First Reading · Revelation
Sweet in the mouth, sour in the gut
Where we are
We are between the sixth and seventh trumpets, in a deliberate pause. Revelation keeps interrupting its own sequences, and this is the longest of the interruptions — a chapter and a half in which nothing is blown. Yesterday the scroll was sealed and nobody could open it. Today a different book is open in an angel's hand, and John is told to eat it.
What happens
"The voice that I had heard from heaven spoke to me again and said: 'Go, take the scroll that lies open in the hand of the angel who is standing on the sea and on the land.'" John goes and asks for it. "He said to me, 'Take and swallow it. It will turn your stomach sour, but in your mouth it will taste as sweet as honey.'" He takes it and eats it, "and in my mouth it was like sweet honey, but when I had eaten it, my stomach turned sour." Then he is told: "You must prophesy again about many peoples, nations, tongues, and kings."
What to notice
The little book is biblaridion — a diminutive of a diminutive. Biblos is a book, biblion is already a small one, and biblaridion is smaller still. The same habit that produced arnion for the lamb yesterday is producing a scroll you could put in your mouth, and the physical scale is the point: this is not the sealed document of Revelation 5 but something handheld and already open.
The instruction is blunt. Labe kai kataphage auto — take and eat it down. Katesthiō is not delicate: it is the verb for devouring, used of fire consuming and of the scribes who devour widows' houses. John is not asked to read the book. He is asked to swallow it, and the sequence of sensations is specified in advance and then confirmed afterwards, in reverse order.
The order is worth watching. The angel says sour-then-sweet — pikranei sou tēn koilian, all' en tō stomati sou estai glyky hōs meli. John reports sweet-then-sour: en tō stomati mou hōs meli glyky, kai hote ephagon auto, epikranthē hē koilia mou. The prediction lists the outcome first and the sensation second; the experience arrives in the order a body would actually meet it. The mouth reports before the stomach does.
The scene is Ezekiel 3 rewritten. Ezekiel is handed a scroll written on the front and the back, with lamentations and mourning and woe, told "eat this scroll and go, speak to the house of Israel," and reports "it was in my mouth as sweet as honey." Ezekiel stops there. Revelation adds the stomach. Whatever else John is doing with his source, he has appended the part Ezekiel left out — and Ezekiel 3:14 does then say he went in bitterness, in the heat of my spirit, so the addition is a fair reading of the older text.
And the commission afterwards is a strange one: dei se palin prophēteusai — "you must prophesy again." Palin, again, in a book that has been prophesying for nine chapters. The eating does not authorise the prophecy; it re-authorises it, in the middle, after the sequence has already begun.
Responsorial Psalm
The taste of a text
Where we are
Psalm 119 is the longest chapter in the Bible: twenty-two stanzas of eight verses, one stanza per Hebrew letter, every verse beginning with that letter, and almost every verse containing one of eight synonyms for Torah. The lectionary takes six verses out of a hundred and seventy-six, and the six it takes are all about the mouth or the heart's appetite.
The selected verses
Psalm 119:14. "In the way of your decrees I rejoice, as much as in all riches."
Psalm 119:24. "Your decrees are my delight; they are my counsellors."
Psalm 119:72. "The Torah of your mouth is to me more precious than thousands of gold and silver pieces."
Psalm 119:103. "How sweet to my palate are your promises, sweeter than honey to my mouth."
Psalm 119:111. "Your decrees are my inheritance forever; they are the joy of my heart."
Psalm 119:131. "I open my mouth and I sigh, yearning for your commands."
What to notice
Psalm 119:103 is why this psalm is here today. Mah nimletsu le-chikki imratekha, mi-devash le-fi — "how smooth to my palate is your word, more than honey to my mouth." Chek is specifically the palate, the roof of the mouth, the organ of taste; nimlats is a rare verb that seems to mean be smooth or be sweet. The psalm is not saying the Torah is pleasant in a general way. It is describing a flavour, located on a particular surface of the body.
Psalm 119:72 sets the terms of exchange: tov li Torat-picha me-alfei zahav va-chesef — "the Torah of your mouth is better to me than thousands of gold and silver." Note Torat-picha, the Torah of your mouth. The instruction came out of a mouth and goes into one.
And Psalm 119:131 is the physical one. Pi fa'arti va-esh'afah, ki le-mitsvotecha ya'avti — "I opened my mouth wide and panted, because I longed for your commands." Sha'af is to gasp, to pant — used of an animal gulping air, and in Jeremiah 14:6 of wild donkeys on the heights snuffing for wind. The image is not reverent. It is an open mouth and hard breathing.
The one thing this psalm does not say today is that the words tasted bad. Six verses, all appetite and sweetness, laid beside a reading in which the sweetness turns.
