The Philippi of Paul's day was a small city both in land area and in population. Perhaps thirty thousand people lived between its acropolis and a swamp. The walls of the city encompassed an area that was not much larger than the agora of Corinth. Philip of Macedon had given his name to this city. He had located it where it was for purposes of convenience and protection. Seven or more miles from the sea, it was close enough to the Pangaion Mountains to oversee the gold found there. Like other Macedonians had done in building other cities, Philip had built his city in the unhealthy regions of a swamp, whose wetlands provided a natural obstacle to any invader.

The city that Paul saw still bore the marks of Philip's builders, but it had also been recently rebuilt by Romans. When Octavius, soon to be named "The Emperor Augustus," had taken control of the Roman empire from Mark Anthony, he deported from Italy some of his former troops. He had resettled them in Philippi. It was a logical move. These men had fought in Octavius' cause in the battle of Philippi, and they were given homes in the city they had fought for. In 30 B.C. Octavius named the city "Colonia Augusta Julia Philippensis." As a colony, Philippi would enjoy "libertas, immunitas, and just Italicum" - self-government, immunity from imperial tribute, and the same rights as Italian cities.

Philippi set itself to become a little Rome, more Roman than Rome itself. Its language was Latin, and its law was Roman. Its money bore Latin inscriptions. Two kinds of Roman citizens inhabited Philippi. Some were citizens by birth, who had formerly lived in Italy and Rome. Others, not Italian by birth, had gained Roman citizenship by other means, usually by performing some service that had assisted the Roman armies in one of its campaigns. Speculation is that Paul's family had gained its Roman citizenship in this manner. Being from Tarsus, a center of the leather-working trade and a city on the route between Rome and the mideast, perhaps the family had gained citizenship by supplying tents to the Roman army under Pompey that had stormed into Jerusalem in 63 B.C. The benefits of citizenship were many to those who held it. They were exempted from scourging, they were free from arrest in extreme cases, they had some taxes forgiven them, and they had the right to appeal to the emperor himself any charge that might be laid against them.

In addition to the Roman citizens who had recently been transported there, population segments that dated back to the former rulers of the area, chiefly Thracian and Macedonian, continued to live in Philippi. These Thracians and Macedonians spoke Greek rather than Latin. Egyptians and other Africans also lived in the city. The Jewish population must have been very small, since the Jews had no synagogue of their own. With the new city of Philippi being founded as recently as it was, there had been no opportunity yet for Jews to migrate into it. The colony was ruled by two magistrates, called "duoviri" (two men), who also acted as its judges. They were assisted in their deliberations by men who held office in the local senate.

The church at Philippi came as near as any among the early churches of the Christian movement to fulfilling the original apostolic design. The charter of the apostolic churches had decreed that there be no difference in treatment in the churches of "Jews and Greeks, slave and free, male and female" (Gal 3:28). The church in Philippi was founded through a woman. It was made up mostly of gentiles drawn from the Roman and Greek strata of society. The slave, Epaphroditus, was one of its trusted members.

When Paul and Silas came to Philippi in the autumn of 49 A.D., they did not find a synagogue where they might begin their ministry. They came instead upon a group of women worshiping by the Gaggitas River, just behind the western wall of the city. These women had sought a place for worship near a stream. For ancient peoples, water was indispensable to worship, since worship was always preceded by some form of ritual bath. If the selected place of prayer also was surrounded by a wall that offered protection from prying eyes, so much the better. The place the women had found for their worship offered both water and privacy. There Paul had baptized Lydia, their leader, and she offered the men the use of her home as a base of operations for the spread of the Christian faith in Philippi.

Lydia was a godfearer. A native of the Asian city of Thyatira, near Ephesus, she was a dealer in purple goods. As a dealer in purple, she was probably quite wealthy. Purple cloth was sold only to the royal and the rich and was the most expensive dye color of the time. It was made by the extraction of a single drop of color from a shellfish called murex. When the dye was extracted, the shellfish died. The process was wasteful. The shellfish was simply discarded after it was used for this purpose, but, then, who then cared about protecting shellfish crops from exploitation? It was also expensive, both in the amount of labor required and in the danger to those engaged in the work. Harvesting shellfish from the sea required the work of a multitude of slaves, some of whom died from their time under water and others of whom slashed their hands brutally as they worked with the recalcitrant shells. The resulting dye-color was much sought after by those who wanted to wear only the most distinctive and expensive clothing.

In her native city, Lydia had learned of the Jewish faith and had been attracted to it, but, as a woman, she had had no opportunity to become part of the covenanted community. Since she was a householder but the name of her husband is not mentioned, it can be assumed that she was a widow. Her name may not even have been "Lydia." That could have been a nickname for "that Lydian woman," as she was respectfully known in Philippi. She might actually have been the "Euodia" or "Syntyche" whom Paul addressed in his letter to the Philippians (4:2). Upon the baptism of "the Lydian woman," she led the friends who worshiped with her by the river into the faith. Her influence and her wealth were prime factors in the establishment of the church in Philippi.

