Aliens in This World

In today’s Gospel reading from John 1:29-34, we hear more of the story of the Lord’s Baptism, from the next day.

St. John the Baptist is explicit about saying that Jesus, Who was born after him, existed before him.

And St. John the Evangelist was probably there to hear him, and remember his weird comments, for the day when he understood them.

(People forget that tradition says in some places that both St. Andrew and St. John were some kind of disciples of the Baptist, before they went with Jesus to “come and see.” Other people say that various of the future Apostles showed up to listen to John, saw Jesus, and then went home again, and were stunned when Jesus showed up. If that’s not true, then St. Andrew might have done a lot more transmission to the Evangelists than we know about.)

Anyway, after St. John talked about this “aner” (adult male human or husband, as opposed to “anthropos,” a person of either sex, and “gyne,” a woman or wife), he “testified” (emartyresen) further about what he had witnessed.

What did he say?

“I saw (tetheamai) the Holy Spirit come down like a dove from heaven, and remain upon Him.”

This is a form of “theaomai,” a special word for “see,” which St. John and the other Gospels use for special occasions. It includes the word “thea,” as in God or divine things, and it is related to the word “thauma,” a wonder. It can be translated as “gazed upon.”

It gets used when Jesus asks what the crowd went out to “see,” when they went to get baptized by St. John the Baptist. (Mt. 11:7, Lk. 7:24)

Interestingly, Luke uses it for when Jesus saw (etheasato) the tax collector, Matthew/Levi, and then called him to follow. (Lk. 5:27) In 2 Mac. 2:4, Jeremiah traveled to the mountain where Moses had gone up and gazed upon (etheasato) God’s inheritance, ie, the Promised Land. So Jesus probably also “gazed upon” Matthew.

2 Mac. 3:36 uses “tetheamenos” to tell what Heliodorus had seen with his own eyes, ie, angels straight from God, who had scourged him for disrespect to the Lord, by his coming to take the Temple treasury’s contents to his pagan king.

A more normal word for seeing comes in the first verse of the reading, when the Baptist “sees” (blepsei) Jesus coming toward him, and tells everyone to “behold” (ide, actually related to the verb “horao” to see, but also meaning “to know”). And then he calls Him the “Lamb of God” (amnos Theou), who takes away “the sin of the cosmos” (ten hamartian tou cosmou).

The other normal word, “horao,” gets used later in the same reading, when the Baptist says that he was supposed to know the “the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit” by seeing the Holy Spirit come down and stay on him.

And then he uses “horao” again when he says that he had seen, and “testified” (memartyreka) that “this one is the Son of God.”

This stuff is done on purpose, making points. It is not just using synonyms for variety. 1 John 1:1 also talks about what we have heard, touched with hands, and seen with our eyes, as well as what we have seen and wondered at (etheasametha).

Copying this over from Reddit, because I did a lot of work posting an answer, and I’m too lazy to rewrite it more briefly. I’m sick with a sore throat but also a little feverish, so energy is kind of up and down today.

First thing. There’s a section in Josephus where he talks about how he was a little genius, so he got a lot of attention from the priests and rabbis, who would love to ask him questions and hear him answer them. But usually they’d invite Josephus’ dad to a dinner party or other occasion, and tell the dad to bring Josephus along. Also, Josephus lived in Jerusalem and his dad was a known person.

Jesus was Just Some Kid, and yet He didn’t get St. Joseph to come run interference with Him and collect invitations. He just showed up. (Like it was His job or something. Which it was.)

People used to say they didn’t believe the rabbis would do this. Then they’d read Josephus, and decide that Luke copied all this off of Josephus, because obviously the rabbis wouldn’t do that for little Jesus. (roll eyes)

Second thing. In Lk. 2:43, when Luke says that Jesus “stayed behind,” the verb is “hypomeno,” which also means “to go through trials, to endure suffering,” because it also means “to remain under.” So it’s a prophecy of Jesus suffering in Jerusalem, even though He didn’t suffer anything at this time.

(Knowing Jewish ladies and men, He probably was chowing down on some pretty good food with His new buddies in Jerusalem, who insisted on taking Him home when the hour got late. Or He was hanging out with the Temple guardsmen-priests, helping them out and having a great time.)

