Lent #13: The City

 When Jesus saw the city,

    He wept over it. (Luke 19:42)

Since we were thrown out of the Garden, humans have longed for a city that works: “Cain was building a city” (Gen 4:17). Jesus arrives at his destination, sees the city, and weeps. There’s a city just over the hill and across the bay from us that we call, or used to call, “The City.” Since the sixth grade, when my family moved to Santa Rosa, The City was something magical to me—full of marvels and wonders. When I was fourteen, my parents took me and my sister to The City to watch the Giants play ball at Seals Stadium. My father, pointing out to center field, leaned over and said to me, “Son, that’s Willy Mays, number 24.” It was the first time I remember my father taken by something, or someone, that was not church related—this city, this ball park, this wonder out in centerfield; all worthy of our admiration, apparently.

When Linda and I got married, we moved from Santa Rosa to The City. Linda worked at Third and Market, and I, at night, sorted packages for United Parcel Services on 17^th street while attending Simpson College during the day.  On weekends, the one time we had together, we explored the city discovering our own mystical places, like this little bluff down the hill from the Legion of Honor and across the Presidio Golf Course. It was our secret picnic place from which we could view the Pacific Ocean on our left, the Bay, and the Golden Gate Bridge. It was, as the columnist Herb Caen used to write, “The city that knows how.”

Today, when we cross the bridge and make our way up Market Street, like Jesus, we weep. The city that knew how, like all cities, even Jerusalem, eventfully loses its magic. It doesn’t know how. “And so,” the writer to the Hebrews tells us, “Jesus suffered outside the city gate to make the people holy through his own blood. …For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come” (Hb 13:12&14). That’s The City that awaits us—eternally magical.