First Reading · Revelation
Two cities, told what they are in their own trade language
Where we are
The lectionary takes the third and the seventh of the seven letters and drops the five between. The pairing is not arbitrary: Sardis and Laodicea are the only two of the seven that receive no commendation at all. Every other assembly is praised for something before being corrected. These two are simply told what they are.
What happens
To Sardis: "I know your works, that you have the reputation of being alive, but you are dead." Be watchful and strengthen what is left, for I have not found your works complete. Remember what you received; keep it and repent. If you are not watchful, "I will come like a thief." Yet a few in Sardis have not soiled their garments, and they will walk with me in white. — To Laodicea: "I know your works; I know that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, I will spit you out of my mouth." You say you are rich and need nothing, and do not know you are wretched, poor, blind and naked. Buy from me gold refined by fire, white garments, and ointment for your eyes. "Behold, I stand at the door and knock."
What to notice
Both letters are written in the local idiom, and that is the key to reading them.
Sardis was built around an acropolis on a spur of Mount Tmolus, defended on three sides by cliffs so sheer the city regarded them as needing no watch. It was captured twice by exactly that oversight — by Cyrus in 546 BC and again by Antiochus III in 214 BC, both times by a small party climbing the unguarded rock at night while the garrison slept. "Be watchful" is not a general exhortation to a city with that history. It is the city's own catastrophe, said back to it twice. And "I will come like a thief" — a night arrival at an unwatched wall — is the same joke with the point showing.
The diagnosis is one clause: onoma echeis hoti zēs, kai nekros ei — "you have a name that you are alive, and you are dead." Onoma here is reputation, what the place is known as. The letter then plays the word twice more: a few onomata, names, in Sardis have not soiled their clothes, and the victor's onoma will not be blotted from the book of life. The city's problem is that it has a name; the promise is that some people have one. Note also what the works are not: ou gar heurēka sou ta erga peplērōmena — I have not found your works fulfilled, filled up — not wicked, not few. Sardis is failing an inspection for completeness, not for content.
Laodicea is the sharper piece of local knowledge. The city had no usable water of its own. It piped it in by aqueduct from the hot mineral springs at Hierapolis, six miles north, and by the time it arrived it was tepid and full of dissolved minerals — famously emetic. Cold water was available at Colossae, ten miles the other way. So "neither cold nor hot" is not a scale of enthusiasm running from zero to fervent. Cold water is good — you drink it. Hot water is good — you bathe in it and it heals. Lukewarm mineral water from the Hierapolis pipe is the one temperature that is useful for nothing, and the verb the letter chooses is emesai, to vomit.
Every item in the following list is a Laodicean industry. The city was a banking centre — after the earthquake of AD 60 it famously rebuilt itself out of its own funds and declined imperial aid, which is very nearly a paraphrase of plousios eimi… kai ouden chreian echō, "I am rich and have need of nothing." It exported a glossy black wool textile known across the empire — hence himatia leuka, white garments, to cover the nakedness it does not know it has. And it had a medical school noted for an eye preparation — hence kollourion enchrisai tous ophthalmous sou, eye-salve to smear on your eyes. Gold, clothing, ointment: the three things Laodicea sold, offered back to it as things it must buy from someone else.
One title is worth pausing on. Hē archē tēs ktiseōs tou theou — "the beginning of Theos's creation." Archē can mean first in a sequence or origin, source, principle; the Arian controversy would later turn on which. Read alongside Colossians 1:18, written to a city ten miles away, the second sense is clearly in view. And the last image is a domestic one dropped into a courtroom scene: idou hestēka epi tēn thyran kai krouō — "look, I have taken my stand at the door and am knocking." The perfect tense hestēka means he is already there and remains there. What follows is not a threat but an offer of dinner.
Responsorial Psalm
Who gets to stay, answered in money and speech
Where we are
Psalm 15 is an entrance liturgy — a question asked at the sanctuary gate and answered by a list. Yahweh, mi yagur b'oholekha — "who may sojourn in your tent?" The Psalter uses the form twice; Psalm 24, read on All Saints two weeks ago, is the other.