Third weird thing. Jesus wasn’t just “sitting” (kathezomenon) in the Temple. The implication of “sitting in the Temple” was that He was teaching, because in the ancient world, you would find a teacher by looking for a seated person surrounded by people standing up. That’s why bishops sit on a chair, a kathedra, like a teaching philosopher; and their churches are “cathedrals,” the place of the teaching chair.

Matt. 26:55 doesn’t use the exact same expression, but Jesus does tell the arrest priests that every day He’s been sitting (ekathezomen) in the Temple, teaching. (Actually a lot of the time He was being like a Peripatetic philosopher, strolling around in the porches while teaching, but eh.)

Fourth weird thing. When Mary talks to Jesus, she uses an extremely strong verb, “odynao,” to describe how she and Joseph felt while they were searching for Jesus. It means “to be agonized, to be tormented,” and it shows up a lot in the OT as translated into Greek in the Septuagint. It shows up in Messianic prophecy. (It’s also what happened to the rich man in Sheol, in the parable.)

For example, in Zech. 12:10, when the prophet talks about Jerusalem and the House of David looking upon the one they had pierced, and mourning him, the Septuagint says that they will be tormented as one is tormented for one’s firstborn. (This translates the Hebrew verb “marar,” to feel bitter or salty pain, which is a word closely related to the name Miriam/Mary.)

It’s also used in Isaiah 21:10 in the LXX, for what happens to threshed wheat (concerning what happens to Babylon, but it’s probably a Eucharistic image too).

So yup, both St. Joseph and St. Mary suffered torments for Our Lord, even before His Passion.

Fifth weird thing. Jesus doesn’t say “Father’s house” or “Father’s business.” He says “of my Father.”

“You did not know, that in those (en tois) of My Father (tou Patros mou) must I be (dei einai me)?”

“En” can also mean “with, by, among” and other prepositions. But it sounds (to an outsider) like “Didn’t you know that I’d be staying with kin/friends/workers of my father?” or similar expressions.

But it could mean “in My Father’s” [Temple] or “in My Father’s” [business affairs], or all sorts of things.

It’s really really cryptic, for an explanation to your mom after three days away.

Sixth funny thing. When St. Luke says that Mary and Joseph did not understand (ou synekan) the saying/word (rhema) that Jesus had said to them… that’s not the last time in the Gospels that somebody doesn’t understand Jesus’ sayings or parables. Nope, not at all.

But Mary carefully kept (diaterei) all these sayings (rhemata) in her heart. (Lk. 2:51)

Just like God told Abraham to carefully keep (diatereseis) His Covenant, in the LXX translation of Gen. 17:9-10.

Just like Jacob “carefully kept the saying” (diateresin to rhema) of Joseph’s dream (Gen. 37:11).

Just like Moses’ mom was hired by Pharaoh’s daughter to “carefully keep” Baby Moses (Ex. 2:9).

Just like the families of Israel were supposed to “carefully keep” a spotless lamb, until it was time to sacrifice it at Passover. (Ex. 12:6)

UPDATE: The Kata Biblon site has a Deuterocanon Greek word search! Yay!

In Tobit 9:4 in the LXX, Tobiah said, “But my father counts the days, and if I delay, he will be agonized (odynethesetai).”

Also in Tobit 5:7, Tobiah said, “Stay behind (hypomeinon) for me, while I tell my father.”

I love the Wise Men and Epiphany, and the Isaiah and Psalm and Gospel. Btw, it turns out that “thesaurous,” treasures, also means treasure chests or treasuries. So when the Magi open their treasures, they’re really opening up boxes and bags of treasures.

But. The second reading has some really awesome Greek in it. It’s Eph. 3: 2-3a, 5-6.

“Stewardship” is “oikonomia.” A steward is the “oikonomos,” the household law guy who passed out all the paychecks and money allowances, and dealt with all the debt and expenditure accounting.

As basically a wandering missionary bishop, St. Paul has a stewardship of God’s grace, which has been given to him to pass out to folks like the Ephesians. And he talks about it.

