The Name of Jesus Christ
John the Baptist’s early proclamation of Christ as the Lamb of God finds its fulfillment at the cross in John 19, where the same Christ is also mocked, truly, as King of the Jews. Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac supplies the Old Testament’s own rehearsal of a father giving up a beloved son. Lamb and Lord, sacrifice and sovereignty, collapse here into a single title rather than remaining two competing ones.
How Christians view creation itself is at stake here, as much as how they view redemption. Colossians 1 and Hebrews 1 both insist Christ is proclaimed by linking the two together rather than keeping them separate. Old Testament passages describing God in very specific, personal terms are read as already pointing toward this connection. Creation, on this account, only becomes fully understandable in light of its own recreation in Christ.
John’s prologue identifies Christ as God, going well beyond calling him God’s Son, a claim John 3 and Christ’s own exchange with Pilate in John 18 both assume rather than argue for. Christ’s parable of the seven demons in Matthew 12 becomes a warning against mere withdrawal from the world instead of active service in it, the pattern Christ himself set. God’s own giving, the sermon insists, is never stingy.
This review sermon draws the series together around one repeated movement in John: Jesus brings heaven down to earth, feeds his people with heavenly bread, and pulls the future forward into the present tense. John 4’s conversation with the Samaritan woman supplies the clearest example of that last move. What results, in each case, is real blessing and real peace already delivered, not merely promised.
Thomas’s confession in John 20:28, ‘my Lord and my God,’ is the destination John’s whole Gospel has been building toward, and 20:30-31 makes that purpose explicit. Mary’s own clinging to the earthly, risen Christ in 20:16-17 supplies a contrasting picture, one Scripture repeats elsewhere, of grasping the wrong thing too tightly. Real reconciliation, on Paul’s terms in 2 Corinthians 5, requires letting go of exactly that instinct.
Philippians 2 and Christ’s own question about David’s son in Matthew 22 both press the same title, Son of God, further than casual religious language usually allows. In the Old Testament, a son is an heir, and the inheritance in view here is nothing less than God himself. Christ’s perfect sonship is what makes believers sons and heirs alongside him, sharing the inheritance rather than merely benefiting from it.
‘Kurios,’ Lord, carries real weight behind Paul’s confession in Romans 10, weight already visible in how Christ exercises that lordship in Mark 11’s triumphal entry. The Old Testament’s own language of belonging supplies the pattern here. To confess Christ as Lord is to confess ourselves his possession, his bondslaves. Admiration alone falls short of that confession.
‘Christ’ is not a surname but a title: the anointed one, standing in a line of anointed prophets, priests, and kings stretching back through the Old Testament. Paul’s language of corporate anointing in 2 Corinthians 1:21 and John’s in 1 John 2:20 mean believers don’t merely admire that anointing from a distance. It binds them to Christ himself, already in heaven.
Joseph’s dream and the debated meaning of Isaiah 7:14 both converge on a single claim: the name Jesus is the same name as Joshua, and it means the same thing here. Isaiah’s own sign, the remnant child Shear-jashub, already anticipates a salvation that comes through apparent weakness rather than visible strength. The name itself, read this way, is already a sermon.