Come, Lord

Maranatha is an Aramaic phrase that Paul left untranslated in the Greek of his First Letter to the Corinthians, and which appears again in an early Christian manual of church order, the Didache, at the close of a eucharistic prayer. Depending on how the Aramaic is divided, it means either "Our Lord has come" or, more commonly taken as a prayer, "Our Lord, come," a plea for the return of Christ. Its survival in Aramaic within Greek-speaking congregations is significant to historians: it shows that the invocation of Jesus as Lord, and the hope of his coming, were already current among the earliest, Aramaic-speaking followers, before the faith's expression settled into Greek, evidence of a very early devotion to Christ. The phrase has remained in Christian use as a compressed expression of hope for the second coming, and it echoes the closing prayer of the Book of Revelation, "Come, Lord Jesus."