Θαρσεῖτε, Ἐγώ Eἰμι

The summer that has just now passed was, for me, divided fairly distinctly into two sections. The first part was largely occupied by doing things I enjoyed: World Youth Day, a good friend’s wedding, a visit to France, and being with my family. This first part was abruptly cut short like a speeding train suddenly chancing upon a solid wall, by the arrival of the LSAT prep manual I had ordered.

Now it isn’t that I hadn’t expected that it would arrive, but it caught me short when it did. I opened the door to find the book waiting there, like some token of doom. For a moment and a half we just eyed each other, sizing each other up much in the way I imagine the fastest gun in the West would have sized up the second fastest gun had they run into each other by chance in some dusty town.

Now the LSAT is the Law School Admissions Test, and it weighs more for law schools than GPA or even (within reason) which undergraduate college one attended. The difference of even one point on the LSAT can yield massive differences in which schools accept you and thousands of dollars of difference in financial aid.

As such, as I opened the prep book for the first time I was very much weighed down by the gravity of the whole situation. By the grace of God, I was struck at that time by a line from Matthew’s Gospel:

Θαρσεῖτε, ἐγώ εἰμι· μὴ φοβεῖσθε.

It comes from the moment when the disciples are at sea being tossed by the storm. They see Jesus walking on the water towards them and they’re terrified. He gets into the boat and says “Take heart, I AM. Do not be afraid” which is the translation of the Koine Greek above. There is such a punch in the English, but that punch is a thousand times harder in the exact words which St. John chose to describe his own living memory.

Even the way the words sound convey the feeling “Tharseite, egō eimi. Mē phobeisthe”. There’s a power in the syllables: the strength of the constants in the first word, the peace in the vowels of the second. In sound and meaning, it perfectly fits with the love and strength of Jesus.

I do not believe that it is worth the mind-cracking, depression-inducing experience (truly, esteemed reader, the stuff of nightmares) which is learning Greek to understand one line from the New Testament. So as to explain the difficulty involved in learning this language anecdotally, once while I was enrolled in elementary Greek I nearly drowned in freezing waters. When I realized that I was in danger of death, my first thought was “this terror is exactly the same as what I felt during my last Greek quiz.”

Suffice to say, it would not be worth it for one line, but, as it would happen, the New Testament is fairly entirely like this, most especially John’s Gospel. Reading the New Testament in Greek opened up so much for me, both because I was forced to go slowly and because there are some things which no translation will ever capture, no matter how many scholars and theologians and linguists are involved.

I realize that the Holy Spirit touches different hearts in different ways, and not everyone will find that Greek brings them closer to the love of God, but I do believe, strongly, that there are many who would, not least those studying the humanities and liberal arts.