Life in the City

Psalm 15:1-5
Deuteronomy 4:25-31
2 Corinthians 1:23-2:11
Luke 15:1-2, 11-32
Psalm 48:1-14

Today’s passages are about being-together, something like a discussion of polis. This is a quality that is more spatial than simply social or familial. The morning Psalm asks “O Lord, who may abide in your tent? Who may dwell on your holy hill?” The evening Psalm praises God in His city, and ends with references to this city’s features. “Walk about Zion, go all around it, count its towers, consider well its ramparts; go through its citadels…”

The other passages introduce absence from the city. The OT reading from Deuteronomy tells the Hebrews that “The Lord will scatter you among the peoples” and in the Gospel we get the Prodigal Son, who squanders all he has in a distant country and then gets stranded there.

It’s easy to assume these are just metaphors and that God’s city is a figure of speech. But why this metaphor and not another? Just to add variety? Don’t the qualities of the image count for something? Otherwise they are just words. A degree of literalness gets you someplace richer. Familial relationships occur in space, by being together to each other, the intern notwithstanding. So does the relationship with God. And a city, polis, isn’t just a place. It is a web of interdependent beings and forces, the thrust of physical structures, the churning of climate, and the ways people help and harm, entertain and disturb each other. God exists in such a web of relationships between physical, natural, and human being. Recently I read an article in The Believer by Jenny Price, a nature writer talking about how Los Angeles is the perfect place to write about nature because it is a place where humanity and nature constantly encounter each other, and where all of the impacts of humans in nature reveal themselves when you look for them These are the kinds of organic relationships that define the city, not just the buildings dropped on the street grid.

Paul’s letter touches on the nature of relatedness in a community. It’s one of those almost chatty letter covering early church family business. I decided not to come to your house—we’d just get on each other’s nerves, and what could would that do—I still love you, but you’re driving me nuts.” This is a family going through a little thing. The key point in the passage is “Anyone whom you forgive, I also forgive.” If they are going to become a community, the polis, at the end of the day the participants will have to figure out a way to share experiences and decisions, to get to the same place on important things. I’m reading Danielle Allen’s book The World of Prometheus, on punishment in Athenian society. An essential aspect of Athenian democracy was the ability, in certain kinds of cases, to convert the isolated anger of the individual into a collective anger shared by the city and expressed in city-regulated actions of judgment and punishment.

In a passage like this one from Paul, the Bible offers us a glimpse of polis, of humans living, in the Christian view with God, with each other, in society, in space, in time.