MARANATHA
Detail of the Last Judgement, St. Mary’s Church Lutterworth, Leicestershire. Photo by Walwyn, via Flickr.
As my years have increased, so too has the length of my prayers. I have more to say to God these days: more people to pray for, more thoughts to untangle, more thanksgivings to offer. Yet as I have grown older, I have also come to appreciate the power of the shortest prayer in the entire Bible.
Found in 1 Corinthians 16:22, it consists of a single phrase: maranatha, an Aramaic expression that means “Come, O Lord!” (1) At the close of his letter to the Corinthians St. Paul prays for the swift return of Jesus from heaven and the descent of the New Jerusalem to earth, and I often find his words escaping my own lips.
*
There was a time in my life when I could not understand the imprecatory psalms. I thought it not only un-Christian, but inhuman, to cry for vengeance upon one’s enemies, to demand that God burn down armies and cities, to wish that oppressors’ children be destroyed. I still think these sentiments un-Christian, but I no longer deny that they are human. I turn on the news and see whole cities razed to the ground in the name of a tyrant’s ambition. I learn with increasing horror just how many of my fellow citizens will embrace outright lies that imperil our democracy, stoking old grievances rather than admitting their candidate lost an election. Then, of course, I confront the daily outrages of life in the twenty-first century: a climate crisis caused by greed and intransigence, ever-increasing wealth disparities, and horrifying human numbness toward – even enthusiastic acceptance of – the worst kinds of cruelty toward others.
I’m not one to call for burning it all down and starting over. Perhaps my congenital Midwestern moderation predestines me to prefer incremental change; perhaps I am suspicious enough of human nature to believe that revolutions are as likely to devour their children whole as they are to inaugurate a better world. Yet I know that things cannot continue as they are. And so, I turn to the one revolutionary I can wholeheartedly trust and cry, maranatha: Come, Lord Jesus, and sort this out, for we surely cannot do it ourselves.
*
Sometimes I need Jesus most when there is no clear enemy in sight. Every day the world hosts a thousand ordinary tragedies of no one’s making. Many a pair of lovers meet, marry, grow apart, then spend years in acrimonious and painful entanglement before a bitter divorce. Every day, some things must die so that others may live. And who can say how many times we hurt those we care about despite our best intentions?
But who can detect one’s own errors?
Clear me from hidden faults.
Thus the Psalmist cries, (2) and it is a fitting expression of the human dilemma. We cannot see ourselves; we cannot always avoid wrongdoing. We cannot stop being human – and even a human who is not a villain can do profound harm.
Maranatha. Come quickly, Lord Jesus. Wipe away every tear, make the whole creation new, and show us a way out of the tragedies of living.
*
The clinical psychologist Melanie Klein was the first to notice that human beings tend to oscillate between two basic emotional configurations. In the first state, which develops earlier in life, we tend to see everything as either completely good (idealization) or completely bad (demonization). The old cliché about how two people newly in love not only ignore, but seem completely blind to, each other’s faults illustrates this idealizing tendency. However, for each idealization, there is a corresponding (often unconscious) demonization. Sometimes we demonize the same person we idealize, as when a lover dramatically rejects their partner after a single small misstep. In other cases, we split our idealizations and demonizations between different people. Klein once treated a young boy whose mother was terribly hurtful to him. When Klein asked him about her, he insisted that his mother was loving and had never been cruel to him. He immediately noticed an older woman walking past the window in Klein’s office and became terrified, convinced this passerby was evil and sought to hurt him. He had unconsciously transferred his fear of his mother onto a passerby, turning her into a malicious, demonic figure.
The second and more mature emotional state occurs when people can feel the combinations of good and bad that each person carries within them. In such a state, lovers can feel both their love and their frustration at their partner at the same time: “I love X, but I will never understand them!” is the oft-repeated anthem of such an emotional state. While it makes for a calmer household, this second state also leaves ennui and frustration in its wake. In a fit of melancholy, I once told a mentor that it felt as if the whole world had turned a vomit-inducing shade of ugly green. A world in which good and bad are always intermingled is one in which those who satisfy us most will inevitably disappoint and frustrate us. This can be profoundly enervating, or even disgusting, as it was for me in that moment.
