Holiness and Mission. Morna D. Hooker
master and slave, rich and poor, people who matter and those who apparently do not count. No wonder cities create tensions – and in our own day, we see the problems that inevitably result: gang warfare; areas of deprivation and acute poverty; men and women who are living on the streets, or resorting to drugs and alcohol. Surrounded by millions, individuals lose their identity.
Last week, on the way home from a lecture, my train had barely left King’s Cross before it came to a full stop – and remained stationary for almost two hours. The reason? The delay was due, we were informed, to ‘a fatality on the line’. Some poor soul, overcome by the pressures of life, had decided to end it all. Why, I wondered, had they done so? Was it because of the pressure of living in the modern city? And what had led him or her to commit suicide, not by a private act, but in this particular public way? Was it simply that it seemed to offer a quick fail-safe method? Or was it perhaps a desire to make some impact on society? Was it the last, desperate attempt by some lonely soul to make others notice that they had once existed? Certainly their actions affected the lives of several hundred travellers and their friends for a few hours at least, maybe more.
Cities exacerbate problems and create new ones. As if to ensure that we are all aware of the challenge they present, the Evening Standard has begun publishing a series of articles on ‘Poverty in the City’, which it describes as ‘A tale of two cities’. Picking up a copy, I found myself reading:
For all the achievement of Londoners and the wonderful things that this city stands for, poverty, homelessness, lack of advantage for dispossessed young people continue to challenge us all.2
Judgement
Not surprisingly, cities get a bad press in the Old Testament. The first recorded city is Babel – a name that conjures up in our minds a tower, but the Old Testament story is in fact as much about the city as about the tower, and sadly has nothing at all to say about the tower being toppled. According to Genesis, the descendants of Noah, finding a suitable place in which to settle down, said to one another:
Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered over the face of the earth. Then the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built.
(Genesis 11.4–5)
At this time, we are told, the people all spoke the same language, and unity gave them strength, so the Lord regarded their actions as an attempt to become powerful. And because the Lord disapproved, he ‘scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city’ (Genesis 11.8). Building a city is not only necessary as a way of finding space for everyone to live; not only convenient – a way of providing food and services for everyone; not only a means of protecting people from their enemies, it is also an attempt to gain power and influence. So one gets rivalry, not only within cities, but between cities.
Babel is only the first in a long line of cities to be condemned. The names Sodom and Gomorrah were a byword for what was evil and corrupt. And cities in other parts of the world were as bad. Prophets constantly pronounced judgement on them. The book of Nahum, for example, is an oracle against Nineveh. Jeremiah 50—51 pronounces judgement on Babylon. But Jerusalem was no better! Jeremiah announced God’s judgement on the city described as ripe for punishment (see Jeremiah 6.6).
From the towns of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem I shall banish all sounds of joy and gladness, the voices of bridegroom and bride, for the whole land will become desert.
(Jeremiah 7.34, REB)
Why? Because the people have refused to worship God, have committed adultery, and have acted unjustly.
Run up and down the streets of Jerusalem,
look around, take note;
search through her wide squares;
can you find anyone who acts justly,
anyone who seeks the truth,
that I may forgive that city?
(Jeremiah 5.1)
The city will be punished because its inhabitants have abandoned both love for God and love for their neighbour. In other words, they have forgotten that they are God’s holy people, called to be holy as he is holy.
No wonder the Old Testament prophets denounced the cities! Some of them appear to have seen the cities as the symbol of evil, and hankered after an imaginary, idyllic past – the time when Israel had wandered in the wilderness. Hosea, for example, describes how God is going to speak tenderly to Israel and bring her into the wilderness, saying that she will respond as she did in her youth, at the time when she came out of Egypt.3 Jeremiah believes that when Israel lived in the wilderness, far from any city, she had been faithful to God.4 But had she? Other prophets are more realistic about the time in the wilderness – a time when, according to Exodus, Israel had been rebellious. There had certainly been plenty of tensions then – hardly surprising, since Exodus depicts Israel as, in effect, a large mobile city – a large group of people without land, without roots, and with a tendency to break into warring factions.
The prophetic tradition of denouncing cities continues in the New Testament. Jesus pronounces judgement on the small Galilaean cities that he has visited – on Chorazin and Bethsaida, which were, he declared, more wicked than Tyre and Sidon, and on Capernaum, which was less responsive than Sodom.5 Although the tower of Siloam had killed a few sinners, there were, he said, many people in Jerusalem who were equally guilty.6 Jerusalem itself was the city that killed the prophets and which refused to respond to Jesus.7 The Synoptic Gospels all record his pronouncements of judgement on Jerusalem,8 and Luke tells us that in his final hours, he urged the grieving women of Jerusalem to weep for themselves, not for him, because of the terrible fate that awaited them.9
But the most wicked city of all is ‘Babylon’ – the pseudonym for Rome – which is described in Revelation 17.5 as the ‘mother of whores and of earth’s abominations’. And yet – remarkably – the book of Revelation ends with a description of the holy city, the new Jerusalem, which is the home of God himself. The city is built of gold and jewels, and is perfect in its symmetry. From the city flows the river of life, by which grows the tree of life. The Garden of Eden and the city of God have apparently coalesced.
The author of the book of Revelation has clearly picked up another strand in the prophetic tradition – found, for example, in the promises that Sion will be restored,10 and that the nations will flock to Jerusalem, the city of God, to worship him there.11 Jerusalem is, after all, as Psalm 48.2 expresses it, ‘the city of the great King’ – an idea echoed, according to Matthew, by Jesus himself.12 The temple of God is situated there, so the city is seen as the dwelling-place of God himself. The same tradition appears in the letter to the Hebrews, whose author also speaks of ‘the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem’ (Hebrews 12.22), ‘whose architect and builder is God’ (Hebrews 11.10).
The biblical tradition is obviously ambivalent. On the one hand, cities are constantly being denounced: they are places of oppression and injustice. On the other, we have the vision of the holy city, the dwelling-place of God, a vision that inspires both the prophets and the apocalyptic writers, and which depicts men and women living in harmony, not only with God but with one another. What the city is at present – corrupt and evil – is diametrically opposed to what the city will one day be.
Now there are two ways of interpreting these visions of the future. One is to see them as a description of something that lies beyond history – a picture of what God himself will establish after