Holy is His Name
In sending seventy of His disciples, two by two, into all the towns and places He Himself was about to come, Jesus tells them He is sending them out as ‘lambs in the midst of wolves’. We can imagine that in the case of actual lambs, the wolves would make a very short thrift of them. In the parallel text of St Matthew, Jesus tells the disciples to be ‘wise as serpents and innocent as doves.’ They are not going to be relying on their own authority, nor will there be safety in their number being divided into multiple groups of pairs. Nor are they going to depend on an instant answer to their prayer for the Lord to send out more labourers into the harvest. They are to place their complete trust in Divine Providence for food and shelter. They bear with them the Peace of God and news of His Kingdom coming near. This coming of the Kingdom is identified with the coming of Christ, the Messiah, the Son of God. They are given power to heal the sick which will be a sign for them of the presence of God’s Kingdom in their midst. Jesus gave them power over ‘the enemy’, Satan and all his cohort. But when they return, their joy is expressed solely in the fact that even demons are subject to them in the Name of Jesus.
We understand from the Book of Exodus when Moses is given the given the commandment by God to lead the Israelites out of Egypt, Moses first wants to know in what Name he is to do this. God reveals Himself through His Name: ‘I Am who I Am’. He is the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, eternally present among His people. He is not an anonymous force. He is a Divine Person who has chosen to make Himself known in this manner, through His Name. He is the One and only God to Whom all must follow and obey. Once we learn this, there is no cause for fear.
Such is the importance of the Identity of the One God that later when Moses received the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai written on tablets of stone, this fact is enshrined in the first two commandments: The first: ‘I am the Lord your God. You shall not have strange God’s before Me’. The Second: ‘Remember to keep the Name of the Lord your God Holy.’ God has a Name. Through a name we make ourselves known to one another and capable of being known more intimately and addressed personally, the Catechism explains. God wants to make Himself known to us. He wants to draw us into an intimate relationship with Him, a Sacred Bond of Love, of Divine Love. Just as He appeared to Moses to free His People from slavery to the Egyptians, so too today He is among us to free us from the slavery of our sins. But we must place all our trust in Him.
We place our trust in God each time we humble ourselves before Him in the sacrament of confession. We place our trust in Him when we refuse to allow fear to overtake us and distort our spiritual vision. We place our trust in Him when we take the courage to speak the Truth in Love. We place our trust in Him each time we allow the Holy Spirit to act in our lives to seek to continue to build up the Kingdom of God in defiance of Satan and all his cohort. We place our trust in Him when we preach the Kingdom of God by the conduct of our lives.
What is greatly undermining the Holy Name of God is a misunderstanding of the great dignity of the only part of creation made in His Own Image, the only part of creation made for its own sake, namely the human person. Not only does this undermining of His Holy Name refuse to understand the value of the most vulnerable of human life – the unborn child and the elderly – but it spans the whole of human life. To confuse love with adultery and fornication is to undermine a person’s dignity and destroy the art of real loving which is the genuine gift of oneself to another. We can only do this in obedience to God’s commandments which are ultimately our true and only path to freedom. There is no alternative.
The disciples experienced the Power of God in the mighty works done through them, as Mary sang in her Magnificat. She too could say with her whole heart: ‘Holy is His Name’ because she knew God with a profound intimacy. Nevertheless, Jesus tells His disciples not so much to rejoice in the fact that the evil spirits were subject to them. ‘But rejoice that your names are written in heaven’. The intimacy we can experience in our relationship with God is not for this world alone. Rather, it is intended for us to span all of eternity. A genuine and holy fear of God makes us mindful of this fact to such an extent we will endeavour in our daily lives to live within this realty.