What does ‘Maranatha’ mean?

Question 10152.

Maranatha appears once in the New Testament, tucked into the closing lines of a long and often difficult letter, and it is one of the oldest Christian prayers we possess. Paul writes: “If anyone has no love for the Lord, let him be accursed. Our Lord, come!” (1 Corinthians 16:22).

That last phrase stands in the Greek text as an Aramaic expression, transliterated rather than translated, and the fact that Paul left it in its original form tells us a great deal about the church that first prayed it.

What the Word Means

The expression is Aramaic, the everyday language of Judea in the first century, and it combines the word for our Lord with a form of the verb to come. Because the earliest manuscripts were written without word division, it can be split in two ways, and both have been defended for centuries.

Divided as marana tha, it is an imperative: “Our Lord, come!” Divided as maran atha, it is a declaration: “Our Lord has come,” or “Our Lord is coming.” You can look at the underlying material at Blue Letter Bible and see the difficulty for yourself.

Most translators, including the ESV, take it as the prayer rather than the statement, and I think they are right. It matches the closing prayer of the whole Bible, “Come, Lord Jesus” in Revelation 22:20, which reads like a Greek rendering of exactly this Aramaic cry. Maranatha and that final verse are the same longing in two languages.

Why Maranatha Was Left Untranslated

Paul was writing to a Greek-speaking congregation in a Greek city. He translates other Aramaic terms when he uses them. Why leave this one alone?

The natural explanation is that it had already become a fixed liturgical expression, so familiar in the churches that translating it would have been like translating “amen” or “hallelujah”. Corinth did not need it explained. That points to a very early and very widespread use, carried from Aramaic-speaking Jewish believers in Judea out into Gentile congregations across the empire.

The Didache, an early Christian manual usually dated within a generation or two of the apostles, ends its communion prayers with the same word, which suggests it had a settled place in worship at the Lord’s Table. Believers ate the bread, drank the cup, remembered a death and then asked their Lord to come back.

What It Reveals About the Earliest Church

Here is what I find most striking. Maranatha is a prayer addressed to Jesus, and it comes from Aramaic-speaking Jewish believers, the very people least likely to blur the line between God and a man.

Devout Jews did not pray to rabbis. They did not pray to prophets or martyrs. Yet within a very few years of the crucifixion, in the language Jesus Himself spoke, His followers were calling on Him directly as Lord and asking Him to return. The high Christology of the New Testament is not a late Greek invention layered on top of a simple Jewish teacher. It is there in an Aramaic prayer that predates every book Paul wrote.

It also reveals an expectation. You do not ask someone to come if you believe they are already here in the sense you mean, and you do not ask if you think their arrival is centuries away and no concern of yours. Maranatha is the prayer of people who thought their Lord might appear before the week was out. That is the doctrine I discuss in imminence.

The Context in 1 Corinthians 16

The setting of the word is severe. Immediately before it Paul writes that if anyone has no love for the Lord, let him be accursed. Then comes the prayer for the Lord to come. The two sit side by side deliberately.

Corinth was a church of factions, lawsuits, drunkenness at the Lord’s Table and tolerated immorality. Paul has spent sixteen chapters on it. At the end he sets the whole mess against the coming of the Lord, because nothing sorts out a congregation’s priorities quite like remembering who is on His way. The return of Jesus is comfort for the faithful and warning for the careless in the same breath.

Maranatha and the Deity of Jesus

I want to press the point I made a moment ago, because it carries more weight than its size suggests.

Critical scholarship of an older generation argued that the church gradually elevated Jesus from teacher to prophet to divine figure, and that this development took place as the faith moved out of Palestine into the Greek world. On that theory the high claims of John’s Gospel are late and Hellenistic.

Maranatha is an awkward fact for that theory. It is Aramaic, not Greek. It comes from Palestine, not Ephesus. It is early enough to be a fixed formula before Paul wrote to Corinth in the mid-fifties. And it addresses Jesus as our Lord in prayer, using the very word Jewish believers reserved for God. The highest Christology in the New Testament turns out to be its earliest, preserved in a single untranslated word.

Longing as a Mark of Faith

There is a spiritual condition described in the New Testament that I think we have quietly lost, and Maranatha names it.

Paul says a crown of righteousness is laid up for all who have loved His appearing (2 Timothy 4:8). Loved it. Not simply believed in it or assented to it on a doctrinal basis, but wanted it, ached for it, found the thought of seeing Him the best thought available. That is an affection, and affections can be cultivated or neglected.

Comfortable Christians in comfortable countries do not naturally pray Maranatha with any urgency. We have too much to lose and too little to escape from. Persecuted believers have always prayed it more readily, and I suspect they understand something we have insulated ourselves against.

That is not a reason for guilt but for honesty. If the prayer feels hollow in your mouth, that is worth bringing to God rather than hiding. The word Maranatha has survived twenty centuries precisely because generation after generation has needed to say it out loud, and you can look at the wider context in 1 Corinthians 16.

Maranatha in the Life of a Church

I would like to see this word recovered in ordinary congregational life, and not as a novelty.

The early believers used it at the Lord’s Table, which is exactly right. We proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes, so the meal itself looks backwards and forwards at once. Ending communion with Maranatha would close the loop that Paul opened.

It also belongs in the hard places. At a hospital bedside, at the end of a difficult church meeting, on the morning after a funeral, when there is genuinely nothing useful left to say. Maranatha says the one thing that is always true: our Lord is coming, and this is not how the story ends.

There is a wonderful lack of religiosity about it. Two Aramaic words, no polish, no eloquence, just a request from people who could not fix their situation to a Lord who can. That is most of us, most of the time.

And it is worth remembering who first prayed it. Not theologians in a study, but ordinary believers under Roman pressure, many of whom would be dead within a decade. They prayed Maranatha and He did not come in their lifetime, and they were not disappointed in Him for it. That is faith of a fairly high order.

Two Words and a Whole Theology

It is remarkable how much doctrine sits inside two short Aramaic words, and it is worth gathering it up.

There is Christology, because Jesus is addressed as Lord in prayer. There is eschatology, because He is expected to come. There is ecclesiology, because the prayer belongs to a gathered people saying our Lord rather than my Lord. And there is something of soteriology too, since the verse just before it distinguishes those who love Him from those who do not.

For a phrase short enough to fit on a wristband, that is a considerable amount of theology. The earliest Christians did not have systematic textbooks. They had prayers, and their prayers carried their doctrine.

Which is worth remembering when we are tempted to think that serious theology requires a library. Two words, said honestly by a frightened believer in a hostile city, contained more than most of us manage in an hour of talking.

So, now what?

I would ask you to make it your own prayer, and to notice what happens when you do. Praying Maranatha honestly is a searching exercise, because it means asking Jesus to walk into your life exactly as it currently stands.

If there is a habit you would want to tidy away before He arrived, the prayer will find it. If there is a relationship you have let rot, the prayer will find that too. The early church prayed this at communion, which is precisely where self-examination belongs.

The Bible ends with a promise and an answer. “Surely I am coming soon.” And the church says: Amen. Come, Lord Jesus. Can you say that this evening and mean every word of it?

He who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!

Revelation 22:20 (ESV)