Holiness and Mission. Morna D. Hooker

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