I just started listening to the Bible Project’s recent podcast series on anointing, and the first episode’s title and content were a reminder of a curious thing I started noticing only when I started growing away from the faith tradition I grew up in: a lot of Christians refer to Jesus as “Christ” almost exclusively, despite the fact that “Christ” is not a name but a title. I remember phrases like “my relationship with Christ” being used frequently in my church community growing up, and I struggle to remember the contexts in which people would use Jesus’ actual name. The same is true for “Lord”—another title for Jesus—which people may have used more frequently than “Christ” in fact. “The Lord’s been good;” “I love the Lord.”

This isn’t to say using a title to refer to Jesus is in any way wrong. I just came to find it interesting that, say, 90% of the time these Christians referred to Jesus, they used titles. As I reflected on how that particular idiosyncrasy shaped my experience of faith, I felt like it actually served to distance me from the person of Jesus and the intimate relationship I’m able to have with him. So for me the pendulum has swung, and these days I nearly always refer to Jesus by the name God told Mary to call him, a name that means “Yahweh saves”—or, as the First Nations Version translates it, “Creator Sets Free.”