When Martha stood outside her brother’s tomb and confessed who Jesus was, she reached for a word that carries the whole hope of Israel inside it: χριστός (christos), “the Anointed One.” We’ve translated it so often as a proper name — Jesus Christ — that we forget it’s a title, and that the title is a translation. Christos is simply the Greek rendering of the Hebrew mashiach, “anointed one.” It names the king set apart with oil, God’s chosen ruler, the son God had promised to the line of David.

That’s the freight the word was carrying when Martha spoke it. Asked whether she believed, she answered: “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, who is to come into the world.” In the Greek her titles stack — ho christos, then ho huios tou theou in apposition right behind it, the way you’d lay a second name beside the first. “The Christ — that is, the Son of God.” The second phrase doesn’t reach past the first into metaphysics; it restates it. To be the Son of God, on Martha’s tongue, was to be the Christ. The Messiah. The anointed king.

That pairing matters because it tells you how to hear “Son of God.” Where Nathanael, early in the Gospel, had set “King of Israel” beside the title to interpret it from behind, Martha sets “the Christ” in front of it to interpret it from before. Both confessors wrap the title in the language of kingship. The Greek hands you the first-century meaning right there in the verse, set beside the word so you can’t miss it: Son of God is being used as a name for the promised king.

There’s one more thing worth filing away about Martha’s exact phrase. Ho christos ho huios tou theou, “the Christ, the Son of God,” strung together just this way, appears in only one other place in all of John — the purpose statement at the end, where John says he wrote the whole book “that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God.” Martha, in her deepest grief, said John’s thesis out loud, chapters before he wrote it down. Her confession was his aim.

So when you meet Christos in the Gospel, hear it as Martha’s first audience would have. Not first a claim about substance, but the announcement that the long wait was over — that the anointed one, the king of David’s line, had finally come. The Christ. The one they had been waiting for.