"What's in a Name?"

I’m confused. What will we call this baby – Jesus or Emmanuel?

Matthew 1:18-25

December 21, 2025    

Dr. Todd R. Wright

Did you ever notice that Joseph never speaks?

His actions do!

Still, it takes an angelic intervention to get him to do what he ends up doing.

One scholar observes, “Angels usually get involved in the biblical story only when heavy lifting is involved. I think it’s safe to say that the [time] leading up to Christ’s birth was not one blissful baby-shower after another, but fraught with anxiety and concern and [raw] emotion.”[1]

So the angel appears to Joseph and tells him not to be afraid to take Mary as his wife because her pregnancy was sparked by God, not the result of unfaithfulness. And then the angel tells him to name the baby Jesus, as if that was important.

Matthew then does a curious thing. He says all this was to fulfill a long-ago prophecy about another birth, a baby who was to be named Emmanuel, as if that name applies here too.

---

I’m confused. What will we call this baby – Jesus or Emmanuel?

At a basic level, both names are symbolic:

Jesus (Yeshua in Hebrew) means YHWH saves.

Emmanuel means God with us.

Either way, in Roman occupied Israel, calling the boy in for dinner with one of those names would mean shouting defiance, or voicing a prayer of hope, every single time!

So, a birth story that involves these names is not just an ordinary birth story.

Matthew is saying there is more at stake in what Joseph is deciding than there appears.

Will he say YES or roll over and go back to sleep?

---

Jill Duffield reminds us that the Isaiah prophecy Matthew quotes was rooted in a particular bit of history – King Ahaz and all of Judah were being threatened by the Assyrian Empire. God sends the prophet to offer the king a sign to reassure him that God is with him, but he refuses to ask for one.

Duffield writes, “[You] can almost hear the exasperated sigh of the prophet when he says, ‘Well, God will give you one anyway.’ Ahaz is told to request a sign as ‘deep as Sheol or as high as heaven.’ In other words, go big or go home. Ahaz chooses the latter. Is it his faithfulness that refuses to ask for a sign … or his fear?”[2]

Duffield believes it’s his fear: “Ahaz may not want a sign from God because those God-signs point the way in big neon letters – making refusing to follow impossible or clearly disobedient. If Ahaz asks for and receives a sign, he may have to change his plans in order to be a part of God’s.”

I mention all this because Joseph is faced with a similar dilemma – go big or go home!

It is a momentous choice! You know about those. Every year I ask the incoming class of elders to tell me about pivotal decisions they have made and how their faith played a role.

They tell moving stories of selecting colleges and taking jobs, of marriage and moves, of having kids or adopting. I’ll bet you have stories about such choices too!

Poet Jan Richardson asserts that those choices forge us and have ripple effects. Listen:

“What we choose changes us.

Who we love transforms us.

How we create remakes us.

Where we live reshapes us.

So in all our choosing, O God, make us wise;

in all our loving, O Christ, make us bold;

in all our creating, O Spirit, give us courage;

[so that] in all our living may we become whole.”[3]

---

What will Joseph choose?

Perhaps it comes down to whether he trusts the message – that God will save.

Or makes the connection, as Matthew did, to that earlier story that God is with us.

It is a fork in the road. I expect Joseph lingered at that crossroads for a while.

What would it mean, if true, that God saves and is with us, even when times seem god-forsaken?

Scott Hoezee muses that he thinks it means,

“God with us in all our flesh-and-blood realities and messiness.

God with us in diapers.

God with us nursing at Mary’s breast.

God with us in learning to drink from a cup without spilling milk all down his chin.

[And eventually] God with the prostitutes and the lepers and the outcast.

God with the little children whose warm brows he touched and blessed.

[God with those struggling with demons and disability, with poverty and powerlessness.]  

God with [people on] ordinary days, even unto the end of the age.”[4]

And that promise is not just applicable to the Bible stories we love. No, Hoezee continues:

“Immanuel is God-with-us in the cancer clinic and at the local nursing home.

Immanuel is God-with-us in the Hospice room and when life’s final breath slips [out].

Immanuel is God-with-us when the pink slip comes or when a beloved child snaps, ‘I hate you!’

Immanuel is God-with-us when you pack the Christmas decorations away and, with an aching heart, realize afresh that your son never did call over the holidays. Not once.

Immanuel is God-with-us when your dear wife or mother stares back at you with an Alzheimer’s glaze and absently asks, ‘What was your name again, dear?’

But he isn’t just the one who is with us. He is the one who saves us. And make no mistake, we need saving.

As one scholar sums up, “Our best deeds [aren’t] good enough; our best efforts always seem to come up short; death is relentless, claiming every one of us. Jesus is the one who saves — he saves us from our sins, from ourselves, from death’s final word. He does what we can’t do.”[5]

---

All of that deep theology tied to a name or two.

It must have made Joseph’s head spin. It’s a lot of weight to put on the shoulders of a baby!

God is asking him to be part of the whole plan –

to set aside a sense of betrayal and embrace Mary as his wife, rather than dismissing her quietly,

to weather the storm that will blow up as people begin to whisper, about both of them,

to support and protect and provide for a son that is not biologically his,

to teach him lessons about righteousness and honor, as well as imagination and showing grace.

That’s a lot of weight to put on the shoulders of a humble carpenter.

And for a moment every listener and all the angels hold their breath to see what he’ll do.

---

I think it is with some mixture of joy and relief that Matthew writes that when Joseph woke, “he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him.”

Still, the months that followed couldn’t have been easy.

What with dozens of uncomfortable conversations, and whispers, and nights of doubt.

He could have changed his mind, lost his nerve, reversed course, yielded to temptation.

So don’t miss the importance of the last short line in our passage:

When Mary finally gave birth, Joseph named the boy, Jesus!

He was pining his hopes on the belief that YHWH would deliver, that God would save!

What’s in a name? Everything! Amen

[1] From “God Really With Us” by David Lose, 12/13/16

[2] Here and following, from her reflections on the text for the Presbyterian Outlook, 12/18/16

[3] From “A Prayer for Choosing”, 12/14/10

[4] Here and following, from his reflections on the text for cepreaching.org, 12/22/19

[5] From John Wurster’s reflections on the text for the Presbyterian Outlook, 12/8/25