I wonder whether you know what your name means.
In my case, my parents gave me the name ‘David’ because it means ‘beloved.’ And I was certainly beloved of them, right through to their deaths.
I am sure you know that in the Bible someone is often given a name with a particular meaning to signify their life’s calling. Thus, God sometimes commands parents to give babies certain names. Most prominent of all in this is the detail in the nativity stories, where Joseph is told by the angel to name the infant Mary is carrying ‘Jesus’, which means ‘God saves.’
We see something similar in the famous verse 6 of Isaiah 9:
For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given,
and the government will be on his shoulders.
And he will be called
Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Whoever Isaiah had in mind in his day, the early church saw this as only completely fulfilled in the coming of the Messiah, Jesus. Those four names or titles – Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace – are like a job description for the Messiah.
And so we’re going to explore those four titles from the perspective of the New Testament.
Firstly, Wonderful Counsellor:
In the Old Testament, a counsellor tended to be an adviser to the king at the royal court. And that interpretation would do very nicely for some people: if the Messiah, Jesus, were just an adviser to us, we might be pleased. He could advise us, but we would be under no obligation to follow everything he said. All that pesky stuff about caring for the poor, sharing our possessions, and so on: we could reject awkward stuff like that and simply follow the bits we like.
And some people live pretty much like that, including regular churchgoers.
But in the New Testament we get a different sense of the word ‘counsellor.’ You may be familiar with the way the Holy Spirit is called ‘The Counsellor’ in John’s Gospel: well, in fact, when Jesus introduces that topic he speaks of the Holy Spirit as ‘another Counsellor.’ The sense is that the Spirit will come as Counsellor to replace the Counsellor who is leaving, namely Jesus.
And what does ‘counsellor’ mean here? ‘One called alongside.’ That’s why alternative translations to ‘Counsellor’ are Comforter, Helper, or Advocate.
The Holy Spirit comes alongside us to replace Jesus, who previously came alongside us. And this gets to the heart of the wonder of the Incarnation. In coming to earth, taking on human flesh, and living an ordinary (if not poverty-stricken) life, Jesus came alongside us.
Some people talk as if God is remote. There is that dreadful song that Cliff Richard covered some years ago called ‘From A Distance’, which includes the refrain, ‘God is watching us from a distance.’ But God has done so much more. In Jesus, he has come alongside us, in all the mess and the confusion of everyday living.
Don’t you want someone like that when you are in need? When I had a broken engagement a few years before I met Debbie, two friends of mine turned up on my doorstep and said they were taking me out to lunch. I hadn’t realised that both of them had been through broken engagements before meeting their husbands.
When we pray, let’s remember that Jesus is the ‘Wonderful Counsellor’, who in the Incarnation has come alongside human beings in the grimiest, bleakest parts of life. He is Good News.
Secondly, Mighty God:
A couple of weeks ago after the morning service, Haslemere Methodist Church hosted a nativity production by a group of Ukrainian refugees. Adults and children together in native costumes told the nativity story in what they said was a traditional Ukrainian way. Almost all of it was in their native tongue, so they provided a translation sheet. Their one concession to English was to sing ‘Silent Night’ in both languages. All of this was to raise money for a small charity set up by some British Christians in Portsmouth called Ukraine Mission, which takes relief supplies out there to suffering people.
They explained beforehand how elements of the Christmas story had become all the more relevant to them since Putin’s invasion, not least the flight into Egypt to escape murderous Herod, which spoke to them about the many Ukrainian mothers who had fled their homeland with their children.
And most notable to me in their presentation of the nativity was the attention they gave to Herod’s plot to kill the infant boys in Bethlehem. However, they did vary from the script of the Gospels by including an elite hit squad of angels who turned up to kill Herod and his henchmen. I can’t imagine what hopes they were expressing …
We’d like a ‘Mighty God’ like that. One who sent his hit squads of angels like some heavenly SAS unit to knock out the tyrants and evildoers of this world. Of course, it’s altogether too easy for us to assume that we are the goodies and this God would have no bones to pick with us. Which makes this vision of God dangerous.
