Yes, we’re getting a second Word post this week, since next Monday is Christmas, following so closely on the heels of the Fourth Sunday of Advent that I won’t have a chance to talk about it before Christmas…so we’ll cover it now! Because obviously we can’t skip the week of love.

Love.

Not surprisingly, love has been in the English language pretty much forever, starting with lufu in Old English. It’s always been used to encompass all the different meanings we still have today, from romantic love to affection for family to the love of God. That Old English word lufu is of Germanic origin, and I grinned when I saw what other Germanic words it was directly related to. Like:

Old High German liubi  – “joy
German Liebe – “love”
German Lob – “praise”

Don’t you just smile at how joy, love, and praise are all from the same root? That’s especially beautiful as we observe the season of Advent and prepare our hearts for Christmas…that ultimate expression of love, that perpetual cause for joy, and that event that deserves our eternal and unending praise.

The phrase fall in love dates from the early 1400s, and a hundred years later the concept of being in love with someone had followed. Make love used to mean courtship or wooing, specifically “to pay romantic attention to.” It wasn’t until thee 1950s that it had implied anything sexual. Love life dates from 1919.

But of course, in the days coming in this next week, I hope our thoughts focus not only on the people we love, but on the biggest Love ever known to mankind…the Savior who gave Himself for us.

Word Nerds Merch!

Joy.

It’s been an English word since around year 1200, carrying then the same meaning it does now of “a feeling of pleasure and delight.” Our English word comes from the French joie, which comes in turn from the Latin gaudium.

That gau- root is common to many Indo-European languages, including Ancient Greek gaio, which means “I rejoice!” I love that the noun joy is so closely related to the proclamation of the feeling. It’s especially apropos this time of year, when we’re not just celebrating the joy of Christ’s arrival, but proclaiming it for all to see and hear.

Word Nerds Merch!

Peace.

The etymology of peace begins with Latin. It gives us pax or pacem (different forms of the same word), which forms were passed along to most Romance languages, including Spanish paz, Italian pace, and French pais. It’s the French pais that made its way across the Channel to inform the word pes in the mid-1100s in England. It was in the 1500s that the spelling changed, to reflect how the vowel had begun to be pronounced.

What did peace mean? Pretty much what it always has, all the way back to Latin: “freedom from civil disorder, internal calm within a nation.” Peace, in all its languages dating back to ancient times, meant primarily this exterior, physical peace.

Which is why it was revolutionary when Jesus began to talk about a different kind of peace–an internal peace. When we weren’t not-at-war with other people…but rather, when we were not-at-war with God.

This concept of Biblical peace or pax has been a huge part of the Church and its symbology since the earliest days. Ancient churches and monasteries had what we call a pax stone marking their entrance, which was a prayer for peace, and one of the most enduring symbols is the Chi Rho Pax that marked those stones. It’s literally the first two Greek letters of Christ (Chi and Rho) interlaced, and then adding in the pax to be a benediction of “Go in peace in the name of Christ.”

May the peace of Christ go with you this week, my friends! And as we enter the hustle and bustle of a busy season, I daresay we all need to pause and consider what that looks like. How can we embody a lack of strife? How can we be the bearers of peace, both in the external and internal senses of the word?

Word Nerds Merch!

Hope.

It’s a word we all know, of course. Use so regularly we probably never really stop to think about it. But since yesterday marked the first week of Advent–the week of hope–I thought it appropriate to pause and actually look at the word.

Hope is from the Old English hopian, which is in turn borrowed from North Sea Germanic languages, so has cognates in Dutch and similar dialects but not in most other Germanic tongues. The word has been around pretty much forever…but it had one very specific meaning until the 13th century: “to hope for salvation or mercy from God; to have faith or trust in God’s word.” Hope was a purely theological term, a word for the virtue in the faith.

By the 1200s, the word hope had expanded…one might even say that it weakened…to “to wish for something.” But as we look toward the coming of Christ during the Advent season, it’s important to remember where the word actually comes from and what it actually means.

We don’t just hope for the present we want or the weather we want or anything else we want. We hope for Christ’s salvation, we hope for His mercy, we hope in the Lord.

Next week we’ll take a look at peace, as we’re in that week of Advent!

Word Nerds Merch!