As often happens, we get a little bit taken out of the reading, in order to make it work as a reading.

The last chapter ended with a resounding declaration that the Ephesian Gentiles are no longer “foreigners and resident aliens” (xenoi kai paroikoi), but “fellow citizens” (sympolitai) “of the saints, and household-members” (oikeoi) “of God” (Eph. 2:19), as well as jointly a holy Temple built on a foundation of the Apostles with Christ as the cornerstone, which is a holy Temple “in the Lord” and a dwelling place “of God, in the Spirit.” (Eph. 2:20-22) So we have the Holy Trinity too.

Eph. 2:21 has the magnificent Greek participle “synarmologomene,” which means “to be joined closely together.” So it can mean “to frame a building closely together” or “to knit together body parts.” In this case, St. Paul is doing wordplay to make it mean both, since the Body of Christ is being a Temple too.

Eph. 2:22 has “synoikodomeisthe,” which has “oikodomes” (a building) and our friend syn-. So it means “y’all are being built together.”

So… next chapter, which in St. Paul’s text would have just been the start of the next paragraph.

“For this grace (charin), I, Paul, am the prisoner of Christ Jesus, for you Gentiles. So if indeed you have heard of the stewardship of God’s grace given to me for you, how the Mystery was made known to me by an unveiling (apokalypsin)….”

This aside by St. Paul was left out. Obviously it indicates that there was at least one previous Letter to the Ephesians, which didn’t get kept or preserved by Providence, and thus wasn’t inspired.

“….as I wrote to you in brief, by reading which you can understand my knowledge (synesin, a confluence of rivers, and hence a comprehension of knowledge) in the Mystery of Christ….” (Eph. 3:3b-4)

“In other generations, this was not made known to the sons of men” (yup, tois huiois ton anthropon. I don’t know why we got “people,” which seems bland), “as now it has been unveiled (apekalypthe) to His holy apostles and prophets, in the Spirit, that the Gentiles be (einai) co-heirs (sygkleronoma) and co-Body-ers (syssoma) and co-sharers/partners (symmetocha) of His promise (epangelias), in Christ Jesus, through the Gospel.” (Eph. 2:5-6)

Syssoma is just the best word. I want it on a t-shirt. The singular is “syssomos.”

The funky thing is that these syn- words are all adjectives describing the Ephesians, not nouns, although I’d say they’re acting like nouns.

Anyhoo… the Latin from St. Jerome also is pretty nice. Eph. 2:20 has the Temple being “superaedificati” on top of the foundation, and then “constructa crescit” in Eph. 2:21, and finally “coaedificamini” in Eph. 2:22.

In Eph. 2:6, we have “cohaeredes” for co-heirs, “concorporales” for fellow Body parts, and “comparticipes” for co-partners. Which is pretty good stuff.

The chapter goes on, after the verses in the reading, with more mindblowing thoughts. For example, we’re told that the Church’s teaching is God’s way of revealing all kinds of things to the angels in Heaven, which they did not know before.

Boom.

Sadly, we’re about to skip over to 1 Corinthians for the beginning of Ordinary Time, so you might want to read the rest of Ephesians by yourself. We’ve had some of it, back and forth, but there’s a lot of good stuff in there.

There is a story in the Gospels about Jesus, where He drops a hint that He is God. (Mt. 19:17, Mk. 10:18, and Lk. 18:19.)

He gets asked a question, and the questioner calls him “good teacher.” Jesus does the rabbi thing of answering a question with a question: “Why do you call Me good? No one is good but God.”

This is quoting Ps. 14:1 and Ps. 14:3. “There is no one who does good…there is no one that does good – no, not one.” (St. Paul also quotes this in Rom. 3:12.)

And then Jesus adds, “except God,” in the typical free way that rabbis felt able to quote and then clarify, or quote and then combine quotes. Or to quote a translation in one’s own parallel words, for that matter.

The hilarious thing is that the Gospels use the Greek adjective “agathos” for good, but the LXX psalm translation uses the word “chrestotes.” (As does St. Paul.)

