The Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead

Wordsworth wrote his sonnet ‘On Westminster Bridge’ in July 1802. Shortly before he and his sister Dorothy had taken the Dover Coach from Charing Cross at the start of a trip to Calais. In her diary Dorothy wrote, ‘The sun shone so brightly with such a pure light that there was even something like the purity of one of nature’s own grand Spectacles.’ In other words at that time of day and in that light, the cityscape was comparable to the finest that unpopulated nature had to offer. The adjectives Wordsworth uses to describe the scene would perhaps be more at home in the country; silent, bare, bright, glittering, smokeless, calm. It is as though the city is at its best when it is least like a city – there is no reference to people doing anything – they are all asleep. The normal life of the city hasn’t yet begun; the reasons why a city exists are not yet manifest – worship, trade, entertainment, politics, education have all been silenced as have crime, corruption, violence and exploitation. Which is why I have always found the final line rather disturbing, though I suspect Wordsworth didn’t intend it to be so. It is perhaps just an unfortunate trick of the English language whereby ‘lying’ can have two meanings;  but once you notice it – it becomes difficult to forget. ‘And all that mighty heart is lying still.’ In other words the whole beautiful scene as described by the poet may be a lie.
It was after all Cain the first murderer who built the first city. Cities in the Old Testament  often have a dubious reputation; there is Babel built to make a name for its inhabitants, and Sodom and Gomorrah, and Babylon and Nineveh. The Promised Land is a land of milk and honey not bricks and mortar and Jewish poets are more often than not inspired by the pastoral vision of a flock in green pastures and by still waters.
Except that is for one city – a city not founded by any Jewish hero. Such heroes tended to destroy cities as Joshua destroyed Jericho.   Jerusalem or Zion as it was first called, belonged to the Jebusites before it was captured by David and established as the capital of united Israel. Poetically Jerusalem is important because it becomes the centre of Israel’s worship, a place of pilgrimage, of longing and celebration and joy in the presence of God. The highways to Zion are inscribed on the hearts of the people. One day in the courts of the Temple is better than a thousand anywhere else.
For Jesus, however, Jerusalem was a city which had betrayed its calling. Its temple no longer bore the fruits of sincere worship, it was doomed to destruction just as it had been destroyed in the past. Jerusalem cast out and killed Jesus; so it became for Paul  a city in spiritual bondage to the old law. And yet that was not how the New Testament left Jerusalem. The image of the city was too deeply embedded in the prophetic imagination inherited principally from Isaiah and Ezekiel; so  John on Patmos dreams of a new order in the form of a new Jerusalem descending from heaven to be God’s dwelling place with his people. And so it has remained in the Christian imagination; in Augustine’s City of God, in Dante, in Spenser’s Faery Queen, in Bunyan’s Celestial City, in Blake’s new Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.
Blake, however, has a powerful sense of the ambiguity of the city as an image. Dr Johnson may have held that to be tired of London was to be tired of life, and that London held all that life can afford. For Pope and Swift and Blake London was pre-eminently a place of corruption and dissolution. It is the city of mind-forged manacles and dark satanic mills; a city of chimneysweeps, crippled soldiers, orphans and harlots.  And by the time Dickens came to describe London, the city had not improved. Dickensian London may be at its best at Christmas but for the rest of the time it is a place of  impenetrable moral and spiritual fog.
And though by now the physical atmosphere may have improved perhaps the mental fog has not. How does living in London affect our spiritual imagination? Does our experience of the city help  us in any way to respond to the imagery of the heavenly Jerusalem? How can the experience of city life help us to imagine a more perfect life with God? How can the image of the city be redeemed by the theological imagination?
We might begin by reflecting on the difference between nationality and citizenship. Nationality is a given, it is embedded in language and tradition, wherever I go in the world I am still English. Citizenship on the other hand involves choice; it is something I acquire. The city is a place I can choose to identify with or not, it is a network of relationships in which I can find a part to play or not. And that network of relationships will change who I am, often in ways of which I am not aware.
And the second principle of the city is inclusion. In the new Jerusalem no gate is ever shut; the leaves of the tree of life  grow there for the healing of the nations; all tears are wiped away and mourning and crying and pain are no more. And so the representatives of the nations flood into the city bringing with them their own gifts and glory. The city is a place of healing and reconciliation and generosity.
 And the third principle of the city is exchange. City life began perhaps out of the recognition that a better life was to be led by exchanging what one could grow and make oneself with what others were growing and making so that each lived a richer life from others. And from such exchanges grew others – the recognition that burdens could be shared and that we must have courage both to relinquish and to bear. The un-exclusive life of the city is therefore also a vicarious life as we bear one another’s burdens. But this reciprocity can extend into the structure of the city’s life which might be described as an hierarchical republicanism. Thus John describes the inhabitants of the city as those who both serve and reign.
In effect the life of the city has the potential to become the human equivalent of the life of the Trinity. It is where we learn the principal of Trinitarian co-inherence. The persons of the Trinity inseparably co-inhere yet without coalescence or commixture.  Citizenship means relationship in which I find myself to be more than I thought, through finding you to be more than you seemed. And it is the city which gives that to you – for in the city you cannot choose to whom you will relate. In the city no-one can live to himself or from herself. As Jesus put it to the disciples, ‘Others have laboured and ye have entered into their labours.’
What this means in practice here in London – would require perhaps a spiritual revolution to achieve. Only a new sense of spiritual citizenship and spiritual courtesy will overcome the inequalities, prejudices, vulgarities, cruelties and physical exhaustion of the modern city. And such spiritual courtesy would inform the life of the city through the welcoming of strangers, through the  reconciliation of alienated communities, through a more equal sharing of the city’s wealth, and through the healing of those who feel that they have nowhere to belong. Above all the healing of the city and the test of true citizenship can be found in the words of the one time Dean of the city’s cathedral: ‘I am no companion for myself… I must not be alone with myself… I am the Babylon that I must go out of, or I perish.’
           
Those who know the work of Charles Williams will recognise that some of his ideas have been used in this sermon.