But our Mighty God is not like that, and it’s certainly not what we see of the Messiah in the Christmas story. Tom Wright says this:
When God wants to sort out the world, as the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount make clear, he doesn’t send in the tanks. He sends in the meek, the broken, the justice hungry, the peacemakers, the pure-hearted and so on.[1]
He doesn’t send in the tanks. He sends in the meek. That sounds very Christmassy to me. That sounds like the way Jesus came. Mighty God? Oh yes. He turned history upside-down.
In the chorus of a song called ‘Cry of a Tiny Babe’, the Canadian Christian singer Bruce Cockburn put it like this:
Like a stone on the surface of a still river
Driving the ripples on forever
Redemption rips through the surface of time
In the cry of a tiny babe
Thirdly, Everlasting Father:
Well, this could be tricky: as Christians, we don’t want to confuse Jesus and the Father in our understanding of the Trinity.
But maybe what we need to remember here is this. There is plenty of biblical material to say that no-one has seen God. Even Moses, who wanted to see the face of God, was denied that.
But on the other hand, Isaiah says in chapter 6 of his prophecy that in the year King Uzziah died, he saw the Lord in the Jerusalem Temple. And we need to put this alongside Jesus’ assertion that if you have seen him, you have seen the Father.
Jesus himself is divine, and he is the revelation of God. If we want to know what God is like, we look at Jesus. And we get to see that in the Incarnation.
Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury in a former generation, famously said,
God is Christlike, and in him is no un-Christlikeness at all
The other night, Debbie and I were watching Sky News when the ad break came. One of the ads was for Asda supermarkets. Now I expect companies like that to be promoting all their Christmas wares at this time – although as one of my Midhurst members said, much of it is insensitive at a time when food banks are being used more than ever.
But what really got me was the slogan at the end: Asda – the Home of Christmas.’ How shallow. How depressing. The home of Christmas is a manger.
And if Jesus came to reveal the Everlasting Father to us, then Christmas is so much more. It is a time when God is revealed to the world.
That’s why I’ll always have a short evangelistic talk in a carol service. God is revealed to the world at Christmas. It’s our unique message at this time.
Fourthly and finally, Prince of Peace:
This is a huge title for the Messiah. Paul talks about us receiving peace with God through Christ in Romans, and in Ephesians he talks about Jews and Gentiles finding peace with each other and bringing all things together in unity under Christ. Is it any surprise that the angels appear to the shepherds in Luke’s Gospel and proclaim peace on earth to those on whom God’s favour rests?
So this is big! It’s the Hebrew peace of shalom, where all is restored in the world. Not just the absence of war, but reconciled relationships, justice, healing of people and planet, basically everything right with the world. In other words, Jesus has come to reverse all the curses of Eden when everything went wrong.
Indeed, if we go back to Genesis 3 and the story of the Fall, we see brokenness everywhere. Adam and Eve hide from God – but now there will be peace with God through the Messiah. Adam and Eve are alienated from each other – because the man will rule over the woman – but in Christ human beings are reconciled with one another. Eve will suffer pain in childbirth – but Jesus brings healing. Adam is alienated from the earth, because his daily toil will be subjected to frustration – but the creation, which Paul says in Romans is ‘groaning’, will also find peace.
Let’s not just pick and choose our favourite bits from this and ignore the rest. Let’s not call people to conversion while missing the social dimensions. And equally, let’s not just make ourselves into religious politicians and downplay the call to personal commitment to Christ. Because if Jesus is the Prince of Peace we need to embrace the whole package. Jesus the Prince of Peace ushers in the new creation, and he calls us to be his disciples in this project.
Howard Thurman was an American Christian theologian at Boston University and civil rights leader who acted as a spiritual advisor to people like Martin Luther King. His most famous piece of writing is called ‘The Work of Christmas’. This is the best-known passage from it:
When the song of the angels is stilled,When the star in the sky is gone,When the kings and princes are home,When the shepherds are back with their flock,The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among brothers,
To make music in the heart.
Conclusion
Jesus the Messiah comes alongside us in even the darkest parts of life. He mightily transforms the world in his meekness. He reveals the Father to us, and he brings peace to every aspect of creation.
This is Jesus’ job description. This is his calling. This is the mission on which he came at the Incarnation.
This is what we celebrate.
[1] N T Wright, The Challenge of Jesus; cited at https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9023698-when-god-wants-to-sort-out-the-world-as-the
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