Little remains of
Laodicea today. The upper rim of the theatre is just visible beyond
the stones, and beyond that across the valley the lime-encrusted
falls at Hierapolis (Pammukale today).
Little remains of
Laodicea today. The upper rim of the theatre is just visible beyond
the stones, and beyond that across the valley the lime-encrusted
falls at Hierapolis (Pammukale today).
The church in Philadelphia earned from its Lord nothing but praise; the church at Laodicea drew from its Lord nothing but blame.
The town of Laodicea was one of a group of three which lay within easy sight of each other, at a point where the narrow glen of the river Lycus broadens out into the lower valley. The other two towns were Hierapolis and Colosse. Paul in his letter to the Colossians includes the Laodiceans in his greetings and asks that his letters to them both should be exchanged. His letter to the Laodiceans has been lost, but he must have been known to them personally. By the time John's letter was written there had been a church there for more thirty years. Colossians 4:13 suggests that Epaphras was the pastor of the Laodicean church, and perhaps he was its founder.
Commercially, Laodicea was one of the richest cities of the seven. It was the banking centre for the whole of Asia Minor. Cicero, we know, cashed his letters of credit there. When in AD 60, just about the time Paul wrote to the church, the city was devastated by earthquake, Rome offered her the same grants and tax relief toward rebuilding that Sardis and Philadelphia had been glad enough to accept, but Laodicea disdained such help. She preferred to rebuild the shattered city out of her own resources "with no help from us"... as Tacitus the Roman historian observed.
Laodicea was the city which said, as did the church, "I am rich: I have prospered, and have need of nothing." In the false security of their wealth, the citizens of Laodicea believed they had need of help from neither man nor God. It is noticeable, in each of the situations these letters review, how the prevailing mood of the town infected the members of the church there. The spirit of the godless community in which we live easily penetrates the ranks of its local churches. I have been in the Albert Hall in London when the fog outside had filtered into that great hall so that you could barely see the stage from a balcony seat. So the spirit of the world can fog the church's life. "Don't let the world around you squeeze you into its own mould," said Paul. "Rather, let God remould your minds from within." (Rom. 12:2) Here in Laodicea, the deadly complacency of wealth had settled on the church.
Like Pergamum, Laodicea boasted, too, a fine medical school, especially famous for its Tephra Phrygia, an eye-powder exported in tablet form. The school specialised, in fact, in the treatment of eye troubles, and this salve was held to be a miracle remedy. "Your city is renowned the world over for its cure of weak eyes," Christ said to them in effect, "but the eyes of your soul are so short-sighted that spiritually you are groping, though you know it not."
A considerable part of the city's wealth came from the production of a high-grade black wool, glossy, soft and dark, from which the town's factories made at least four different kinds of garment, marketed all over the world - one especially, the Trimita. In the face of all this, Christ counsels the church to buy of Him "white garments to wear to hide the shame of your nakedness."
"You are proud of your garments," He says in effect, "but spiritually, you are naked in the public streets." Notice again how John takes up local facts and weaves them into his letter.
Laodicea's situation was strangely modern. Here was a people who reckoned life in terms of wages, production and health. The embodiment of that outlook on life is the Welfare State; give men better housing conditions, better pay, better working conditions; look after their physical health as it has never been looked after before; then watch the golden time come in.
We must be careful. These are good things; they breathe a spirit of proper concern, and the church should be heart and soul behind all such efforts to meet the needs of men. But these things are material, not spiritual; they are but the trappings of life, not of its essence. The man who receives a new house and new health must also himself be changed. He must be made new. "Men are looking for a better life; God is looking for better men." (E. M. Bounds)
Leave men themselves unchanged, and all our efforts to improve their conditions turn to vanity. Material prosperity (this is a hard saying, who can bear it?) is a drug, a narcotic, which creates an insatiable desire for itself and so destroys the man. With dreadful ease, it encourages spiritual complacency. It breeds a sense of security which is false. Wealth is indeed a bulwark against physical hardship, but it is not a defence against the spiritual perils amid which we stand. It builds a spurious sense of safety, a trust in false values.
GREETING
So Christ announces
Himself to this church as the "Amen, the faithful and true witness,
the beginning if God's Creation"; that is
... He who is true both in judgment and in promise
... He who is the source of Life, which is always and everywhere
God's gift to be had in its fulness only from Him.
This announcement of Christ is plainly geared to the desperate and solemn condition of this church. I must draw attention here to the sheer genius of John's choice of allusions in this description of Christ. The reference to the "Amen" is almost certainly a re-call of Isaiah 65:
"You shall be hungry," said Isaiah - "beggars," said John.
"You shall be put to shame," said Isaiah - "the shame of your nakedness," said John.
"This," said Isaiah, "from the God of the 'Amen'" - the God of truth as it is translated. Then follows immediately that great passage of promise in which God undertakes to recreate His broken people. So John describes Christ as the first-born, or rather the source and origin of all being; but the phrase he uses is identical with the phrase St Paul used of Christ in the letter to the Colossians, which Paul asked to be read at Laodicea, and in which he expressed his fervent desire for the Laodiceans that their hearts should be knit together in love, and to have "all the riches of assured understanding" - the very riches they now so dismally lacked.
In that single sentence, John gathers together the one passage in the Old Testament that fits Laodicea like a glove, and the whole letter to Colosse, and flings them in the face of Laodicea like a glass of icy water to shock them out of their complacency - and at the same time to hold out to them a sure and certain hope. That is inspired writing.
