Associated Scriptural Words on Circumcision
God said to Abraham, “As for you, you are to keep My covenant, you and your offspring after you for the generations to come. This is My covenant, which you are to keep, between Me and you and your offspring after you: Every male among you must be circumcised. You must circumcise the flesh of your foreskins, and it will be the sign of the covenant between Me and you. Every male among you who is eight days old must be circumcised.” Genesis 17:9-12
The Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, so that you will love Him with all your heart and all your soul, and you will live. Deuteronomy 30:6
In Him you also were circumcised–not, however, with a circumcision performed by human hands. Instead, it was a removal of the corrupt nature in the circumcision performed by Christ. This happened when you were buried with Him in baptism, and raised with Him through faith in the power of God, who raised Him from the dead. When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ and forgave us all our sins. He destroyed the record of the debt we owed, with its obligations, which stood against us and condemned us; He has taken it away, nailing it to the cross. Colossians 2:11-14
In Christ there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, uncivilized person, slave, or free, but Christ is all and in all. Colossians 3:11
For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything; what matters is being a new creation. Galatians 6:15
Sermon
And they called His name “Jesus.” Jesus means “Yahweh saves.” Jesus’ name is “Jesus” because He was born to save His people from their sins. And how Jesus did the saving is at the heart of what happened to Him on the 8th day of His life.
That’s when two road-weary travelers, because of Caesar’s mandated census, went to the local rabbi in Bethlehem, bringing their baby boy in tow. They brought the baby to receive, in His own flesh, the sign of God’s covenant with Abraham. That would bring the boy into the covenant that God made with Abraham and later with Moses. It would also obligate Him to keep the entire Law that God had given to His people.
And so Joseph, Jesus’ guardian-father, laid down the baby, and the rabbi removed His foreskin with a knife of flint. Blood was spilled, which was the promise of greater bloodshed yet to come.
We gather today, on the eve of the first day of a new year, to celebrate with Christians across the world the circumcision and naming of a Jewish baby 2,000 years ago.
The God who has made us His own is a God who makes lavish, outrageous promises, which boggle the imagination, defying reason and common sense. To Abraham, then Abram, God made promises. Abraham lived 4,000 years ago in what we, today, call Iraq. He was 70 years old, living a settled and peaceful life–although a bit sad. For he and his wife had no children.
Oh, they were well-off. They had all that life could bring, except a baby. Of all the men in the world, God singled out that man and made promises to him:
- You will become a great nation, with kings as your descendants;
- You will have your own land in which to live;
- Through you and your Offspring blessing will come to all nations of the world.
Those were the lavish, outrageous, mind-boggling, reason-defying promises of God. Astoundingly, Abraham believed those promises, even though they hinged on his having a child. Despite Abraham’s advanced age and him having a wife well past her childbearing years, he trusted that if God makes a promise, God will keep it, no matter how impossible it seems.
The sign of circumcision was to be a constant reminder to God’s people of what God had promised Abraham. What promise was that? It was that one day the Offspring, the Seed, the Descendant, would come who would bless all nations and He would be a descendant of Abraham and Sarah.
Yet, that same God who made those lavish promises is also a God who is pure in righteousness and holiness. So, when He makes people His own, His holy people, He gives them the Law of His holiness. For, you see, to belong to the One who is burning holiness and shining love, their lives must also be of burning holiness and shining love.
Through Moses, God gave the Law in 10 clear and terrifying utterances. When the people heard God speak to them, they covered their ears, pleading that they no longer would have to hear God speak to them directly, but only through Moses. And Moses, according to God’s instruction, joined the sign of the promise to Abraham with the obligation to keep the Law.
Now, we must be blazingly clear on this: God’s Law promises everlasting life and salvation to everyone who keeps it without flaw. But it threatens judgment and eternal condemnation to everyone who breaks it–even the one who breaks it only once.
And so we come back to Jesus. His name will be called “Jesus,” for He will save His people from their sins. The rabbi cut the sign of the promise and the sign of obligation on Jesus’ infant flesh. That was the last, real circumcision of the Old Covenant. For on that day in Bethlehem, the promised Descendant went under the knife to fulfill God’s mandate of circumcision as the way to bring one into a covenant with God. That’s because Jesus is the One to whom all those circumcisions pointed.
