Radically One

IC XC
✙
NI KA

O Adonai, and leader of the House of Israel,
who appeared to Moses in the fire of the burning bush,
and gave him the law on Sinai:
Come and redeem us with an outstretched arm.

O Antiphon for 18 December

TODAY IS THE Second post on the Great O’s Antiphons. We’re addressing O Adonai here and the next post will be on the 25th.

Christianity is Radically Monotheistic. When God is the Ground and Source of all being – not one being among many, but rather beingness in Himself, then all that participates in being is doing so by God’s will and action. All the opposes God’s will is acting in opposition to its own being, in opposition to the order (the Logos) that God has throughout the world. And yet, even that opposition is part and parcel of the Wisdom by which God’s plan is unfolding in real time around us.

So I’ve been working on the Jesus prayer in Hebrew. The first word of the prayer is “lord” which in Greek is κυριε Kyrie. Straight up translation in Hebrew would give us אדון adon. That’s ok and the prayer makes sense with that word in place. But Kyrie is also used in the Septuagint as a translation for the four-letter name of God. In fact, it’s the origin of our English tradition of using “LORD” as a translation of the Holy Name. The is a similar tradition in Hebrew of replacing the Name, when reading the scriptures out loud, with today’s title word, אדני Adonai. In fact the tradition is so strong that there are replacement words for the replacement word when in another context: instead of saying “Adonai” one may say “Kadonai” or “HaShem” (lit: the name) or even, “KadoShem” (abbreviated “The Holy Name”). So it came to me that it was this word rather than “Adon” which should be used in the Jesus prayer.

As today’s verse indicated, the Church teaches it was the pre-incarnation Second Person of the Trinity that spoke to Moses. In fact, the Church says that God the Father is always present, in this world, through the person of his Son, his word. God speaks the word – which is also Divine – and the word is always and only Yeshua. Thus, to use today’s verse to address Jesus is totally correct. When God spoke the Commandments to Moses, the word spoken was “wholeness” or “salvation” which is to say, Yeshua. And, further back, when God saw that everything was Good, it was Whole, Saved, Yeshua.

And when, at the end, all things are restored to wholeness there will be only the one light in all things – the Light of the World. And to get there, there is only one way, one truth, one life…

All things spoken are the one Truth.

God’s one Truth – which is his own essence – is always the same.

And he comes to redeem us with an outstretched arm.

Which will be nailed to the Cross. And Rise.