A prayer-cry so fixed in early worship that Paul left it in Aramaic rather than translate it into Greek.
Maranatha is really two Aramaic words stuck together with no space between them in the earliest manuscripts, which is the whole problem. Split one way, marana tha, it's an imperative: "Our Lord, come." Split another way, maran atha, it reads as a statement: "Our Lord has come" or "is coming." Both readings are grammatically sound. Nobody alive can now tell you for certain which the earliest Christians meant, because by the time it reaches Paul's letter it's already a set phrase, not a sentence he's composing fresh.
What's not in doubt is its use. It sits at the end of a letter written in Greek to a Greek-speaking church, kept in Aramaic anyway, which tells you it had become a fixed liturgical cry, something Aramaic and Greek speakers alike would recognise from worship without needing it translated. It carried both the ache of waiting and the confidence that the wait would end.
If anyone does not love the Lord, let him be under a curse. Come, O Lord!
The only place the Aramaic word itself survives in the New Testament, left untranslated.
He who testifies to these things says, “Yes, I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!
The same cry appears in Greek here, "Come, Lord Jesus," closing the whole Bible on the same note.
The Spirit and the bride say, “Come!” Let the one who hears say, “Come!” And let the one who is thirsty come, and the one who desires the water of life drink freely.
The Spirit and the bride say "Come," the same longing voiced as an open invitation.
Let your gentleness be apparent to all. The Lord is near.
"The Lord is near" carries the same forward-leaning expectation, in Paul's own words rather than the fixed phrase.
Most English Bibles either leave it as "Maranatha" with a footnote, or translate the imperative sense as "Our Lord, come!" A few opt for "Come, Lord!" Whichever they choose, they've had to pick a side in the split-word ambiguity that the original text simply doesn't resolve, and the footnote is usually where the honesty about that gets tucked away.
People sometimes treat Maranatha as a magic phrase or a curse word, because in 1 Corinthians it sits right next to "let him be accursed" (anathema). The two words just happen to be neighbours in that sentence. Maranatha itself is a prayer, not a curse: an early church's shorthand for longing and trust, not an incantation.
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