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The Challenge of the City

MORNA HOOKER

According to Professor Robin Dunbar, of the University of Oxford, the human brain cannot cope with more than 150 friendships.1 Attempt to exceed that number, and social cohesion suffers. Although the manufacturers of my telephone at home have clearly been less than generous in limiting the number of my close contacts to 20 people, the creators of BlackBerry phones and Facebook have, if Professor Dunbar is correct, wildly overestimated the number of people with whom one can have a meaningful relationship.

If the human brain is indeed programmed in this way, it is hardly surprising if our ancestors met problems when they moved out of their Stone Age villages and began to live in cities: there were just too many people for them to cope with. The inevitable results were violent clashes between rival gangs – each of limited size. Those who were not among one’s 150 friends were strangers, possibly enemies, even if they lived in the next street. Cities over a certain size were unfriendly places, and the larger the city, the greater the tensions. Big proved to be anything but beautiful. We are familiar with similar problems today. Friends who live in villages tell me how good it is to live in a small community, where it is possible for them to know all their neighbours, and where they are automatically part of a social network. By contrast, those who live in large cities can be desperately lonely.

The truth would seem to be that, though cities are necessary and in many ways convenient, they are not our natural environment. According to Genesis, paradise was located in a garden, not a city. To be sure, two human beings could scarcely constitute a city! Nevertheless, the story of Adam and Eve reflects the belief common in the Bible that the garden, rather than the city, is the ideal place in which to live. When the prophets and apocalyptic writers came, at a later stage, to describe what the world would be like when God set it to rights and restored his creation, what they pictured was paradise restored: a return to the Garden of Eden, with nature yielding extraordinarily abundant harvests, men and women – and even animals – living at peace, and everyone sitting contentedly under his or her own fig-tree.

Cities are, by their very nature, unfriendly places, simply because they are too big. Inevitably, they create social divisions. In a city, there must be a division of labour: some will do this, others that – and the ‘this’ may be considerably more pleasant and enjoyable than the ‘that’. In a city, someone must give orders, and others obey. Certain classes – or castes – will perform menial and unpleasant tasks, while others enjoy privileges. The result is a division between ruler and ruled, 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 the Last Judgement. Nothing we can do on earth will have any lasting effect, but at the last day, the present evil order will be swept away, and an entirely new order be established. The other is to say: these are visions of what God intended his world – that is this world – to be like, and the judgements pronounced by the prophets – and by Jesus himself – are witnesses to the fact that men and women are failing to implement them. If men and women were truly obedient – if they loved God and their neighbour, if they were truly ‘holy’ – then the city would not be a byword for evil, but would embody what God had planned for his world. Our task, then, is not to despair of this world, and dream of a future utopia, but to endeavour to make this world what God intended it to be. True, the task is an impossible one: in spite of all our endeavours, we are not going to build the kingdom of God on earth. But for those of us who live in cities, or who work in cities, as most of us do, the biblical vision of a new Jerusalem is not just a promise, but a summons to action. The task of God’s people is to witness to what the city could be: a just society, a caring society, where every individual has his or her place, and where all live in harmony. Holiness is about transforming this world.

Jesus

But what can we learn from the New Testament about mission to the city? According to the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus came to Jerusalem only a few days before his death: the rest of his ministry was spent in Galilee, or in the surrounding regions. In spite of the saying in Matthew which we noted earlier denouncing Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum, the response to Jesus at this time is depicted as overwhelmingly positive. Crowds flocked to him from all the villages and the whole countryside. To be sure, there was opposition. Nazareth could not believe that the man next door could be anything special. Scribes and Pharisees objected to his teaching. Significantly, however, the most vocal of these are said to have come from Jerusalem.13

And it is when Jesus reaches Jerusalem that he confronts real opposition. The evangelists all tell us that Jesus was aware of what was likely to happen. Jerusalem had a long tradition of opposing the truth. Luke records Jesus as saying:

I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed away from Jerusalem. Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets, and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her brood under her wing, and you were not willing.

(Luke 13.33–34)

Nevertheless, Jesus was determined to go to Jerusalem. Matthew tells us that immediately after Peter’s confession of Jesus as Messiah at Caesarea Philippi,

Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and endure great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes.

(Matthew 16.21)

Luke tells us that from this point on, Jesus ‘set his face towards Jerusalem’ (9.51).

For the evangelists, the reason that Jesus went to Jerusalem was simply in order to die. His death and resurrection were the great transforming events in their lives, and they had taken place in Jerusalem. But there was surely more to it than that. Jerusalem was the seat of authority – of religious authority – the place where Jewish priests, scribes and Pharisees were to be found. Jesus’ message, ‘Repent, and believe the good news’, had to be addressed to them. But Jerusalem was also a city where Jesus was bound to come into conflict with the Roman authorities. By his presence there, Jesus not only confronted the challenge of the city, but presented a challenge to the city. And it was because he challenged the authorities there that he was put to death.

All the Gospels tell us that Jesus entered Jerusalem as a king, riding on the back of a donkey, much as his ancestor Solomon had done.14 Matthew and John point us to the words of Zechariah 9.9,15 which suggests that Jesus was entering Jerusalem in peace, an idea picked up by Luke.16 But Mark, who emphasizes that Jesus rides into Jerusalem (an extraordinary thing for a pilgrim coming to a festival to do!) depicts his entry as that of a triumphant king.17 Here is a challenge to the people to accept Jesus as God’s representative – and a challenge, also, to the Roman authorities, to recognize another king beside Caesar. His first action in Jerusalem is to enter the temple and inspect what is happening there. He creates havoc by driving out those who were selling animals for the sacrifices, and by overturning the tables of the money-changers, sending their piles of coins flying. Why? The answer is given in the quotation from Isaiah:

‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations,’

But you have made it a den of robbers.

(Mark 11.17)

The temple needed to be cleansed because the worship that was offered there was hollow. The religious authorities were more concerned to make money from the sale of sacrifices than to worship God: they did not truly love God – and instead of helping others to worship God, they were preventing them from doing so. The temple had been built as a place where not only Israel but all the nations could pray, and it was not fulfilling its purpose. No wonder Jesus’ action was seen as a sign of the temple’s coming destruction! What he was doing was to challenge people to repent and to worship God with heart and soul and mind and strength;18 but they failed to do so.

In the days that followed, Jesus taught in the temple. Once again, he challenged the religious authorities, this time in a parable about a vineyard, whose tenants refused to give the owner the produce that was his share, and who, when he sent servants and even his son to collect it, killed each of them in turn. The chief priests, scribes and Pharisees, listening to him, realized that he had told this parable against them.19 They were the tenants who were rebelling against God, refusing to give him the love and obedience they owed him, killing his messengers, the prophets, and plotting to kill his Son.

And now, some Pharisees and Herodians challenge Jesus. The extraordinary alliance of Pharisees, whose concern for purity separated them from those Jews who were less strict in their observance of the Law, with Herodians, political supporters of the Roman puppet king, is extraordinary, and demonstrates the danger that Jesus posed. ‘Should we pay taxes to Caesar?’ they ask. The tax to which they were referring was the poll-tax, and the question was a burning one. The Romans were a foreign power – what right had they to be in Jerusalem? Yet they did maintain law and order. In time, resentment about the tax would result in open rebellion against Rome. But the question posed by Jesus’ opponents proves to be a boomerang. ‘Show me a coin’, he says, ‘Whose image is on it?’ Jesus’ final words, ‘Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God’, is a challenge to his interrogators, and one they are not prepared to meet.20