PSALM 67: "You judge the peoples with equity and guide the nations upon earth (67:4)." This is the substantive center piece of the psalm, and it is also its stylistic center. Three verses precede it, and three verses follow it. Even in terms of its own stanza, it is the central affirmation. In the first part of verse four, all the nations are asked to be glad and to sing for joy. In verse 5, we are told: "Let all the peoples praise you, O God; let all the peoples praise you."

"Judging the people with equity" is a major theme of the Old Testament. The 103^rd Psalm expresses the idea with these words, 8-18:

There is a moving contemporary expression of this. At the close of the Second World War, when the atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, people wondered when the bomb would drop again. Among those who wondered was a poet named Hermann Hagedorn. He wrote a poem called "The Bomb that Fell on America." In it he pictures a man going to the Lord with his concerns about what might happen to the world. God is upset that humankind is so slow to make the changes that might avert catastrophe, and God says to the man, "Why, oh, why am I Mercy when I want to be nothing but Justice, and expunge what I cannot inspire? But I seem to be Mercy as well as Justice, and that, said the Lord, is your luck!" (p. 47) God's justice is tempered by God's mercy, and humankind from Moses on is the beneficiary of that.

REVELATION 21:10, 21 - 22:5: The cities of John's day were hard places to live in, perhaps unbelievably hard. Let me picture what the urban dweller at this time in the Roman Empire was up against.

The cities were crowded. People lived in tenements as much as five stories high. The building were made of wood, which meant that they were susceptible to frequent fires. Water was collected into cisterns, which meant that most of it was rancid and putrid, full of dangerous bacteria. There was no such a thing as soap; people cleaned themselves, if they bothered with that at all, by scraping the dirt off their bodies with a stick. Garbage and human waste was simply thrown out into the streets. Such food as they had was not refrigerated, which meant that it was hardly usable for human consumption; most people had too little to eat, so many died of starvation. Plagues were a constant threat; living so closely together in such unhealthy conditions created a health hazard for everyone. The air of the cities was made up of equal parts of smoke, human stench, animal odors from living animals and from those being sacrificed at the many temples in the city; you could smell most cities for miles around before you could see them. When night fell, there was no street-lighting. Cities were murky and dark. They were dangerous places; thieves and thugs roamed after darkness fell, and no one was safe. Enemy armies might storm the gates of the city at any time and despoil all its inhabitants. Cities were lonely places; populations in cities changed almost one hundred percent every decade, no one knew their neighbors or cared to know them. These unhospitable places were the kinds of cities in which the people who read John's vision lived.

Add to this grim picture one more fact. The city most Jewish people - even Jewish people who had become Christian - cared most about lay in ruins. Roman legions had despoiled the city of Jerusalem in 70 AD, probably just a few years before the presentation of John's vision. They had burned its houses and buildings and killed many of the inhabitants. They had killed the soldiers who fought against them, and those they had not killed they had marched off to Rome to be sold as slaves. They had burned the Temple that was so precious to Judaism. They had plowed up the city's streets and had decreed that no Jew could live any longer within its precincts. Cities as a group were inhospitable. Jerusalem itself was uninhabitable.

Despite this, the Seer of Revelation had the audacity to present the new heaven and the new earth as a Redeemed City. His vision was not of a restored Garden, even a garden like Eden. The people of God were going to live in a redeemed city, and there God was going to be in the midst of them. It is only against this kind of a background that the climactic vision of John contained in these verses makes any sense at all.

"I saw no temple in the city," said John. What a contrast to the cities of Greece and Rome, filled with ever-present temples to every conceivable god. "The city had no need for sun or moon to shine upon it" - the darkness of the cities had come to an end. "The gates of the city will never be shut by day or by night;" there was no external enemy to fear. "Nothing unclean will enter it, nor any who practice abominations or falsehood." All the filth of the city will be cleansed away. There will be no more night; the fearsome night will be bright as day.

Instead there will be a river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing through the midst of the city. Rivers bring cleansing, they bring cool breezes into the midst of unremitting heat, they bring waters that bring life to plants and people. On either side of the river is tree of life with twelve kinds of fruit. The people will be fed abundantly from the tree, and a different food will feed them each month; no more will the diet of the people be monotonous and repetitious. The leaves of the tree will be for the healing of the nations. To a world exhausted by wars and rumors of war, God will bring healing.

The new city has a new heart: the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb, the throne of God and of the Lamb. The Lord God will be its light, and God and the Lamb shall reign forever and ever. God's servants will worship him, and they will see God's face. Such is John's vision of the coming city of God.

JOHN 5:1-9: Unfortunately for us, this lection does not contain the whole story of Jesus and the man by the pool. The remainder of the story is told in 5:10-18, but because that part of the story takes us well beyond the simple story of healing that we have in 1-9, I will content myself by commenting on this first part only.

