The Name by Which We Are Saved
Homily for 5 January 2025
Most Holy Name of Jesus
Non est in alio aliquo salus, nec enim aliud nomen est sub caelo datum hominibus, in quo oportet nos salvos fieri.
‘Neither is there salvation in any other for there is no other name under Heaven given to men, by which we must be saved.’
In Advent: our prayer for salvation
On the First Sunday of Advent, as we began the new liturgical year, we prayed in the Alleluia, Ostende nobis Domine misericordiam tuam, et salutare tuum da nobis, words which we repeated over and over again at every Vespers of Advent in the Brief Responsory: ‘O Lord show us Thy mercy and give us Thy salutare’—well, what is this word salutare? In Hebrew it’s one of a number of words that are all derived from the verbal root yasha’, which means ‘to deliver, to rescue, to save from enemies’, and there is a whole host of Hebrew words which are derived from this verb: words which mean ‘rescue, deliverance, salvation’, and more broadly, ‘well-being, health, wholeness, safety’—a range of meanings all centering around the idea of being saved, being delivered. That is what is being prayed for in those words from Psalm 84: ‘Give us Thy salvation’, that is to say, ‘Give us deliverance; give us well-being; give us safety and security; give us wholeness; give us freedom from all that could harm us.’ And that prayer for God’s salutare was repeated all through the Liturgy of Advent: that same Psalm 84 was the Offertory of the Second Sunday of Advent, and then as Advent drew to a close, on Christmas Eve we heard the promise held out to us in the Communion Antiphon: Videbit omnis caro salutare Dei, ‘All Flesh shall see the salvation of God.’ (Isaias 40:5)
So this was what we were led to expect all through the liturgy of Advent: God’s salutare. The Latin word is from salus, which again means ‘the state of being safe and sound’; that is the basic definition given to it Lewis and Short. Related to that there are all kinds of synonyms that are expressed by that word salus and then by its derivative salutare. That is what was promised to us there on Christmas Eve: that all flesh will see this salutare Dei: this salvation of God. And the following day, at the third Mass of Christmas, we sang at Communion: Viderunt omnes fines terrae salutare Dei nostri, ‘All the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God.’ (Psalm 97:3)
God’s Salvation made flesh
And today that salvation of God is made explicit in the Name which is given to Him Who is God’s salvation, because in the mystery of Christmas it is revealed to us that God’s salutare, His salvation, His rescue of us, does not just consist in acts that He has performed in history, as wondrous as His acts of salvation were in the Old Covenant, but God’s salvation is a Person made flesh, God Himself come in the flesh and given the Name that He was given at His Circumcision and which we celebrate today—a Name which means ‘salvation’, because that same root word that means ‘to rescue, to deliver’ is also the derivation of the Hebrew name Yehoshua. The Name means ‘the LORD (the Unspeakable Name of God) saves’. In its shorter form it is given as Yoshua or Yeshua. There were a couple of individuals in the Old Testament that had this name: Joshua the son of Nun, who led God’s people into the Promised Land; a great high priest later on in the time of the Maccabees. That same name was given not just by His earthly parents but by God Himself through the mouth of the Angel, ‘before He was conceived in the womb’, to God the Son Incarnate. And as such it expresses the purpose of His Coming. Propter nos homines et propter nostram salutem, we say in the Creed: ‘For us men and for our salvation He descended from Heaven.’ This is what has brought God down from Heaven. He has not come because He needed anything here; He has come for the sake of our salvation. All of His earthly life, every thought of His heart, is directed towards our salvation. He is God’s salvation incarnate, and that is what today’s feast celebrates: that the Holy Name of Jesus expresses to us what God’s desire is for us—to save us, to deliver us, to rescue us, to free us from all that keeps us from being whole, healthy, safe and sound—and that that salvation of God is given to us in the person of His Son.
