From Pergamum we travel (in spirit or in the Spirit) some 45 miles eastward to Thyatira, a commercial city known for its linen, wool, and leather wares, for its baked goods and its bronze products, for its pottery, and for its slave trade. A coin of John’s era commemorates Thyatira’s importance as a center of merchants and military suppliers; it features a metalworker fashioning a helmet, while Athena stands ready to receive it.

Christ commends the Christians of Thyatira for their “love and faith and service and patient endurance,” but rebukes the church for its cozy relationship with Jezebel - either a woman or a philosophy of living that bears resemblance to the Jezebel of Elijah’s time. Those who choose the immoral lifestyle advocated by this Jezebel (those who are Jezebel’s children) will come to an evil end. But those who choose to be sons or daughters of God will receive a divine authority (in contrast to the earthly authority exercised so visibly in commercially and militarily oriented Thyatira). Christ’s followers are encouraged to “hold fast” to the everlasting things they have already received.

Journeying some 30 miles to the southeast, we arrive in Sardis, formerly honored as a political capital, but now overshadowed by the formerly suburban Thyatira. Sardis is grieving its losses (it had hoped to receive a “government contract” to build a temple to the Roman emperor, but it had lost its bid to Smyrna, one of the cities we visited last week). Mirroring, in a sense, the cemetery for which the city is known, the inhabitants of Sardis are at the point of spiritual death. Those who follow Christ are encouraged to “strengthen what remains.” And they are assured that their names will NOT be blotted out of God’s book of life, even though cemetery practices would have included an inevitable removal of names from the secular record of the living.