The selected verses
Psalm 15:2-3a. "One who walks blamelessly and does justice, who thinks the truth in his heart and slanders not with his tongue."
Psalm 15:3bc-4ab. "Who harms not his fellow man, nor takes up a reproach against his neighbour; by whom the reprobate is despised, while he honours those who fear Yahweh."
Psalm 15:5. "Who lends not his money at usury and accepts no bribe against the innocent. One who does these things shall never be disturbed."
What to notice
The question uses yagur, from gur, to sojourn, to reside as a resident alien — the verb behind ger, the stranger. Nobody asks to own the tent. The question is who gets to stay as a guest, which is the correct posture at a sanctuary and, as it happens, exactly the situation Zacchaeus creates in today's Gospel by acquiring a guest.
The answer is a list of ten or eleven items depending on how you count, and the striking thing is its distribution: roughly half concern speech and roughly half concern money. Nothing on the list is cultic. There is no sacrifice, no purity requirement, no festival attendance. The gate liturgy for the house of Theos asks about your tongue and your accounts.
Kaspo lo natan b'neshekh — "his silver he does not give at neshekh." Neshekh is a noun from the verb to bite; it is the ordinary Hebrew word for interest, and it is not a dead metaphor. The Torah's prohibition is on lending at a bite to a fellow Israelite, and the psalm files it beside bribery, not beside piety. The closing formula is one this month has heard before: lo yimmot l'olam — "he shall never be moved." Psalm 112 said the same thing three days ago about the man who is gracious and lends. Both psalms end an ethical list with a promise of stability, and both put lending at its centre.
Gospel · Luke
The rich man who was right about himself
Where we are
Still at Jericho. Yesterday's blind man was on the way in; Zacchaeus is inside the town. Luke has arranged two consecutive stories about people who could not see what was passing and took an undignified measure about it — and this is the last episode before Jesus goes up to Jerusalem.
What happens
A man named Zacchaeus, architelōnēs and rich, tries to see who Jesus is and cannot because of the crowd, being short. So he runs ahead and climbs a sycamore. Jesus looks up: "Zacchaeus, come down quickly, for today I must stay at your house." He comes down and receives him with joy. The crowd grumbles that he has gone to stay with a sinner. Zacchaeus stands and says: "Behold, half of my possessions I shall give to the poor, and if I have extorted anything from anyone I shall repay it four times over." And Jesus says salvation has come to this house today, "for the Son of Man has come to seek and to save what was lost."
What to notice
Architelōnēs — chief tax collector — is a word that occurs nowhere else in surviving Greek. Luke appears to have coined it, and it is the difference between a man who collects and a man who holds the contract and subcontracts the collecting. Jericho sat on the balsam trade and a major customs road. This is not a small-time functionary; it is a franchise holder, and Luke says so twice by adding kai autos plousios, and he was rich.
His name is Zakchaios, from the Hebrew Zakkai, pure, clean, innocent. Luke does not comment. He does not have to: the crowd supplies the joke by calling him hamartōlos, a sinner, four words after his name. The ambiguity in Luke 19:3 is real and worth keeping: ouk ēdynato apo tou ochlou hoti tē hēlikia mikros ēn — grammatically the he who is short could be Jesus. Almost every translation makes it Zacchaeus, sensibly, but the Greek does not settle it, and the ancient commentators noticed.
The tree matters. A sykomorea is the sycamore-fig, a broad low-branching tree easy for a short man to climb — and climbing anything, for a wealthy municipal figure in a Mediterranean town, is a public humiliation. He runs, too: prodramōn eis to emprosthen, running out ahead, which grown men of standing did not do. Then the word that runs through the passage: dei. Sēmeron gar en tō oikō sou dei me meinai — "today I must remain at your house." Dei, it is necessary, is Luke's marker for the divine plan, and he has just used it of the passion. He uses it here for a dinner invitation Jesus extends to himself.
