Bonhoeffer and Croesus.
“Wake up! Strengthen what little remains, for even what is left is almost dead. I find that your actions do not meet the requirements of my God. Go back to what you heard and believed at first; hold to it firmly. Repent and turn to me again. If you don’t wake up, I will come to you suddenly, as unexpected as a thief.” Revelation 3:2-3. NLT
For Christians, staying awake spiritually is the hardest when the world around you is asleep. Soon after Hitler’s ascent to power in 1933, 7000 of the 18,000 Lutheran pastors opposed the “Aryan clause” that forbade Christians of Jewish descent from working for the church. In protest these pastors broke away from the state church and formed the Confessing Church.
One of these pastors, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, protested by leaving a prestigious teaching post at the University of Berlin and moving to London. At the request of the Confessing Church he courageously returned to Germany in 1935 to lead a Confessing seminary for young ministers. He was only 29 years old at the time himself. By 1936 he was banned from further lecturing at the University of Berlin and the seminary went more and more “underground.”
Hitler turned his charm on the Confessing Church. He allowed them to keep some of their distinctives. He offered them legitimacy in exchange for overall support of his plans for the country (at least the ones he was willing to share at that time).
Bonhoeffer fought this compromise, believing that good and evil could not live together. His position became more and more isolated as the Confessing Church felt that its precarious situation required limited co-operation with the state. Bonhoeffer claimed that, “The failure of German Christians to resist the Nazi rise to power stemmed from their lack of moral clarity.”
In 1939 he accepted a lecture tour in the United States. While there, American theologians pressed him to stay in America and continue his work of protest in safety. But his conscience did not allow him to choose a life of relative ease. When it became clear that war was about to break out, he took one of the last ships to leave for Germany. After several years of harassment from the Gestapo he was arrested. On April 9, 1945, a few weeks before the end of the war, he paid the ultimate penalty for his resistance at a concentration camp called Flossenbürg.
Whether we seek to convert the lost or fight for social justice, it is easy to grow weary in well-doing and follow the crowd as Sardis did. This is particularly true when the church itself has become part of the crowd. The only people who can stand at such times are those whose moral compass is not based on reason or conscience alone but on the clear teachings of God’s Word.
The history of ancient Sardis bears some resemblance to Jesus’ description. It was once the supreme city of the region, the capital of the kingdom of Lydia, ruled by the famously wealthy king Croesus. But by the time Revelation was written Sardis had slipped to secondary status behind Ephesus, Pergamum and even Laodicea. So in the first century the reputation of the city far exceeded its reality.
The resemblance of history to the text may be even closer. Ancient historians suggest that Croesus consulted the oracle at Delphi before heading into battle against Cyrus, the Persian ruler who would conquer Babylon eight years later. He asked the oracle if he should cross the Halys River to attack Cyrus or not. The oracle responded that if he crossed the Halys River he would destroy a mighty empire.
He confidently assembled an army and was overwhelmingly defeated. But he was not greatly concerned. Not only did he have the oracle’s promise (he thought), but he knew that he could retreat to his impregnable fortress (Sardis) and raise an even larger army for the following year. But Cyrus pursued rapidly and surrounded Sardis before the new army could be raised. Croesus was still unconcerned, thinking that Cyrus was vulnerable so far from his base and that his army would crush him against the cliffs in time.
The citadel acropolis of Sardis sat on the top of Mount Tmolus. The sides of the mountain are nearly sheer cliffs. Croesus retired one night in confidence that things would soon turn in his favour. He woke up to find the enemy in control of the acropolis and his kingdom was history.
What seems to have happened is that while the rock face below the city was almost perpendicular, a crevice had developed in the rock, allowing the possibility of assailants climbing up one at a time to enter the city. Such an attack would only work if the defenders were unawares, so Cyrus’ attack must have been at night. Along the lines of Jesus’ message, destruction came upon Sardis like “a thief in the night.”