By Martin Smith
Nurturing children in the faith is hardly a one-way activity since they are capable of saying extraordinarily original and perceptive things about the spiritual life that seem like true gifts from God. Adults have been marveling from the beginning of time at the striking oracles that children sometimes utter: words and sayings that jolt adult out of their jadedness and refresh tired religious ideas. “Out of the mouths of infants and children your majesty is praised above the heavens.” (Ps. 8:2)
A young boy in our congregation developed the habit of giving his mother a ‘high five’ after prayer. She asked him why he was doing it, and he replied, “Don’t we all say ‘I’m in!’ when we’ve finished a prayer?” And of course she marveled at this striking and completely accurate ‘hearing’ of the word Amen and its implications. This ancient Hebrew word of affirmation at the end of prayer is intended to be our expression of personal commitment to all that has gone before. The boy totally got this, even though he was mishearing the sound. And he felt that this invitation to personal commitment called for a sign, a physical ritual that expressed that willingness to be in God’s team, ready to play on God’s side—the high-five. I have a feeling that this could even catch on as an innovative liturgical action. It certainly turned out that way at a retreat I gave in Alabama a few weeks ago. I told the story, and from then on in all our services everyone without prompting gave a high five to his or her neighbor at the end of every prayer, gleefully substituting “I’m in” for Amen!
There is a great precedent for wanting to re-energize this ritual word Amen—no less than the spiritual originality of Jesus himself. So many of the sayings of Jesus begin with the word Amen that we must assume that this was a personal habit. (This peculiar quirk of Jesus is completely lost in most English translations of the gospels, as we often find it translated there as verily or truly).
This usage—Amen, I say to you—was completely original! Scholars can find no examples where anyone else before or after Jesus took the word from its place at the end of a prayer and used it at the beginning. This is truly interesting. What can we make of it? It seems to reveal the deep-seated sense of authority that Jesus possessed. In him, personal commitment to God’s will, his faith in God’s rule, did not come as an after-thought. It was the origin and source of all that he had to say, and all that he had to do. This ‘high-five’ to God came at the beginning of every expression of the message that he believed God had chosen him to launch, as one called “to set the earth on fire.” (Luke 12:49)
Rabbis and scribes sought precedents for everything. They merely expounded what had been revealed in the past. Jesus derived his authority as Son directly and immediately from God his Father, and this immediacy he affirmed by daring to transpose Amen to the beginning of his words. A famous scholar once described Jesus’ daring innovation as “containing all Christology in a nutshell.” It implies that Jesus was indeed acting out of a unique sense of mission and authority to speak and act directly on God’s behalf.
We should hardly be surprised then that the word Amen carried a huge voltage of spiritual energy for early Christians. It was no mere noise to be muttered automatically at the close of a prayer. Amen throbbed with meaning. It actually became a title of Christ himself. Christians heard Jesus as the Word that said two things at once. Jesus as God’s Son was God’s word of affirmation to us, his great Amen, his great Yes to us. At the same time, Jesus our brother, as one of us, expressed humanity’s resounding Yes to God, our Amen finally resounding without qualification or reserve. In the book of Revelation, Jesus is called “the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of God’s creation.” (3:14) And in the second letter of Paul to the Corinthians, we have evidence that the early Christians used the great Amen affirmation in their worship as a shout of praise, inspired by the Spirit, in response to God’s great Yes to us through Jesus. “In him it is always ‘Yes’. In him every one of God’s promises is a ‘Yes.’ For this reason it is through him that we say the ‘Amen’ to the glory of God. But it is God who establishes us with you in Christ and has anointed us, by putting his seal on us and giving us his Spirit in hearts as a first installment.” (1:19-22)
Martin Smith is well-known in the Episcopal Church and beyond as a priest, writer, preacher and leader of retreats. Through such popular works as A Season for the Spirit and The Word is Very Near You and in numerous workshops, lectures and retreats, he continues to explore a contemporary spirituality that encourages a lively conversation between new knowledge and the riches of tradition.