January 3
The saints and feasts remembered on January 3, each with a short life, a Bible passage and a prayer.
Most Holy Name of Jesus
Honours the name Jesus — “the Lord saves” — given to Mary’s son
In Jesus’ time, Jewish boys were circumcised and named on the eighth day after birth. Luke’s Gospel says Mary and Joseph did this and called their son Jesus, the name the angel had given. In Hebrew it is Yeshua, a form of Joshua, meaning “the Lord saves.” Matthew explains why: “he will save his people from their sins.”
The first Christians healed, baptised and prayed “in the name of Jesus,” and Paul wrote of a name above every name. In the 1400s the Franciscan preacher Bernardine of Siena spread devotion to the Name across Italy, showing crowds a tablet with IHS, the first letters of Jesus in Greek. A feast followed, first for Franciscans and, from 1721, for the whole Catholic Church.
The feast was dropped in the 1969 calendar reform and restored on 3 January in 2002. Anglicans and Lutherans mark his naming on 1 January; the Orthodox keep his circumcision on 1 January of their church calendar. All of them recall that God’s rescue has a human name.
Therefore God exalted Him to the highest place and gave Him the name above all names, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Philippians 2:9–11 · BSB
A prayer
God our Father, you gave your Son the name Jesus, because through him you save your people. Teach us to call on his name with trust, to speak it with reverence, and to carry it with kindness wherever we go, until every tongue confesses that Jesus Christ is Lord. Amen.
The lives are written with AI help from public-domain histories and checked before publishing; the prayers are ours. Bible quotations are from the Berean Standard Bible (BSB), in the public domain. How we write.