Type the name of Jesus into Google’s Internet search engine and you’ll obtain tens of millions of results.

Keep in mind that this is the name of one person who died when he was just a young man of 33. If you were born before 1972, Jesus’ life was over by the time that he was your age or younger.

This is the name of someone who never authored a book, never held public office, and never traveled more than 250 miles from his place of birth. This is someone who died over 20 centuries ago.

Yet today the name of Jesus continues to be referenced in one way or another all around the world, day by day and hour by hour. Some folks worship him, some passively acknowledge him, and some pointedly denounce him.

The name of Jesus is routinely profaned on many talk shows and in movies.

This always strikes me as particularly peculiar – that people who never even attend church will exclaim “Jesus Christ!” simply to emphasize a point. I never hear anyone swear by Buddha or Muhammad or Martin Luther King Jr. Yet when a man stubs his toe, he’ll curse the name of Jesus. Not Allah. Not Vishnu. Not

Baha’u’llah. Just Jesus.

John Lennon once proclaimed the Beatles to be “more popular than Jesus.” But Lennon died 14 years later and today it’s the Beatles whose popularity has waned.

The title of an old Bill Gaither song about Jesus says, “There’s Something About That Name.” But what is that something? Why does this name of all names continue to evoke such widespread response?

In his book “The Name,” Franklin Graham describes the name of Jesus as a “lightning rod” that “shouts out a choice.” He says that the name of Jesus divides.

I’ve noticed something along that line in folks who will talk about “The Almighty,” a “Higher Power” or even the “Divine Spirit of Christ” with all apparent comfort, but who begin to fidget when the name of Jesus is mentioned. Why is that?

Perhaps it’s because Jesus is actually God up close and personal. In Jesus we must deal with God in a way that does not allow us to merely stand by and observe. The name of Jesus inevitably provokes a response – for or against, up or down, drawing one nearer or driving one away.

Some have tried to sanitize Jesus by selectively quoting him or by referring to his love at the expense of his radical holiness. According to Andree Seu, in a column for World magazine, such attempts only produce a Jesus who “is serene to the point of lobotomized. He makes no demands, brings no conviction of sin, is a hollowed-out vessel to be filled with what America’s itching ears long to hear. Heaven help this generation when … [Christ] returns in all His eschatological glory on the clouds with the shout of an archangel and an uplifted sword.”

The Bible indicates that one day there will be a universal acknowledgment of Jesus as he really is. It says, “Therefore also God highly exalted [Jesus], and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those who are in heaven, and on earth, and under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

Can you imagine such a scene? The founders and leaders and prophets of all the world’s religions and sects and cults, past and present, bowing low before Jesus. Has any other belief system in history ever made such a claim about its founder in its holy writ? Before whom would it be fitting for Jesus to bow?

All of which seems to press home a point emphasized by an old church hymn that asks: “What will YOU do with Jesus? Neutral you cannot be. Some day your heart will be asking, ‘What will He do with me?'”

Final judgment notwithstanding, it is actually the gentle grace of Jesus that has drawn many of us to him. We have been touched by his kindness, his decency and his dignity.

To quote Philip Yancey in “The Jesus I Never Knew”: “Why am I a Christian? To be perfectly honest, the reasons reduce to two: 1) the lack of good alternatives, and 2) Jesus. Brilliant, untamed, tender, creative, slippery, irreducible, paradoxically humble – Jesus stands up to scrutiny. He is who I want my God to be.”

The Rev. Daryl E. Witmer is founder and director of the AIIA Institute, a national apologetics ministry, and associate pastor of the Monson Community Church. He may be reached at AIIAInstitute

@aol.com or through ChristianAnswers.

Net/AIIA. Voices is a weekly commentary by five Maine columnists who explore issues affecting spirituality and religious life.