Is Christmas a time for doing puzzles in your household?
During Advent, our choir has been singing the “Advent Antiphons”. These words date right the way back to the 500s when they were written in Latin. Each starts with the word “O” and so they are often known as the “O Antiphons”. Perhaps less well known is that they contain a hidden message. Ignoring the starting “O” the first letter of each, starting with the antiphon for 23 December and then the one for 22 December etc., spells out the Latin words Ero cras. This means “Tomorrow, I will be there”, which reflects the theme of the antiphons: Emmanuel, Rex (King), Oriens (Morning Star), Clavis (Key of David), Radix (Root of Jesse), Adonai (Lord), Sapientia (Wisdom).
The Bible and, indeed, Christian practice through history, is full of word puzzles. Nine of the 150 Psalms are acrostics in their original Hebrew, which means that the first line starts with the first letter of the alphabet, the second starts with the second letter etc. through the entire 22-letter Hebrew alphabet.
In early Christian communities, when being a follower of Christ was dangerous, a secret sign was created, which is still in use today: the sign of the fish.
In the Greek spoken by ordinary people at the time, the word for fish was Ichthys and those letters represented the first letter of each of the Greek words for “Jesus Christ, God's Son, Savior'.
In our Church at Advent and at Christmas we regularly sing a familiar carol which joins together the Latin Advent Antiphons and contains the solution to the word puzzle of understanding their meaning. Here is the antiphon for 23 December:
O Emmanuel, our king and our lawgiver,
the hope of the nations and their Saviour:
Come and save us, O Lord our God.
Looking forward to the birth of the hope of the nations in just a few days’ time, we hope in confidence that he will come and save us.
And if you like to do puzzles in the holiday season, may we wish you a richly puzzling time.
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