Most Holy Name of Jesus

Today we don’t celebrate a person but a name, and that’s less strange than it seems. The Most Holy Name of Jesus is a very ancient devotion: you can already see it in the christograms painted in early Christian art, those monograms the first Christians traced in place of the whole word. To understand how a name can become a feast, you have to think about how names worked in the Bible. There, a name isn’t a label: it is the person. When a prophet speaks in the name of God, it is God speaking through his mouth. The name of God is David’s weapon against Goliath. In the New Testament this weight passes to the name of Jesus: in his name wonders are worked, the sick are healed, demons are cast out, and Saint Paul writes to the Philippians that this name is “above every other name.” The actual cult, though, came late: it caught on only in the fifteenth century, and it has a clear father, Saint Bernardino of Siena, who worked to have it spread and recognized. Working alongside him was Blessed Albert of Sarteano. Even earlier, in the Middle Ages, devotion to the name had warmed the hearts of Bernard of Clairvaux and Francis of Assisi. Today the feast is celebrated in the Roman rite and in the Anglican Communion as well. Today is the day of anyone named Jesus — rare in Italy, very common in Spain and Latin America — and, in a way, of everyone who bears a name that is also a prayer. There’s something simple in this feast: a name spoken with respect is never just any word.