Sermon for the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus

By Fr. Richard Cipolla

Given at St. Mary’s Church, Norwalk Connecticut on Sunday, January 2, 2011

From the introit:  At the name of Jesus every knee must bend.  From the epistle: For there is no other Name under heaven given to men by  which we must be saved. And  from the gospel: His name was called Jesus, the Name given Him by the angel before He was conceived in the womb.

It seems odd to us to have a feast celebrating a name, even if the name is Jesus.  One of the greatest of baroque illusionist paintings is the painting by Gaulli known by his nickname of Baciccia on the ceiling of the Gesu church in Rome.  It is the most amazing composition of painting and sculpture, with angels falling from and rising to heaven, and there in this wonderful center of light there is the apotheosis of the monogram IHS which is formed by the first three letters of Jesus’ name in Greek.  People come to this church to see this remarkable painting and there is a mirror installed in the nave so that you can look at the painting without crinking your neck.  I often ask myself:  what do people think about the apotheosis of a name, even if the name is Jesus.  For we breathe the air of a perverse nominalism that dismisses a name as something merely assigned to a person or thing without any relationship to the reality of that person or thing.  Umberto Eco’s novel, The Name of the Rose ends with the chillingly enigmatic sentence; Stat rosa pristina nomine; nuda nomina tenemus.  For Eco, names are ultimately empty, for a rose is merely a name that exists quite apart from the reality of the rose. 

But to make sense of the devotion to the Holy Name of Jesus, from its beginning in St Paul’s epistle to the Philippians to St Bernadine of Siena and St Ignatius Loyola, we have to leave aside our dichotomy between names and reality and listen to the brief gospel once again:  his name was called Jesus,  the name given him by the angel before He was conceived in the womb.  From all eternity this child was given the name Yeshuah which means God who saves, because this name is not merely a name that Mary and Joseph gave to the child: the name of Jesus tells us who He is as both God and man: the God who saves by becoming man in order to die on the cross for the sins of the world.  Thus the name Jesus not only signifies who the child is: the name from the moment of the Incarnation becomes holy because it is a name from the depths of God Himself.  Or rather, the name is holy from the beginning of time when it would be the name of the enfleshment of God and that holy name becomes part of the history of this world, not merely as my name and your name, but as the real symbol of the God who saves.

But another problem for us modernists and post-modernists is the very idea not only of a holy name but also the very idea of the holy, period.  The grey ravages of secularism that are the logical outcome of the evacuation of meaning that is the triumph of nominalism has for so many evacuated the very meaning of the word, holy.  It is true that we still mouth the word holy in discourse, that we confess one holy Catholic and apostolic Church: but what does the word really mean to us today?  Isn’t it often just a part of religious jargon we use when we want to do God-talk? The holy cannot co-exist with self-sufficient man. The holy cannot co-exist with the collapse of morality into the amorality of self-love.  You see, holiness can exist only if we believe that we are not the center of being, only if we accept the possibility of something or someone extraordinary beyond our comprehension, only if we believe in fear and trembling at the center of our lives.  For the most part, a holy person today is merely a moral person. The phrase: holier than thou, says it all.  Holiness is not something we aspire to, despite our dutiful recitation of the call to holiness in religious texts.  If we encounter holiness we say:  that’s weird.  Which is not a bad thing to say, because holiness is indeed weird because the holy is radically different from us, for it deals with, it is about wholly Other who is holy. 

Catholics used to encounter at least a whiff of the holy, a hint at least, in the liturgy.  This was true not because Mass was always celebrated in the past with great beauty and reverence.  But the Mass itself, in its organically traditional form, was perceived as  an action rather than mere words, and so pointed to the possibility of holiness, gave glimmers into the presence of the Divine that went beyond mere doctrine about the Real Presence: the combination of the visible beauty in churches that pointed away from the mundane to a real splendor that lay beyond, the familiar ritual that was familiar in the deepest sense, the sense of family that went beyond time and space, the time of quiet, of silence, all helped the Catholic to in some sense understand holiness and its relationship to God and to himself. 

There can be no doubt, as Cardinal Canizares who heads the Congregation for Divine Worship says, that there is a certain crisis in the Catholic liturgy.  We really do not need poll data to tell us that this is true.  But if we want data, we can look at the survey done just a few weeks ago by a reputable firm that shows that 28% of Catholics now attend Mass regularly.  In 1960 it was 68%.  Now of course there are several reasons for this precipitous drop in Mass attendance these past 50 years.  But if one is scientific about it, one cannot help noting that this decline begins with the radical liturgical reform that was not a product of the Second Vatican Council but rather a product of that very rationalistic nominalistic mindset that was determined to demystify the mystery that is at the heart of the Mass, the mystery of the death of Christ and his living presence within the Church.  And so we now hear the call to revive and promote a new liturgical movement and revive the sense of the sacred and of mystery, putting God at the center of everything.  Can the understanding of Mass as high school assembly be overcome?  Can the ironical situation of the priest facing the people as he speaks to God be remedied by a return to the tradition of the priest and people together, united, facing God in prayer and thanksgiving?   Can the banality of Mass tunes be displaced by the Gregorian chant and polyphony that Vatican II denoted as pride of place in Catholic music?  Can canned sermons about feel good trivialities be driven out of the temple to allow sermons that challenge intellectually and spiritually based on scripture and tradition?  On this feast of the Holy Name of Jesus, I would say that what we are doing here is at least a start. It is a start not to some restoration project but to a return to the sense of the holy in Mass because the Mass IS holy. Without this all we can do is to look in a mirror on the floor of the church at a wonderful illusionist painting and say to ourselves:  what in the world is a holy name and why are all those angels staring at those three funny letters that make no sense?  Nomina nuda tenemus.  We have, we hold on to empty names.