A Beautiful Invitation
I’ve recently rediscovered the joy of reading the ancient scriptures in their original language. My Koine Greek is a little rusty, but I’ve dusted off my Greek New Testament and have been referencing it, along with some Hebrew, whenever I come across English words or phrases that seem a little shallow. Sometimes I have a hunch there’s a richer meaning in the author’s original words and I want to understand them more fully.
If you don’t know Hebrew or Greek that doesn’t mean the Bible isn’t accessible to you. If you simply read it at face value and that will be vastly more than enough. But there is a richness of meaning when you can dig a little deeper into the original text. The human authors who God inspired and worked through lived in a particular time and place and culture. Understanding what God meant, and by extension what their original words meant, are, in my estimation (and that of many scholars) the key to faithful interpretation and application of scripture for today.
But it’s not just about that. It’s about finding the beauty and mystery behind these words that have the potential to sink deep into our souls and transform our lives. Sometimes even just googling, “koine greek for love,” for example, can unlock a richer, deeper meaning. If you do that, you’ll find out that there are four different, distinct words used that we translate as “love”, each having beautiful, different meanings. Our word love is pretty shallow compared to their ways of talking about “love.” We say we “love” our closest friends or our spouse or God and then use the same word when we say we “love” donuts — which is true of course, but I hope not in the same ways!
It was in this spirit, then, that I was wonderfully re-awakened today to another concept that our English Bible doesn’t quite communicate. There is a Greek word that John uses in what we know as “chapter 15” of his account of the life of Jesus that is really amazing. It appears in the passage where Jesus is telling us that He is the vine and we are the branches. This particular word is usually translated as “abide” or “remain.” Jesus says, “Abide in me and I will abide in you.” The Greek word is μένω. It certainly can be, literally speaking, translated as abide or remain. But it was also used in a number of other ways that show us the richness of what Jesus was saying here. Some of the other…