And as if that were not enough, the phrase "the true and faithful witness" was already imperishably linked with martyrdom, and recalled the dust and blood and humiliation of the Cross. The Laodiceans were as far removed from dust and blood and humiliation as they could be. They were at their cushioned ease.
But the tragedy of this church was its utter ignorance of the deadly peril it was in. It was completely satisfied with itself. Its members had been inoculated by a mild form of the faith against catching the real thing.
They were tepid. Outside the city were mineral springs whose warmish waters which, if you drank them, would make you vomit. Christ expresses to this church exactly the same sort of violent reaction of disgust. He plainly said to them, "You make me sick."
Then follows his terrifying diagnosis of their condition. "You count yourself rich - but you are wretched": 'burdened' is the heart of the word - burdened with the very wealth you think is carrying you. "You are pitiable, pathetic; you are poor" - the word is a strong one, used of a cringing beggar by the roadside (to have visited Bombay as I have is to know how repulsive the spectacle can be); "you are blind; you are naked," strutting about in your shocking nakedness and fancying yourself dressed like a king.
And yet, every one of these words is one whose usage always went with pity, not with anger. What angered Christ was not their condition, but that they were satisfied with their condition. It was their complacency that disgusted Him. The intensity of our faith will have reached something like its proper level only when 'complacency' has become for us a dirty word.
How different they were from their brethren in other churches. "Sooner," wrote Keith, "would a man in Sardis have felt that the chill of death was upon him, and have cried out for life, and called for a physician, than would a man in Laodicea: he would calmly count his even pulse and think his life secure, when death was gnawing out his very vitals."
"Would that you were cold or hot," says Christ. The mineral springs outside Laodicea rose at their source boiling hot. But by the time they had flowed down the aqueduct to the town, they were luke-warm and nauseous. They were not cold enough to be refreshing in that hot climate. There was neither refreshment for parched men, nor heat enough to cure and disinfect their sicknesses.
But He would rather, far rather, that they were hot - at boiling point, the word means. There can be no real religion without enthusiasm. Jesus loved the enthusiast, the man who knew what side he was on and threw himself with abandon into the struggle. He liked energetic action, as in the men who smashed a neighbour's roof to get their friend through to Him, or Zacchaeus who forgot his dignity and swarmed up a tree. "He who guards his life loses it," He said: "He who throws it away keeps it." He praised the man who thundered on his neighbour's door until the whole neighbourhood was awake and complaining; that is the spirit of determination that He wants. He praised the widow who pestered the idle judge until he gave her justice. He had nothing but praise for the woman who shocked Simon's sense of dignity by her extravagant show of love. All religion that is not passionate is false. The Kingdom will never be brought in by moderation.
The very passion of Christ's love for them is shown by His word to them: "All whom I love, I discipline."
"Others may overlook your faults," He seems to say, "out of a false and shallow kindness. But because my love is passionate, I am intolerant." Real love, as against mere kindness, is intolerant. If we are content to see a person happy in an unsatisfactory way, it is because we do not care deeply about them. "With our friends, our lovers, our children," wrote C. S. Lewis, "we are exacting, and we would rather see them suffer much than be happy in contemptible ways." It is not love which says, "Let him be happy, even if he's dirty, a liar and a cheat." Love is more - much more than mere kindness. There is a severity at the heart of it. "God," said C. S. Lewis in the same passage, "has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense." Because He loves us, He will not let us off.
So by His discipline, by sending the Laodiceans discomfort, by hurting them, in fact, as a mother will see her child hurt by a doctor's injection, He would seek to awaken them out of their stupor. For they were quite happily ignorant of their frightful condition. They felt, almost certainly they felt, that all that John said to them was grossly unfair. One of the symptoms of spiritual lassitude is that through it we lose altogether the power to see how serious our condition is. We are like a numbed limb which feels no pain. It only begins to tingle, to hurt, when life is returning to it. It is precisely to those who feel no sense of need that this stunning message comes. "If," as one old preacher put it, "you smartingly do feel no discontent, thou art the man." It is to those who are content that Jesus says, "You are beggared and wretched and pitiable and blind and naked."
"I counsel you," He says, "to buy of Me the true wealth, the true satisfaction. Naked, come to Me for dress; blind, come to Me for precious eye-salve. Repent then." The verb indicates a single. clear decisive act. Change, your outlook, see the unhappy truth about yourself and face it. Then see the character of the one Whose Name you bear, and turn your life to Him.
"Then be zealous," and the verb means continuous action: "Be passionate to the end." Obviously we cannot be passionate to order. There is nothing worse than a manufactured intensity. Enthusiasm is catching only when it fairly bubbles; drummed up, it only repels. The way to such a spontaneous uprush of love and life is contained in the verse that follows: "Look, I stand knocking at the door. If anyone listens to my voice and opens the door I will come into him."
According to Eastern custom, it is a promise that means pledged friendship, the well-being of a steadfast love, for the offer of hospitality carried with it a pledge of loyalty.
Christ Himself, received into the heart, is the answer, the only answer, to our emptiness. Once He fills our life our soul will become like a festive house, and those who walk in the dark deserted streets outside it will be attracted by the light that pours out of every window, and the laughter that spills through every door and echoes across the lonely night. Joy rings out from such a house, and ever and again the sound of singing breaks out in it.
"When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, we were like those who dream. Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy. Then said they among the nations, 'The Lord has done great things for them.' The Lord has done great things for us: we are glad."
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