Holy Week Through the Eyes of the Languages of the WorldMuestra

In John 17, before he is arrested, Jesus prays that his disciples (and we as their followers) would be one, just as he and the father are one. We've repeated his prayer so often that we tend to think we know what it means, even though many increasingly decry the lack of oneness in the church today. But do we know what this unity means? What kind of oneness is Jesus talking about?

Kikuyu is a language spoken in central Kenya by 6.6 million people, the vast majority of whom are either Protestant or Catholic Christians. In the 1950s, when the Bible was first being translated into Kikuyu, translators ran into a problem with the word "one" in the sense that John uses. This would not be surprising to anyone familiar with other Bantu languages (a large family of languages in Central, Southern, and Southeast Africa that includes Kikuyu). As in many Bantu languages, it's grammatically wrong in Kikuyu to make the word “one” into a plural subject, thus making this translation extremely difficult if not impossible.

The eventual word choice of the Kikuyu translators was one that ended up being uniformly used in both formal and common language translations as well as in Bibles for all confessions—and a term that might be a helpful insight even for people who don't read Kikuyu.

The translators chose between two different new words. The first word—amwe—means "one" as in a family or group of friends; ũmwe, the other, means "one" as in being the same person. Both were neologisms, newly minted words, and though the latter was grammatically more awkward, it was ũmwe that the translators chose for the five relevant occurrences in John,preferring a grammatical violation to using a simile that would possibly have sounded less jarring when it was first introduced but did not have the expressive power of the chosen translation: atĩ othe matuĩke ũmwe ki—"that they may all be one (as in 'one person')" (John 17:21a).

Is your church an ũmwe kind of church, one that is unified in the same way Jesus and the Father are ũmwe? In our present climate, this is easily recognizable as a rhetorical question. Am I, are you contributing to becoming an ũmwe church, a church that is defined by oneness that respects differences while having a deep, supernatural sense of unity of purpose and calling? That's a real, non-rhetorical question that should speak to every single one of us.