The verb χλευαζω (chleuazo) means to jest, scoff or treat scornfully (Acts 2:13 and 17:32 only). It comes from noun χλευη (chleue), joke, jest (unused in the New Testament), which in turn stems from the same widely attested Proto-Indo-European root "glew-", to joke, from which English gets the word glee. But the act of scoffing clearly surpasses a mere innocent mockery or sport.

Our English word sarcasm comes from σαρκασμος (sarkasmos), meaning the same, which in turn derives from σαρξ (sarx), flesh. This suggests that the act of mocking is essentially predatorial, and its aim to take a bite out of someone's mind the way a lion would chomp down on someone's body.

The word σαρξ (sarx) most specifically refers to what we moderns call our consciousness. Our body is all we are directly conscious of, and our fleshy parts include all our senses. This word's Hebrew equivalent, namely בשר (basar), living flesh, even stems from the verb בשר (basar), to bring glad tidings or good news. That implies that all flesh is the expression of the soul, and all mockery is taking bites out of that.

When we mock we declare strategic weakness in the target, and feed our own predatorial soul by diminishing the soul we accost.

The adjective χλιαρος (chliaros) means warm in the sense of lukewarm: neither hot nor cold (Revelation 3:16 only). It stems from the verb χλιαινω (chliaino), to warm, as in to warm up one's cold lunch, warm up under a blanket during cold weather, or warm up through oil rubbed on one's cold feet. Our verb predominantly speaks of clumsily hacking discomfort or neglect, brought on by a combination of relentless weather and a lack of fuel due to poor planning. In the classics, our verb is used to describe a person who is getting warm because he is developing a fever. And it describes people huddling together trying to steal warmth off of each other.

Our word seems to be part of a group of words that ultimately stem from a PIE root "gley-", meaning to shine, from which English gets a word like glimmer, and perhaps also to glow, which are both words that express a rather diminutive appearance of light. Since it's been known since deep antiquity that light and warmth go hand in hand, the connection between a timid glimmer and a little bit of warmth would be obvious to most people. Additionally, it seems hypothetically possibly that our PIE root "gley-", to shine, was perhaps somewhat informed or influenced by root "glew-", to joke, which we discuss above, or even root "gel-", to be cold, from which English indeed gets the words "chill" and "cold".

The pun deployed by Jesus derives from the common Hebrew parallel between light and knowledge or wisdom: verb אור ('or) means to be or give light, which is a quality possessed by the wise: "Those who have insight will shine brightly like the brightness of the expanse of heaven, and those who lead the many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever" (Daniel 12:3). The pun continues in the often deployed parallel between light and water, which we discuss in our article on the verb נהר (nahar), which means both to shine (what stars do) and to flow (what rivers do). And this in turn suggests that the Laodiceans whom Jesus addresses are close to insolvent, because the wealth they have is immobile in their society and has zero velocity: big buildings but no renters, gold tables but no food on them, and libraries full of books but nobody who could critically innovate on their traditions.

Laodicea was a city of the ancient kingdom of Phrygia, whose fabled king Gordias had concocted the Gordian Knot, the epitome of complicatedness, whose comprehension (rather than, say, brotherly love and justice, or even literature and art) connected the ruler to the kingdom, and whose equally fabled king Midas turned everything to gold by his mere touch. This happened in the 8th century BCE, which is about the time of Isaiah, who wrote contrarily: "A shoot will spring from the stem of Jesse. The Spirit of YHWH will rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding [...]. And he will delight in the fear of YHWH, and he will not judge by what His eyes see [...]. But with righteousness he will judge the poor, and decide with fairness for the afflicted of the earth." (Isaiah 11:1-4, see Isaiah 2:7 and compare 31:7 to 46:6).

Jesus urged the Laodiceans to procure gold (from him), in obvious contrast to getting gold via the effortless touch of Midas. Jesus also asked: when salt loses its saltiness (and salt was a currency, hence our word "salary"), how can it be made salty again? (Matthew 5:13). The obvious answer is: via effort, or in modern terms: "production value" or "added value". The value of any currency derives from its connection to the people's labor (the value of one dollar equals the worth of the entire US economy divided by the amount of dollars in circulation), which is precisely the very reason why we pay taxes in our local currency. We don't pay taxes to imburse our governments (because they print the money, and can help themselves to any of it, at any time), but to infuse our country's body of cash with the breath of our labor.

A country with loads of stored reserves (gold, oil, diamonds, guns) and no innovative and entrepreneurial citizens will inevitably collapse when the reserves inflate against labor (when someone invents Bitcoin, green energy, something better than diamonds, something more effective than violence). And the reserves that were once so cherished are now so worthless that people use them for landfills and the foundations of roads. The New Jerusalem which John envisioned famously has streets of gold (Revelation 21:21), because by the time the New Jerusalem descends, gold has become as mundane as common table salt, since the New World's economy will not be driven by scarcity and competition but by abundance, purpose and design. In that New World, anybody who had stored gold will have been as obliterated as king Midas was. But anyone who knew how to procure gold (or whatever the preferred commodity of the day might be) will go on procuring and inflating currency against economy (i.e. giving saltiness to salt).