Gospel · Luke
The house, emptied and then filled
Where we are
Immediately after the tears over the city. Jesus has come down the Mount of Olives weeping about a siege, and the first thing he does on arrival is walk into the temple and start throwing people out. Luke puts the lament and the action in consecutive paragraphs, with nothing between them.
What happens
"Jesus entered the temple area and proceeded to drive out those who were selling things, saying to them, 'It is written, "My house shall be a house of prayer," but you have made it a den of thieves.'" And every day he was teaching in the temple. "The chief priests, the scribes, and the leaders of the people, meanwhile, were seeking to put him to death, but they could find no way to accomplish their purpose because all the people were hanging on his words."
What to notice
Luke's version is the shortest of the four. There is no whip, no overturned tables, no scattered coins, no cattle — Luke has one verb, ekballein, to throw out, and one clause. John gets a cord of ropes and Mark gets the money-changers' seats; Luke gets a sentence. The economy is deliberate: for Luke the incident is a doorway into the teaching that follows, and the teaching is what fills the rest of the chapter.
The saying is two quotations spliced. Ho oikos mou oikos proseuchēs estai is Isaiah 56:7, and Luke stops the quotation one phrase early. Isaiah's full line is my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples — le-khol ha-amim — and Mark 11:17 keeps that phrase. Luke drops it. Whether that is compression or something else, the effect is that Luke's citation is about prayer rather than about who is admitted.
The second half is Jeremiah 7:11: hymeis de auton epoiēsate spēlaion lēstōn — "you have made it a cave of lēstai." Lēstēs is not a pickpocket. It is the word for a bandit, a highway robber, and in Josephus it is the standard term for an insurrectionist — the same word used of the two men crucified beside Jesus and of Barabbas. And a spēlaion is a cave: the place bandits go after the robbery, not where they commit it. The charge is not that the temple is where the stealing happens. It is that it is where the robbers feel safe.
Jeremiah 7 makes that reading almost inevitable, because the sermon it comes from is precisely about people who steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, and then come and stand in this house and say we are delivered — only to go on doing all these things. Jeremiah's next verse promises the place will go the way of Shiloh. Luke's Jesus has just finished predicting exactly that.
And the last clause is one of the loveliest verbs in the Gospel. Ho laos gar hapas exekremato autou akouōn — "all the people were hanging on him, listening." Ekkremannymi is to hang from something, suspended — the middle voice makes it hung themselves on him. The authorities cannot act because of the physical fact of a crowd that will not let go.
| Reading |
What goes into the body |
| Revelation 10:8–11 |
A book eaten — honey in the mouth, sourness in the stomach |
| Psalm 119 |
The palate tasting a text; the mouth open and panting |
| Luke 19:45–48 |
A crowd hanging on words, in a house cleared for the purpose |
Three readings, and in each of them a word is taken into a body rather than merely heard.
The Revelation scene is the most literal. Labe kai kataphage auto — take and eat it down — and the sensations arrive in a specific sequence: en tō stomati mou hōs meli glyky, honey in the mouth, and then epikranthē hē koilia mou, the belly turned bitter. The book is not described as true or false, only as sweet and then sour, and John's obedience is measured in digestion rather than in agreement.
Psalm 119 supplies the first half of that experience and none of the second. Mah nimletsu le-chikki imratekha — how smooth on my palate is your word — and mi-devash le-fi, more than honey to my mouth. The same substance, the same organ. What the psalm does not report is the aftermath, and the pairing lets the psalm's sweetness stand while the reading beside it says the sweetness is only the first thing that happens.
And the two halves are not in conflict. The psalmist who wrote pi fa'arti va-esh'afah — I opened my mouth wide and panted — is describing hunger, not comfort. A person that hungry for a text is not being promised it will be easy to keep down.
Then Luke, where the eating becomes a crowd. Exekremato autou akouōn, they were hanging on him, listening — a physical verb, people suspended from what they are hearing. And it is what makes him untouchable: the chief priests ouch heuriskon to ti poiēsōsin, could not find what to do, because of it. The listening is the protection.
The temple frames the whole of it. He clears the house with a phrase about prayer and a phrase about bandits, and then fills it with teaching every day. The building had become spēlaion lēstōn, a bandits' cave — a place people retreat to after the taking. What replaces that is a crowd hanging on a voice, which is the same picture Psalm 119 gives of an open mouth, and the same picture Revelation gives of a man swallowing a book.
A Question to Sit With
The
angel does not tell John the book is difficult, or important, or true. He tells him what it will taste like going down and what it will do once it is in. And John, who has already been told, eats it — and the report afterwards adds nothing to the prediction except the
order. There is something in that about the difference between agreeing with a thing and taking it in, and about the fact that the second has consequences the first does not. What have I found sweet on the palate and never let get as far as the stomach — and would I still take it if I had been told, in advance and in detail, exactly how it would sit?