Jesus had come to Jerusalem for one of the festivals that Jewish people kept. They were three in number, Passover, Pentecost, and Tabernacles. These three were distinguished from other Jewish celebrations because they were "pilgrimage festivals"; on these three occasions Jewish men were to travel to Jerusalem to observe the festivals. There is no indication in the story as to which of the three was being celebrated.

Jesus went to a pool that is by the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem. "The Sheep Gate" was one of many gates in the walls of Jerusalem. This particular gate was (or had been) used by shepherds as they moved their sheep in and out of the city. Recent excavations in Jerusalem a little to the north of the temple site have disclosed a large trapezium-shaped double pool divided in the middle by a broad wall. This corresponds to the description of the sheep pool with four columns surrounding it and a fifth post in the middle. Remains of pillars and balustrades further support the identification, and votive inscriptions suggest that ancient superstition ascribed healing virtue to the water. By this pool were many people who were lame, blind, paralysed, and otherwise infirm. They believed that if they could be the first one into the water after "the angels" stirred it, they would be healed. While the "stirring" was attributed to angels, it may very well have been that the water was stirred by a breeze. At any rate, those who wanted to be healed were poolside and anxious to race to the pool to be the first to arrive after the waters gently moved.

We need also note that there was a reason that Jesus had gone to this pool. Suffering human beings were gathered there, and Jesus was one who sought out those who suffered.

One man especially attracted Jesus' attention. There was nothing attractive about this man. He was a poor creature who probably brought his sickness on himself by youthful excesses (see verse 14). He had no friends as the others did and probably was not the kind of man who could keep them. After he was healed, he never paused to thank his benefactor. He even went out of his way to report to the authorities what Jesus had done. At the end of the event Jesus had to come back and warn him not to fall into the errors of 38 years ago. It was just this kind of person for whom Jesus risked a reprisal by the authorities.

All Jesus knew about the man was that he was lying amidst the porticoes and had been there a long time, thirty-eight years according to the account. The "thirty-eight years" may have something mythic about it. This corresponds to the period that the Israelites wandered in the wilderness before they came into the promised land. It is also the number of centuries, according to contemporary Jewish theology, that Israel had already awaited the coming of the Messiah. But, says the Gospel of John, the Messiah is here now, and he brings fulfilment to those who have been wandering in the wilderness waiting for God to act. Certainly the gospel writer had these ideas in mind as he wrote "thirty-eight years."

Jesus asked the man, "Do you want to be healed?" This was his only question to him. The man answered Jesus in the same way that Nicodemus had done in the incident related in chapter three and that the woman at the well had done in the incident of chapter four: he gave a very literal interpretation to the question. "Sir," he said, pathetically, "I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me." Jesus gave him three commands: "Stand up. Take up your mat. Walk." He did so. Says the gospel, "At once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk."

Did you note that there is no mention of "faith" in this story, or a promise of forgiveness of sins, or any of the things that we usually associate with a healing by Jesus? Here Jesus speaks, the man responds, and the healing takes place. That is all we are told about the process of healing. The man did not even know who was speaking to him at this moment. It is only later, after he had been accosted by the authorities as to why he was carrying a mat on the Sabbath, that Jesus came to him and identified himself. These omissions in the story tell us that this healing is completely the work of God, the one who works for healing and wholeness in human life.

The last verse of the passage talks about "Sabbath." It is important to our interpretation to recognize that in the Greek text there is no definite article before "Sabbath." It may well be therefore that this was not a Sabbath in the sense of being the seventh day of the week. During a great feast (and we have already been told that this event happened during one of the great festal occasions), Sabbath laws were constantly in effect, so that every day of the festival had to be observed as if it were a Sabbath. Did Jesus and the man know this, or did they unwittingly break the law? I suspect that Jesus knew that Sabbath laws were in effect on this day and that they would be in force for the next five, six, or seven days. It is in character for Jesus not to want to postpone this healing act for that long a time.

Because John's Gospel often uses natural phenomenon to interpret religious events, I think we have to take special note of the fact that "water" is present in this healing. "Water" links this account to the earlier episode of turning water into wine and to the living water that Jesus brings to replace the water in Jacob's well. Here we have "water" which offers those who use it newness of life, and then for 38 years it is not effective in the life of this man. Over against this "water" is set the life-giving word of Jesus Christ. It may well be that the pool represents the law given through Moses or any religious system that depends upon anything but the grace of God in Jesus Christ. There at his feet lies the healing water, the law, but the cripple remains unhealed. The problem is, how can the person who wants to make use of the law, or the water, or any other religious system than that which brings the word and power of Christ, come into contact with its healing power? These other systems might show the way to life, but they are powerless to create the will to live. The will to live, as well as the power to live, is given in the word of Christ.