Lost in translation

A few Sunday’s ago Redeemer enjoyed a visit from our friend, Emily, recently returned from the Oaxaca region in Mexico where she was doing translation groundwork with Wycliff Bible Translators. She’d been there serving a small people group whose dialect has no written language. That afternoon, sitting around the table after we’d eaten, she shared a few stories that had made her time there memorable and meaningful. One in particular stood out to me.

Whereas in English we’re limited to only one word for “eaten” (as in, “Have you eaten?”), the language of that region has two. The first word means, “Have you eaten?” and the second, just subtly different, basically means, “Have you “tortillaed?”” In that region if you haven’t “tortillaed” you haven’t had a proper meal and it’s assumed you are therefore hungry. They would sometimes tell a host they’d “eaten” (in the first sense, because they didn’t yet recognize the difference) only to have them begin immediately to prepare a “proper” meal. One with tortillas.

It was a difference, lost in translation, that caused some tension for them because they really didn’t want to risk imposing on the hospitality of their gracious, but mostly subsistence-farming, hosts.

Jesus’ teaching in the portion of the Sermon in the Mount from last week and this can cause some tension primarily rooted in four words, which because ofsome limitations in English are often lost in translation: righteousness, anger, insult, and fool. But the Sermon on the Mount is, after all, a sermon—practical teaching given to regular folk. It is neither an esoteric discourse of sublime irrelevance, nor a treatise of aspirational but mostly unattainable—and certainly unsustainable—morality. It is meant to be metabolized in us.

Jesus gave it to bring hope, to give life, and to describe the kind of everyday life that’s within the reach of the Kingdom of the Heavens.