“Chrestos,” the root word, or a Latinized version, “Chrestus,” was often used wrongly as Christ’s name, by non-Christians in early Christian times. The word basically means useful or manageable, but the extended sense is someone good, kind, and excellent. Wine that has fermented pleasantly over years is also “chrestos.”

So “chrestotes” is the quality of goodness, kindness, excellence, and so on.

You easily could take this as Christ punning on the title Christ by implication, as well as dropping the hint that He really is the good God.

Of course, St. Paul mentioning the same thing is also doing wordplay. Of course nobody is as Christ-like and excellent as Christ. Duh.

The apologetics consequence is that St. Paul is not even talking about sinlessness or sin in Rom. 3:12. The topic is adjacent, but that isn’t the point. Freaky.

(The point is that nobody is able to do good things without God assisting. Whatever good is done, whatever person is righteous like St. Joseph, is not doing it by his own effort only, but by cooperating with God and His plan.)

Anyway… In today’s reading from Col. 3:12, “kindness” is also the word “chrestotes.”

(“Heartfelt compassion” is the good old “bowels of compassion,” and “patience” is “macrothymia.”)

Also… in the LXX, there are tons of times that a Bible verse that says that the Lord is good (tob in Hebrew), is translated into Greek as “chrestos ho Kyrios” (like Ps. 33:9/34:8).

So this horrible, wonderful pun was actually built into the Bible, and was sitting waiting for the coming of the Christ for hundreds of years ahead of time! The Lord is the anointed one, the Messiah (Christos) but also the good, kindly one (chrestos).

The Greek word is “eudokia,” and apparently it was coined by Greek-speaking Jews, while translating the Psalms. “Eu-” is good, and the verb “dokeo” is to think, to judge, or by extension to decide something is pleasing, and so on.

It usually translates Hebrew “ratson,” which is one of the words for God’s favor, up to the point of delight.

The English translations of those passages are all over the place. Like Ps. 68:14/69:13, where the English is “acceptable time” or “day of favor,” and the Hebrew is “ratson ‘et.” The Greek is “kairos eudokias.”

So in Luke 2:14, when the angels proclaim “epi ges eirene, en anthropois eudokia,” it is God’s goodwill toward men, or rather, His extreme favor and delight being exercised toward us, by sending His Son to us.

St. Jerome condenses the statement even more. “Eirene,” peace, is a nominative and so is “eudokia.” But he goes with “in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis,” with only “pax” in the nominative.

So it’s “on earth, the peace of [God’s] goodwill toward men.”

(The wording in the Gloria of the Mass is different, and might be from the pre-Jerome Old Latin translation. He also says “in altissimis,” and everybody else says “in excelsis.”)

Romans 10:1 has St. Paul talk about his heart’s “eudokia” toward his fellow Jews, in a context that shows how strong a word it is, in a Greek-speaking Jew’s vocabulary. He also talks about his “deesis” for them, which is a particularly strong and pleading kind of prayer to God.

I did a big post on Reddit the other day, so I’ll try and do a quicker version here.

Matthew 1 and 2 set up patterns, so that Matthew can then point out the differences in Jesus’ case.

First Matthew talks about “The record” (biblos, not biblios, meaning a papyrus record) “of the genesis of Jesus Christ,” and then proceeds to talk all about which male ancestor begat (egannesen) which other male ancestor. All the female ancestors mentioned have the added phrase “ek tes [female name],” which in the horse world would be “out of [female name].”

There’s an exception with Solomon, who is “ek tes tou Ouriou,” meaning “out of Uriah’s one.” (Meaning the unnamed Bathsheba, who was Uriah’s wife.) The word “wife” isn’t used. It’s possible that we’re supposed to remember that Bathsheba is also compared in a parable to a pet ewe lamb that belonged to a poor man (Uriah), and who got taken and eaten by a rich man (David). There’s a paschal and Eucharistic meaning to this, too.

The women in Matthew’s genealogy list are Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and “Uriah’s.” As many have noted, two of these women are foreigners who married into Israel. Tamar extrabiblically is said to have been an Aramean; or that she was a daughter/descendant of the Aram who was a descendant of Abraham’s brother Nahor, and thus a Mesopotamian. (The latter idea is big in the Book of Jubilees and the Testament of Judah, which are non-Biblical Jewish literature.) One Jewish literary source even identified Tamar as a daughter of Shem/Melchizadek! (The Targum of Ps.-Jonathan.)

