The Name

In Scripture a name is never a mere label. It is the person made sayable, the whole weight of who someone is gathered into a word that can be spoken and called upon. To know the name of God was to be admitted to something of his very self. The name of the LORD is a strong tower, says the proverb, the righteous runneth into it, and is safe. Notice that a man runs into a name as into a fortress, and is kept there. The name is not a sound only. It is a refuge, a presence, a power, because the name and the One named cannot be divided.

So when the apostle tells us that God has given his Son a name which is above every name, he is telling us something vast. He has just described the great descent, how the Lord, being in the form of God, did not cling to his equality with God but emptied himself, took the form of a servant, and humbled himself to death, even the death of the cross. And then the turn: wherefore, because of that descent, God has highly exalted him and given him the name above all names, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and in earth and under the earth. The name he was given is bound to what he did. Jesus means the LORD saves, and the name is the gospel folded into two syllables, the whole story of the descent and the salvation carried in a word a child can say.

CALLING ON THE NAME

From the beginning the people of God have been those who call upon this name. Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved, the prophet promised, and the apostles took the promise and preached it to the nations. To be a Christian is, at the root, to be one who calls on the name of Jesus. And the calling need not be eloquent. When blind Bartimaeus sat by the road and heard that Jesus of Nazareth was passing, he cried out the plainest of prayers, Jesus, thou Son of David, have mercy on me, and when the crowd told him to hold his peace he cried it the louder, and the Lord stood still and called him and healed him. When the publican in the temple could not so much as lift his eyes, he beat upon his breast and said, God be merciful to me a sinner, and he went down to his house justified. These are the shortest prayers in Scripture, and among the most powerful, and they are almost the same prayer, the name and the cry for mercy joined.

It is from such seeds that the solitary tradition grew its oldest and simplest prayer, the calling on the name of the Lord Jesus with the plea for mercy, said slowly and often until it sinks from the lips into the mind, and from the mind at last into the heart, where it can go on almost of itself. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me. There is nothing in it that Bartimaeus and the publican did not already pray. It is short by design, for the soul cannot sustain long and elaborate speeches without ceasing, but it can breathe a name the way it breathes air, in the field and in the kitchen and in the sleepless night, and so a man may begin to obey the command to pray without ceasing, not by praying longer, but by praying smaller and deeper, one name carried under everything he does.

THE NAME IS NOT A CHARM

But here we must set a guard, for the human heart will turn even the holiest thing into an instrument for its own ends. The name of Jesus is not a charm. It is not an incantation that compels God to do our bidding if only we repeat it correctly or often enough. There were men in Ephesus, the seven sons of Sceva, who tried to use the name as though it were a technique, invoking the Jesus whom Paul preached over an evil spirit as one might work a lever, and the spirit answered that it knew Jesus and knew Paul, but who were they, and the man in whom the spirit was leapt on them and drove them out wounded and naked. The name has no power in the mouth of a stranger to the One who bears it. To call on the name is not to operate a mechanism. It is to address a Person, and to submit to him in the same breath.

For the very verse that exalts the name tells us what calling on it means, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow. The name and the bent knee belong together. You cannot truly call on the name of Jesus while your knee stays stiff, using him as a servant of your purposes. To say his name rightly is already to kneel, to hand over your will, to want what he wants. This is why the prayer of the name is so quietly transforming, and so unlike a mere calming exercise. It is not that repeating a word soothes the nerves. It is that every honest saying of the name is a small bending of the knee, a repeated surrender, and a soul that bends its knee ten thousand times a day is slowly bent into the shape of Christ.

THE NAME ABOVE THE NAME

To grasp how great this gift is, remember what the name meant to Israel. The holy name of God, revealed to Moses at the bush, was so weighty that the people would not pronounce it, and when God said I AM THAT I AM he gave them a name almost past speaking, the name of the One who simply is, the ground of all that exists. And then, in the fullness of time, a carpenter’s son stood among his enemies and said, before Abraham was, I am, and took that unspeakable name upon his own lips and his own person. The name above every name that God gave to Jesus was, in the end, his own name shared, the name of the LORD who saves, now bearing a human face and a wounded side.

And there is no other. When the apostles were dragged before the rulers and asked by what name they had healed a man, Peter answered without hedging that there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved. Not one name among many good ones, but the only name, the single door. This is not narrowness for its own sake. It is the plain confession that salvation is a Person and not a principle, and that the Person has a name, and that the name is Jesus, and that a drowning man does not complain of the narrowness of the one rope thrown to him.

This name has been put upon you if you are his. God commanded of old that the priests should put my name upon the children of Israel, and I will bless them, and you were baptized into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, marked with it, claimed by it, made to belong to it. You do not call on the name as a stranger hoping to be noticed. You call on it as one who bears it, a child using the name of his own father, and that is a boldness the sons of Sceva never had and could never counterfeit.

THE NAME AND THE BREATH

Because the name is short it can go where long prayers cannot. A soul cannot recite paragraphs while it works or while it lies awake in pain, but it can breathe a name, and so the old counsel was to join the name to the breath itself, to draw it in and let it out until the praying runs on beneath the day like a spring beneath a field. This is how the command to pray without ceasing becomes possible for ordinary people with ordinary work, not by praying longer but by praying smaller and deeper, one name carried in the chest through everything. In time the name descends from the lips to the mind, and from the mind at last to the heart, and begins to pray itself there, so that a man wakes in the night and finds the name already on his soul before he was awake to place it there.

But let the name be spoken with reverence, and never lightly, for it is holy. Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain, the commandment says, and it is broken not only by the curse but by the careless and empty use, the name flung about as a thing of no weight. If you would carry the name as prayer, carry it as one who knows whose name it is, the name at which heaven bows. Familiarity in prayer is a gift, but it is the familiarity of a child with a father he still reveres, not the shabby ease of a soul that has forgotten whom it addresses. Say the name a thousand times a day, and let each saying be both intimate and holy.

So take the name and make it your own before it is too late to learn to love it. Carry it into the morning as you wake, and into your labor, and into the moment of temptation when no other prayer will come, when all you can do is say Jesus and cling to him. Say it over the ones you love and cannot help, and over your own failures when you have no words left to explain them. Let it be the last thing on your tongue as you fall asleep. For the day is coming, the apostle says, when every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. Every tongue, without exception, the willing and the unwilling, will one day speak that name. Some will speak it in the joy of long love, having said it ten thousand times already and found it sweeter each time. Others will speak it in the terror of a knee that must bow at last against its will. The name will fill your mouth in the end. Blessed is the soul that learns, now, in the quiet, to say it with love.