181 Pronouncing Omicron

    (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Pronouncing Omicron”, originally shared on January 13, 2022. It was the 181^st video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   The fifteenth letter of the Greek alphabet has been getting a lot of press lately, none of it welcome. Today, we’re going to see how to pronounce “Omicron” and, more importantly, what “omicron” pronounces about us. Stay with us and check it out.

   No one knows how the Greek words in which the New Testament section of the Bible was first written were pronounced in the New Testament era.

   Language changes over time, so there is likely little connection with modern Greek pronunciation, going on 2,000 year later.

   The pronunciations we use to speak Biblical Greek words are sounds that have been agreed upon by scholars so that all students, anywhere in the world, can sound the same to each other, and to distinguish one letter from the others, and to be consistent between those who learn and those who teach. [I’m not proficient enough with my software to print Greek words with the breathing and punctuation marks that are used to show how Greek words are commonly pronounced, but I think you’ll get a sense of it here.]

   Even then, there are issues.

   For example, the first class I took in Biblical Greek, was taught by an Irish Roman Catholic priest who apologized to the class for teaching us to pronounce Biblical Greek with an Irish accent. 😊

In addition, Biblical Greek is only spoken to teach words and grammar, it is not taught or practiced as a spoken language. It is used to understand the texts, all of which were written in the common version of Greek in use at the time. I have a book on “conversational Greek”, but it is mostly a novelty.

   And, the New Testament was written in a specific version of Greek called koine. Not the classical Greek of philosophers, poets, and conquerors, but in the language of the people. Or, as one of my professors called it, “street Greek”.

    People learn Biblical Greek in order to read the Bible in its original language, pick up on the nuances of the original language, to get a feel for what is being expressed, and to see why different translations come up with different expressions of the original language.

   If a person starts young and studies Biblical Greek for several decades, they might gain some credibility as a scholar of Biblical Greek.

   When I say “Biblical”, I am thinking particularly of the New Testament. The original language of the Old Testament was Hebrew. It was translated into Greek later, and can be read in Biblical Greek, but that translation is not necessarily authoritative for Jews.

   The New Testament was written in Greek. It was written in Greek in the context of the Latin-based Roman Empire. But, when Paul wrote his letter to the Romans, to the church at Rome, he wrote it in Greek.

   The coronavirus variants now plaguing the world are being named with letters of the Greek alphabet to avoid misinformation or stigmatizing the places where new varieties of the Coronavirus were first detected. In addition, the letters Nu and Xi were omitted to avoid confusion with the word, “New” and with the common family name, Xi. (Fun fact: the word alphabet comes from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet: Alpha and Beta.)

   Even then, there are issues.

   For example, remember when we first started to hear about the coronavirus? Sales of Corona beer went down because people thought it might have something to do with the coronavirus. Seriously. You can’t make this stuff up.

   When the recent variant that was given the name Omicron, the 15^th letter of the Greek alphabet, came out, a widely circulated email claimed that in the word omicron, omi stands for omega, the last letter of the Greek alphabet, and cron is short for chron, which is short for “chronos”, the Greek word for time. So “omicron” means “end time” and, therefore, the omicron variant is a sign that we are living in the end times. <Sigh.> You can’t make this stuff up. Unless you are talking to people on-line. Then you can make anything up.

   Actually, the pronunciation of the Greek letter omicron has a Greek word now in common English usage: “micro” meaning “very small”. “Omicron” means “little o”, to distinguish it from the letter “Omega”, the last letter of the Greek alphabet, which also has a word that has come into common use in English, “mega”, meaning “very big”. “Omega” means “big o”.

   The “o” in the Biblical Greek letter “omicron” is commonly pronounced like the “o” in the English word “not”, like what we would call a soft “o” pronunciation. The “o” in the Biblical Greek letter “omega” is commonly pronounced like the “o” in the English word “tone”, like what we could call a hard “o” pronunciation.

   In the last chapter of the last book of the Bible, in Revelation 22:13, John writes of his vision these words of Jesus in the Last Judgement, including this metaphor using the first and last letters from the Greek alphabet,

¹³ I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.”

   Jesus, who has always existed, was present at Creation and will come again in the Last Judgment, the beginning of the new heaven and the new earth, and will reign forever, was crucified and rose from the dead someplace in time between his first advent and his second advent, between his first coming and his second coming.

   Omicron, the 15^th letter of the 24^th letter in the Greek alphabet, exists someplace between the alpha and the omega, as we live between the beginning and the end of time.

   Only God knows when Jesus, the Son, will return, and who will and will not be living in the end times.

   We are called to live, to truly live, as the Body of Christ in the present. To always be prepared for the end times, but not to live there, or engage in pointless speculations.

   We are now in the middle of a surge of COVID-19 cases, mostly because of the Omicron variant. Vaccines will not necessarily prevent us from getting the Omicron variant, but they change its effects on us to being a horrible few days at home from a horrible long hospital stay and death. More importantly, though, they make it way less likely that we will transmit the virus to someone else. That is why we take the precautions and get our vaccines. Because we are Christians, a word based on the Greek word Christos, which means “anointed one”, or “messiah”, and we live in response to the selfless love that God has first shown us in Jesus Christ.

   This is what omicron, a letter between the alpha and the omega, pronounces for us. It reminds us that we people of the in-between time know how to live because Jesus died on the ugly cross so that all who believe in him may have eternal life. And when he had given his life, he took it back again to validate what he did on the cross.

   This pronouncement reminds us that we who are Christians in this middle period live as people who know that, like the alphabet, all things must come to an end. We don’t fear the Last Judgment. We long for it. Meanwhile, we live joyfully, as people who love one another, and care for one another in the name of Jesus. Why? As John writes in his 1^st letter, chapter 4, verses 17-19,

¹⁷ Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world. ¹⁸ There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. ¹⁹ We love because he first loved us.