Scared Mysteries: Amen – a single true word taken in jest
Representative Emanuel Cleaver was surprised when his prayer at the opening of the new US Congress was met with hostility. Mr Cleaver, who is a Democrat and a Methodist minister, made his prayer “in the name of the monotheistic God, Brahma, and ‘god’ known by many names by many different faiths. Amen,” adding “and a-woman.”
It was a strange joke that didn’t quite hang together. Perhaps he said “a-women”, though pronouncing it, as some people do these days, not to rhyme with swimmin’, but to rhyme with bomb-men.
I hadn’t realised that Congress did begin with a prayer. Church and state are separated in America, unlike arrangements in England, where the head of state is also the Supreme Governor of the Church of England.
The mood in Congress has turned less jokey since the scenes of public disorder on Wednesday. But the word Amen retains its serious function, under-appreciated through its familiarity.
Some American politicians this week called it a Latin word, and so it is, in a borrowed role. It comes of course from Hebrew, and is often found in the Hebrew Bible as a confirmatory response to the statement of another, as in the book of Deuteronomy: “Cursed be he that lieth with his mother in law. And all the people shall say, Amen.”
By the time of Jesus, Amen was also used as a form of affirmation of a speaker’s own words. In the Gospel according to St John, Jesus declares: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am.”
That is the translation of the Authorised Version of 1611. But the Greek in which the Gospel was written uses the words “Amen, Amen.” St John records its use in this double form 26 times. It almost seems a personal mannerism of Jesus, though the Evangelist obviously selects his sayings to express the theological intention of his narrative.
Jesus spoke Aramaic in everyday life, a language closely related to Hebrew, in the North-West Semitic linguistic group. He knew Hebrew, and read it in the synagogue. When he is reported saying Amen, he would be speaking Aramaic, but conscious that the word would be strongly allusive of Hebrew biblical usages.
Amen is used at the end of prayers in another Semitic language still used in modern times, Arabic. Pronounced Amin, it is said for example at the end of the first seven verses of the Koran (the Fatihah) that are recited at daily prayers.
In the languages of the West used for liturgical Christian prayer, which, even in Rome, was at first Greek, it is more surprising that a Hebrew word has been preserved in use. In this it resembles Hallelujah.
In addition to its function at the end of prayers, Amen was said by the congregation from the earliest times in two special places. One was at the end of the Eucharistic prayer, the central act of worship. Later in the same service, when people received Communion, they each answered “Amen” to the statement “The Body of Christ.” In the 4th century, St Augustine commented, in one of his sermons, on a sentence from St Paul: “Now you are the body of Christ, and individually you are members of it.” On this he brought to bear the single word Amen that his hearers spoke each time they received Communion.
“It is the sacrament of yourselves that is placed on the Lord’s altar, and it is the sacrament of yourselves that you receive,” he said. “You reply Amen to what you are, and thereby agree that such you are. You hear the words ‘The body of Christ’ and you reply Amen. Be, then, a member of Christ’s body, so that your Amen may accord with the truth.”