The Only Name That Saves
The Epistle today dwells upon this aspect of Our Lord’s Name which means ‘salvation’: ‘There is no salvation in anyone else’, says St Peter. There cannot be salvation in anyone else because no one else is Who Jesus is: the Second Person of the Trinity, consubstantial with the Father. In this Holy Year we are celebrating the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, which gave us the Creed which we sing every Sunday at Mass, the Creed which tells us Who Jesus is: not just the highest of creatures, not just a man whom God looked upon with favour, but God from God, light from light, true God from true God, consubstantial—of one Substance, of one Nature—with the Father. While He is not the Father, He is everything that the Father is except being Father within the Trinity, and so He is fully Divine as the Father is. And yet He has taken to Himself a human Nature, a true human Nature Which He unites to his Divine Person, and thus the human Nature Which we are contemplating in Bethlehem, of Him Who is given this Name today—this human Nature is the human Nature of the Eternal Son of God, and thus He can save us as no one else can.
And so St Peter can say: ‘There is no salvation in anyone else; there is no other name given to men by which we can be saved.’ This is something which we can never remind people of enough today in the relativistic world in which we live, where society wants to make us believe that there is salvation in anybody or anything that you want to call on. Whatever makes you feel good, whatever you think will fulfill you: that will be your salvation, that will bring you happiness. ‘No’, St Peter tells us, ‘There is no salvation in anyone else.’ No one else can give us eternal life, because no one else can unite us to God.
A Name That Must be Proclaimed
50 years ago, at the end of another Holy Year, 1975, Pope St Paul VI issued an Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii nuntiandi, ‘On announcing the Gospel’, and in it he responded to errors regarding evangelization that were already common at that time. The idea was becoming quite widespread that wasn’t really necessary to proclaim the Person of Jesus for people to be saved; that it was enough to try to build a better world, to try to improve society, to try to bring about justice and peace; that the most important thing was for Christians to give a good example by the witness of their lives, and that this was evangelization. Of course Paul VI was not opposed to any of those things, and he spoke very eloquently in his Apostolic Exhortation about the need for Christians to give witness by their lives: ‘Modern man’, he says, ‘listens more readily to witnesses than to teachers, and if he listens to teachers it is because they are witnesses.’ But he goes on to say that the wordless witness is not sufficient: that for true evangelization to take place, people must encounter the saving Name, the only Name by Which we can be saved. He writes: ‘But there is no true evangelization if the name, the teaching, the life, the promises, the kingdom, and the mysteries of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God, are not proclaimed.’ (Evangelii nuntiandi 22) And so the Pope sought to remind the Church that her mission is to proclaim Jesus Christ, and nothing else: all the other things that she does lead towards that proclamation of Jesus Christ and flow from it.
Similarly, at the time that Paul VI was writing, it was becoming very common for people to think: ‘Well, God can save people in all kinds of ways. He can use whatever means He wants to bring people to Salvation: they don’t need to be converted, they don’t need to come into His Church, they don’t need the Sacraments.’ Obviously, God is not bound by the Sacraments that He instituted; He can work in ways known only to Himself to bring people to the saving knowledge of His Son. But the Church’s Tradition is clear that there is no justification without faith; there is no faith without some knowledge of the Incarnate Word, however God might choose to communicate that in extraordinary ways to those who haven’t heard the Gospel. And those extraordinary ways are not things that we can presume upon: what our Lord has told us is that if we want to be saved we must believe in Him and the salvation that He has come to bring us through His death and Resurrection. ‘Go into the whole world and proclaim the gospel to every creature’, He said. ‘He who believes and is baptized will be saved; he who does not believe will be condemned.’ (Mark 16:15-16) Those are the terms that He’s laid out for us; those are the terms that we have to act upon, and so the mission of the Church must always and everywhere be to proclaim Jesus Christ, to bring all men to the saving knowledge of Him in Whom alone is our salvation.