Clinical psychologists, with their penchant for cheery optimism and inviting terminology, have named these two states the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, respectively. For Klein, psychic health is simply a human being’s ability to navigate between these two states with appropriate flexibility. Life is full of pain and sorrow; without the paranoid-schizoid position’s ability to ignore and escape from its harshest realities, we would despair. Yet if we lose touch with the depressive position’s ability to recognize ambivalence, we shall become unmoored from reality altogether. The mentally well person balances the tension between these two modes of feeling without becoming overwhelmed by either. The dilemma of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions is one that we can navigate better or worse, but never perfectly.
The Second Coming promises a solution. Jesus is, after all, the ideal figure who shall not disappoint even our most fantastical hopes for healing and joy. He also promises not merely to tolerate our faults and ambivalences, but to forgive and heal them. In the Kingdom of God, idealization and reality can exist side by side. When I can find no peace in the world without or my mind within, I close my eyes and whisper my one-word prayer: maranatha. Come, Lord Jesus, and bring a world wonderful enough to still my unquiet heart.
*
I visit a beloved member of my parish in the hospital. Her medical team has just informed me that they do not expect her to last through the night. Life and death battle over her body; she still kicks off her blankets, like a child whose parents tucked her in too tightly, even as each increasingly labored breath and unconscious flutter of her eyes makes it painfully clear that death has the upper hand today.
Her family steps out of the room to greet new visitors. As I steal a moment alone with my parishioner, the tears I have been holding back begin to fall. I am her priest, after all, and I will not do her or her family much good if I cannot say her last rites through my tears. But now that we are alone, the tears can fall. I weep in sorrow that such a lovely woman, full of joy and good humor well into her eighth decade of life, is about to be separated from us. I weep in rage against the power of death – the decreation of our bodies, destined for glory but doomed for a time to return instead to the dust.
“Such bitterness you ask us to endure, Lord,” I murmur under my breath. The last enemy to be destroyed is death, as St. Paul tells us, (3) yet until the last day God commands us to endure death’s reign. In moments like these, I cannot help but feel some anger at God for burdening us with such grief – an anger that has never yet dimmed my hope that God will ultimately make good on the Gospel promise. And as my anger, sorrow, and hope crest within me, I mutter the only prayer that captures them all: maranatha. Come back, Lord Jesus, and swallow up death forever like you promised. Don’t you dare let your creations fall back into nothingness.
*
The wonderful thing about a short prayer is that by necessity it carries many meanings. We haven’t got time to speak longer and sort out which implications we intend and which we don’t. We bring a short prayer to God the same way we bring ourselves to God – unfinished, laden with hidden depths, and usually more pressed for time than we had hoped. I have tried to tease out a few possible meanings of maranatha in this article. No doubt you have more you will add to it. When you do, you will make one of the oldest and richest prayers of the Church even richer. This is, after all, one function of the Body of Christ: to hold its own tension and incompletion with patience, exploring ever further the depths of its praises and petitions. We do this on behalf of all creation, which yearns for its own fulfillment to be had at the Second Coming which will crown all joys and heal all sorrows. We are part of the longing of the cosmos for its creator.
Perhaps that is the ultimate reason this prayer has so much meaning for me. Beyond all the vertiginous drops and slow ascents of my life, I desire God’s return because it is what I was made to desire. That longing takes different forms over the course of a lifetime, but it remains the same. And so, trusting in all the meanings that prayer holds that I do not yet know, I say it again: maranatha. Come, Lord Jesus. Come, and teach me what I meant when I asked you to come.
Amen.
Based on some complicated possibilities relating to the Greek transliteration of this phrase, another possible translation is “Our Lord has come.” I think this alternate translation likely incorrect, so I will stick with the most common translation for this essay.
Psalm 19:12
1 Cor. 15:26