Anyway… then we come down to Jesus, and He isn’t “begat” by any listed male. The genealogy says that Jacob begat Joseph, the husband of Mary (ton andra Marias), which is almost the exact opposite of calling Bathsheba “tou Ouriou”. Then it says, “Out of her” (ek hes) “was begotten” (egennethe) “Jesus who’s called Christ” (Iesous ho legomenos Christos).

Weird, eh?

In Matthew 1:18, the text adds that the child in Mary’s womb was “out of the Holy Spirit” (ek Pneumatos Hagiou). Holy Spirit is in neuter gender, but the “ek” is the same used for the feminine ancestors in the genealogy. So that’s kinda weird and pattern-breaking, too.

The “take” that Joseph is told not to be afraid about is the verb “paralambanou,” which means “to receive near” and originally meant “to take by the hand.” It can also mean “to take as a close friend or associate” or “for a disciple, to memorize and internalize the teaching of one’s master.”

Joseph is shortly told by the angel to “take the child and his mother” to Egypt, using the same “paralambanou” verb. And a little later, the Devil “takes” Jesus to the highest part of the Temple roof, using the same word “paralambanou.” So… yeah. This word gets used a lot, and the marital use isn’t its thing.

Joseph in the OT also advised his brothers to “take” their families and their dad to Egypt, btw.

One interesting bit is that Matthew changes the Scriptural reference to Isaiah a bit, or he knows a different version. The Hebrew says, “And she shall call his name Emmanuel,” while the LXX translation says, “And you [King Ahaz] shall call his name Emmanuel.” But St. Matthew quotes Isaiah as saying, “And they”, probably referring to Mary and Joseph. So St. Joseph does have an important part in the story, and by naming Jesus, he acknowledges him legally as his son in the marriage (adopting him), and hence as a male member of the House of David.

Yesterday we listened to the Gospel for Christ the King, and it was all about Christ crucified.

Why? Because Luke tacitly shows us how Christ fulfilled one of the ancient Messianic prophecies that was constantly quoted by the Fathers and other early Christians.

God was supposed to have “reigned from the wood” or “from the tree.” This comes from Psalm 95/96:10 – “Say to the Gentiles: The Lord has reigned.” The early Christians said that the text was “The Lord has reigned from the wood.” (That’s “apo tou xylon” in Greek, and “a ligno” in Latin.)

This directly interacted with the idea in the Law that anyone who died hanging from a tree was a curse upon the land, etc., and therefore the corpse had to be moved off the tree immediately. This originally was supposed to be about human sacrifice to Asherat and other tree gods, but was diversified to executions by noose or by crucifixion.

Christians definitely believed that Judas Iscariot’s suicide was accursed, and possibly was deliberately done by hanging from a tree because Judas wanted to make bad worse, in his suicidal mood of self-punishment.

But despite a lot of Jewish pushback about the curse on tree death, over centuries, Christians consistently insisted that Jesus fulfilled the prophecy about reigning from a tree. They insisted this, past the point that rabbinic Jews had forgotten that this verse had ever existed. (Which it probably did, as it’s well known that the Dead Sea Scrolls showed a lot of early Christian text readings being older than the Masoretic text ones.)

So what do we see in this Sunday’s reading from Luke 23:35-43?

Well… one thing we see is that the beginning of the first verse of the reading isn’t read, probably because it’s not very exciting. It’s just the words, “And the people had been stood looking on.”

(A clumsy literal translation. “Stood” is in the pluperfect, and “watching” or “looking on” is the participle “theoron.” The verb “theoreo” is an intensified version of normal “horao,” to see. It’s often translated as “behold,” but it also means “to watch carefully and investigate,” or “to spectate at an event.” It is from this verb that we get both the word “theater” and the word “theory.”)

This phrase comes back again at the end of St. Luke’s Passion, when the crowd standing around who had “seen” what happened “at the sight,” ended up going back home beating their breasts in repentance.

