Jesus said, ‘Holy Father, protect [the disciples] by the power of your name, the name you gave me, so that they may be one as we are one.’ John 17:11b
At about the time of Jesus, the Jewish people regarded God as both remote and untouchable (‘transcendent’), yet He was also present in the here and now (‘immanent’). His transcendence was a consequence of His utter purity while his imminence demonstrated His desire to operate in human lives in works of comfort, love, and miracle.
With time, God’s transcendence came to outweigh His immanence to the extent that even saying ‘God’ was forbidden. He was so completely holy that a sinful person speaking such a word was blasphemy.
As a direct result, there arose a wide array of phrases that enabled people to refer to Him while avoiding these prohibitions. One such was to talk about ‘the Name’. It occurs most often in the poetical Scriptures, such as Psalm 145:1 ‘I will praise your name’. Here, the verse makes most sense when the word ‘name’ is taken to mean God Himself. There are many examples in the psalms, such as 9:1 and 34:3.
So when Jesus says God gave him ‘the name’, he is claiming divinity.
The best known example of ‘name’ referring to God occurs in the template prayer that Jesus gave to his disciples when he was teaching them how to pray. The Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6:9–13 starts, ’Our Father … hallowed be your name’. The prayer therefore starts with two roundabout ways of referring to God, first ‘Father’ then ‘name’.
In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus is telling us to pray to a God who is holy but reachable. By saying ‘Father’ he is referring to the intimacy of a God who cares for us, and wants to be in a loving relationship with us.
But by using ‘name’ in this way, he is also reminding us that God is utterly holy, completely‘other’, and different from us because He is sinless and spiritual.
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