Yet, He is still just a babe in arms. Although He is the Promised One, how will He bring the promise of His blessing? What will the blessing be?
The blessing that He brings is that He takes on Himself the obligation to follow God’s Law. He does what no one before had ever done. He keeps it, and He keeps it flawlessly. He came to live the life that we have all failed to live, the life that God’s holy and unchanging Law demands must be lived if we are to have eternal life. He lived the unbroken “yes” to the Father.
Never once did Jesus draw back–not in Gethsemane, not on the cross, not as His body lay in the tomb. His perfect life of love never failed–the life of perfect dependence on God and the life of perfect love toward all people. Jesus lived it to the full as He obligated Himself to do, on the day of His circumcision when He was but an eight-day-old infant.
Do you see, then, why we have something to celebrate on this New Year’s Eve, on the eve of the circumcision and naming of Jesus? Everything that He took on that day He did for us, to bring the promised blessing of Abraham home to us, even to God’s Old Covenant people who had faith in the Messiah to come. What promised blessing was that? It was that we might be among those who inherit the blessing of eternal life.
Well, there’s even more Jesus for you. At His circumcision, Jesus also received His name. If you carefully read the Christmas story in Luke’s Gospel, you’ll find that Jesus was not called by the name “Jesus” until the name was given Him at His circumcision.
Circumcision and naming went together in the Old Covenant. Both were ways of “marking” a person as being in a special relationship to the God of Israel. The child of Mary was marked by the name Jesus, “Yahweh saves,” because that’s what He came to do–to save His people from their sins.
So already, the eight-day-old infant is set on the road that will lead through the sufferings of the cross, the stony silence of the tomb, and the jubilation of Easter morning. This infant has come to be the One who will complete salvation, opening a road home to His Father for all of us, and then giving us the gift of walking that road.
And how does He give it? How has God ever give salvation? Why, it’s always with His name. God puts His name on someone. And when He does that, that person no longer belongs to God in general but now belongs to Him in specific as a precious and prized possession.
In the New Covenant that Jesus set up when He fulfilled the Old, He gave name-giving words to His Apostles. Jesus said, “Go and disciple all nations by baptizing them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to keep everything I have commanded you.” (Matthew 28:19-20).
Now, in the New Covenant, God no longer commands circumcision. Jesus fulfilled that when He shed His blood on the 8th day of life. Yet, God still takes babies and brings them into a covenant with Him. He still puts the sign of His promise on them–but this time it’s with water.
The shed blood of circumcision has fulfilled its purpose. Water is now the sign that God uses to show that He has fulfilled His promises and kept His obligations. The blessing of all that Jesus did He now gives to you freely in the waters of holy baptism. There, you receive the promised inheritance of the Holy Spirit to live within you as the down payment in your life that you have an eternity of joy with God.
In your baptism, you are His, for you now bear the name of the Triune God. The rest of the Christian life is then unpacking the joy of what it means to live life, and die death, as someone who belongs specifically to the Triune God. It’s living under the promise and mark of God’s holy name, as someone who is walking home to the Father.
Yet, God has even more for you. For wherever God puts His name, there He also puts His blessing. In the Old Covenant, God gave special words to the priests to put on the people. Those words were not empty words. How could they be? They came from God, and so they were alive with His presence and blessing.
You hear those words at the end of every Divine Service: “The LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; the LORD look on you with favor and give you peace” (Numbers 6:24-26).
If such a blessing held true for God’s Old-Covenant people, marked with the sign of circumcision, how much more does it hold true for us? For we’ve been marked with nothing less than the Triune name of God at Jesus’ command in the waters of baptism: The Lord, the Lord, the Lord–the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
In baptism, God is the One doing the doing. He’s the One who blesses us. He’s the One who keeps us. He’s the One whose face beams at us in delight. He’s the One who graces us with unmerited good. He’s the One who looks on us and regards us with love as the individuals that we are, and so He is the One who gives us peace. Every time you hear the blessing at the end of the Divine Service, those words are recalling and reminding you of your baptism and covenant with God.
So, what better way can there be to enter a new year than to remember that God has marked you as His own? Amen.