A Name That Saves All Who Call on Him
So, we are reminded today, there is no salvation in anyone else. And at the same time, as we heard in one of the Antiphons of Vespers last night, ‘Everyone who calls upon the Name of the Lord will be saved.’ (Romans 10:13) These are originally the words of the Prophet Joel (2:32) which St Peter quotes in his first sermon on Pentecost (Acts 2:21). All those who call upon the Name of the Lord Jesus will be saved. For God desires our Salvation: He desires it more than we ourselves do, more than we could possibly imagine; He desires it so much that He has sent His Son, consubstantial with Himself, into this world to live our life, to suffer and die for us, and all of that is directed towards our salvation. ‘Everyone who calls on the Name of the Lord will be saved.’ Of course it’s not enough simply to say the words. To call in truth on the Name of the Lord means to accept Him as our Lord and to accept all the implications of that: to embrace all that He asks of us, to keep his Commandments—‘if you love Me, keep My Commandments’, Our Lord tells us. (John 14:15) It means to remain within the bosom of the Church, His Bride, His Mystical Body, receiving the Sacraments through which He wants to communicate His life to us. But all of this is given to us for the sake of our salvation: making us whole, making us safe, delivering us from all that can harm souls and even our bodies. The Name of Jesus offers us salvation from all that can harm us.
We heard St Bernard at Matins this morning describing how this salvation works in us. He says that the Name of Jesus is like oil, quoting the Canticle of Canticles (1:2). Why oil? Well, oil has several properties: it nourishes fire; it can nourish our bodies; it can also be used as a medicine to heal wounds. And so too, the Name of Jesus, he says, provides light and food and medicine. It enlightens the darkness of our minds with His truth. It feeds our souls, making spiritual truth sweet and palatable to us. ‘If I am reading,’ St Bernard says, ‘I find no savour in what I’m reading if I don’t find there the Name of Jesus.’ (Sermon on the Canticle) And the Name of Jesus is medicine, a healing balm spread over all of our wounds. In that Name is contained all that God wants for us: to save us, to free us from evil, to make us whole, to make us healthy.
Calling on the Name of Jesus with His Mother
So as we begin this new year, this Jubilee Year, let us resolve to have the Name of Jesus ever upon our lips, ever within our hearts. And in beginning this year, and taking up the Name of Jesus, we do so in the company of His Virgin Mother, who was the first to hear that Name revealed by the Angel. In saying that there is no salvation in any other name but the Name of Jesus, what are we to think of the Holy Name of Mary, of which we have another feast day and of which the same St Bernard speaks so eloquently as the Name that we should call upon in all of our trials? There is no contradiction here. Mary is who she is solely for the sake of her Son: all of her privileges, all of her prerogatives, all of her glories are given to her because she has been predestined from the beginning of the world to be the Mother of the Saviour. And so in glorifying her, in glorifying her Name, we glorify even more the Name of her Son for Whom she exists. And so we ask her to teach us to pronounce His Name with the love with which she pronounced It. So let It live in our hearts as It lived in her Heart—‘and she kept all these things in her Heart’, St Luke goes on to say several times throughout the Gospels that we’re hearing in these days. So may she lead us to treasure the Holy Name of her Son.
A Eucharistic Salvation
And may she help us especially to receive worthily the salutare Dei, the ‘Saving Thing’ of God Which is the Most Holy Eucharist, because That is ultimately What we are praying for when we say, Salutare tuum da nobis, ‘Give us Thy salvation’. Those words of Psalm 84 that we prayed throughout Advent, which are fulfilled in the Holy Name of Jesus, are words that the Church puts on our lips at the threshold of the Holy Mysteries: after the Asperges each Sunday before Holy Mass, and then in the Prayers at the Foot of the Altar each day, that verse is repeated. This is a Eucharistic prayer, a prayer that God give us here and now, concretely, upon the Altar, His Salvation: His Salvation made flesh in the Person of His Son, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, Who has come down from Heaven for the sake of our salvation, in Whom is contained all that God has promised to us, all of His desire to save us and make us whole and free us from all of our enemies. May Our Lady obtain for us the grace to receive that Salvation today, as It comes to us upon the Altar, with open hearts, and to carry that saving Name always in our hearts and on our lips throughout this year.