What had they been watching at this point, when the reading starts? Jesus and the two evildoers getting crucified. Jesus praying, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” And the soldiers dividing His garments and casting lots.

(Luke doesn’t include the bit about the soldiers not dividing the beautiful seamless robe woven by Mary. John, who lived with Our Lady, is the one who talked about it – probably both because it fulfilled prophecy from Ps. 22:18, and because it was probably something that Our Lady would have been bound to mention, among all the indignities and sorrows of the day.)

I think we should notice that Luke deliberately doesn’t mention the Messianic prophecies connected to these things, although I’m sure they were already part of Christian teaching, from the road to Emmaus onward. He is writing for Gentiles, so he lets the events just sit there, waiting to be explained more fully by others.

So, anyway, the people are standing there watching, thinking their own thoughts, much as Our Lady and the women and St. John were doing. But what were other people doing?

And that’s where our Sunday reading begins. We are told that “the rulers” (oi archontes) sneered at Jesus, and that the soldiers jeered. (I criticize the wording of our lectionary translation sometimes, but sneered/jeered is good stuff.)

Sneered is “exemykterizon,” which literally in Greek is “raised their snouts derisively.” Luke used this word to point out the connection to both Ps. 21:8/22:7 (which also has “theorountes”), and Ps. 34/35:16. (There are other Septuagint passages that use the verb “mykterizou,” which is a shorter way to say the same thing.)

Jeered is “enepaizon.” The verb “paizo” is “to play like a kid, to joke, to dance merrily or do funny things,” which is why the company Paizo Games is named that. “Enepaizon” is from the verb “empaizo,” which means “to mock, to mess with a person, to deceive or delude a person.” Matthew, Mark, and Luke all mention Jesus prophesying that He would be mocked, using this verb “empaizo.”

The same verb gets used in the Septuagint at some important points, such as when Samson was jeered at; and in 2 Chr. 36:16, when “they sneered (mykterizontes) at His angels, and despised His words, and jeered at His prophets….”

What did they sneer and jeer about? What was the Word they despised?

“He saved others;” (allous esosen), “let him save himself” (sosato eauton). The verb is “sozo,” to save or to heal. Savior = soter.

(It occurred to me to ask whether “Physician, heal yourself” used the same verb. No. It’s — “Iatre, therapeuson deauton” — which is pretty different in both verb and pronoun.)

The soldiers (strateontai) then address Jesus directly, telling him, “Save yourself” (soson deauton).

One interesting thing is that Luke has the Judaean rulers saying, “If you are the Christ of God, the chosen one of God.” It’s a Greek construction that you see in a lot of languages where you can move words around more, where you have a genitive form that can apply to two nouns in the same sentence.

So they say, “if you are… ho Christos / ho tou Theou / eklektos.” It could mean “If you are the chosen Messiah of God,” if eklektos is being used as an adjective; or it could mean both “the Christ of God” and “the chosen one of God” if eklektos is being used as a noun.

It doesn’t show up in English, but it’s a neat thing to do in Greek and Latin, and in other inflected languages. It shows up in poetry and rhetorical prose.

The soldiers say, “If you are the king of the Jews” (ei sy ei ho basileus ton Ioudaioun), which has the neat construction where one “ei” means “if,” and the other “ei” is the verb “to be” in present second person singular.

Then one of the criminals (literally “evildoers,” kako-urgon) reviles (eblasphemei) Jesus, also demanding, “If you are the Messiah” (ei sy ei ho Christos), “save yourself and us” (soson deauton kai hemas).

So that’s Luke making a very strong point through repetition. I’m not sure why the lectionary translators break the pattern there, because the words are literally the same things I’ve posted. Maybe they’re going by a variant? Maybe they just think repetition is boring, instead of understanding its important literary role?

Anyway, I should mention that the soldiers also offer Jesus vinegar, “oxos.”

There’s at least one positive use of vinegar (“homesh” in Hebrew) in the OT and LXX. When Boaz tells Ruth to come eat with the harvesters at mealtime, he tells her to come eat her bread (phagesai ton arton) and dip her morsel in the vinegar (bapseis ton psomon sou en tou oxei), and then Boaz also gives her some of the parched barley or barley meal (alphiton).