And the crux is a tense. Zacchaeus says ta hēmisia mou tōn hyparchontōn didōmi tois ptōchois and apodidōmi tetraploun — both present indicative, not future. Greek can use a present for a resolve taken on the spot, and most translations do that. But the plain sense is "I give" and "I repay" — a description of his standing practice, which would make the sentence a defence rather than a conversion, offered against a crowd that has just called him a sinner. Either a rich man is converted, or a rich man who was already doing this is finally believed by someone.
The fourfold figure is legal. Exodus 22:1 sets fourfold restitution for a stolen sheep, and Roman law imposed quadruplum for robbery with violence. He is not being generous; he is applying to himself the penalty for the worst class of theft — and the verb he uses for what he might have done, esykophantēsa, means specifically extortion by false accusation. Finally, notice who Jesus calls him: huios Abraam, a son of Abraham — the thing the grumbling crowd has just implicitly denied. And to apolōlos, "what was lost," is neuter, so the last sentence is not "the lost ones" but "the lost thing," which is Luke's word for the sheep, the coin, and the son in chapter 15.
| Reading |
The self-assessment, and the reality |
| Revelation 3:1–6 |
"You have a name for being alive" — and are dead |
| Revelation 3:14–22 |
"I am rich and need nothing" — and are poor, blind, naked |
| Psalm 15 |
Who may stay in the tent: mostly a question about money and speech |
| Luke 19:1–10 |
A rich man who says out loud what he does with his money, and is right |
Today is about the gap between what you would say about yourself and what is true, and it puts two cities on one side of the gap and one man on the other.
Sardis and Laodicea are the only two of the seven assemblies that get no commendation, and the reason is the same in both: each has an account of itself, and the account is what is wrong. Sardis has onoma hoti zē, a name for being alive. Laodicea has a balance sheet — a city that rebuilt itself after an earthquake without imperial money and had every reason to believe ouden chreian echō, I need nothing. Neither is accused of a scandal. Both are accused of a self-description.
And the corrections are delivered in each city's own vocabulary, which is the most striking thing about these letters. Laodicea sold gold, black wool and eye-salve, and is told to buy gold, white garments and eye-salve from someone else. Sardis trusted a cliff and lost the city twice to men who climbed it at night, and is told "I will come like a thief." The letters do not import a foreign standard; they take what each place is proudest of and hand it back inverted.
Then Psalm 15 asks the entrance question — mi yagur b'oholekha, who may sojourn in your tent — and gives an answer that would be at home in either letter. It is a list of about ten items and not one of them is cultic. Truth in the heart, no slander, no harm to a neighbour, no lending at neshekh, the bite, and no bribe against the innocent. The gate of the sanctuary asks about your tongue and your books, which is exactly where Laodicea would have failed and exactly where Zacchaeus, of all people, passes.
Because Zacchaeus is the day's counter-example, and the crowd is on the cities' side of the argument. He is architelōnēs, a franchise-holding chief collector, and plousios — the one category of person Luke's Gospel has been hardest on. He is also short, and he runs, and he climbs a tree, which is three separate abandonments of dignity in one sentence. He has none of Laodicea's confidence and none of Sardis's reputation. What he has is an accurate view of his own position, and the accurate view is what gets him up the tree.
Whether Luke 19:8 is a promise or a description — didōmi, I give, present tense — the sentence is the same shape either way: a man stating precisely what he does with his money, in public, to a crowd that has already classified him. Against "I am rich and need nothing," it is the opposite kind of speech. And the answer he receives is the one Laodicea is offered at the door: "Today salvation has come to this house." Revelation says "if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will enter and dine with him." Luke has Jesus invite himself in before being asked.
Elizabeth of Hungary, whose memorial this is, was a landgravine married at fourteen, widowed at twenty, and dead at twenty-four, who spent her dower founding and personally staffing a hospital below the Wartburg. She is the saint of a woman who had Laodicea's balance sheet and made Zacchaeus's speech.