Homer in the Odyssey called “alphiton” and wheat flour the “marrow of man,” (muelon andron) because the men ate so much of them both, in order to survive.

Vinegar was considered a refreshing condiment, and was often even a sports drink for farmers (when diluted and/or flavored).

I don’t know if this means something, but Ruth and Boaz are part of the history of Bethlehem (“house of bread”) and of David’s house. So it probably does mean something Eucharistic and Paschal and wedding-related, and is probably connected to the Passion and the Last Supper too.

St. John talks about the Last Supper morsel being dipped, but it’s “bapsas tou psomion” and “embapsas tou psomion” instead of “psomos.” It gets mentioned quite a lot, though, because it’s in John 13:26 twice, and then John 13:27 and John 13:30.

Job 31:17 has Job talking about never eating his morsel alone, without the fatherless orphans; but it’s “psomos” also.

But of course the main meaning of the vinegar is the fulfillment of Ps. 69:21.

I’ve gone off track here. The other evildoer speaks up for Jesus, pointing out that they are doing the time after doing the crime, but that Jesus has done nothing wrong.

What the other guy (ho heteros, literally “the different guy”, and sometimes even “the weird guy” or “the stranger”) did first was “replying, then, he rebuked” the first guy, “saying….”

“Apokritheis, de, ho heteros epetima auton, legon….”

The verb “epitimao” is interesting. It originally meant “to honor, to show honor to” and kept that meaning. But it then came to mean “to raise the price,” “to penalize or tax for a good reason,” and “to admonish severely for a good reason.”

What he says as a rebuke is, “And do you not fear God?” (Oude phobe sy ton Theon?) “Because you are in the punishment [given] to him.” (Hoti en tou autou krimati ei.)

The interesting bit here is that the different evildoer inadvertently also said, “Because you are in the punishment given to God.” He was prophesying, through the grace of the Holy Spirit.

What he says next is tricky.

“And we — surely [it is] righteously!” (Kai hemeis, men dikaios.)

“For what we have done, of ourselves, fitting things (Axia gar hon epraxamen), we receive back (apolambanomen).”

“But this one has done nothing out of bounds.” (Houtos de, ouden atopon epraxen.)

Atopos literally means “out of place,” but it came to include anything unfitting, improper, or wicked.

The different guy then continues, saying to Jesus, “Let me be remembered, O Lord, whenever you shall come into your kingdom.” (Mnestheti mou, Kyrie, hotan elthes en te basileia sou.)

Hotan is the kind of “when” that goes with an event you are sure will happen, but of which the exact time is not known to you. It can also mean “as soon as” the thing happens.

Mnestheti is an aorist passive imperative, which is just crazy formal for a guy who’s dying slowly in agony. Maybe he was always the poet/rapper bandit, or maybe it was the Holy Spirit giving him the words to say.

And then Jesus spoke to him as a king.

“Amen, I say to you: ‘Today, with Me, you shall be in Paradise.'” (Amen, lego soi: semeron, met’ Emou, ese en tou Paradeiso.)

That’s a royal decree, issued from the Throne of the Tree, by Him gloriously reigning.

And the next verse after the Gospel reading says that it was about the sixth hour when He made this decree; and darkness fell over all the earth for the next three hours, until the ninth hour.

The King speaks, and darkness falls. He is King of the universe.

This is our awesome Greek word for the day. It showed up in today’s 2nd reading, from 2 Thes. 3:11.

“Ergazomenos” means someone who is working.

A person who stands around asking irrelevant questions while other people are working, is “peri-ergazomenos.”

This gets translated as things like “busybodies” or “people who don’t mind their own business.”

The readings today were full of interesting writing.

Luke 21 has a ton of Greek alliteration, for instance. Who knew that “famines and plagues” is “limoi kai loimoi” in Greek?

You also hear in Luke 21:15 that those against you (antikeimenois) will not be able to talk against you (antepein) or stand against you (antistenai).

It’s just so nifty.