A City upon a Hill

A city set on a mountain – or, as traditionally translated - a city upon a hill.

What images does that call to mind for us as Americans?

Barack Obama in 2006, Ronald Reagan in 1980, John F. Kennedy in 1961.

All of them, of course, were referencing the first Governor of colonial Massachusetts John Winthrop's use of Jesus' words in 1630, in his famous sermon, A Model of Christian Charity, which warned his fellow immigrants as they were about to start their new nation in America:

For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. … We shall shame the faces of many of God's worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are a going.

What a warning, indeed!

And how, we well might ask, has it turned out in this city upon a hill, in this now big and immensely rich and powerful - perhaps too rich and too powerful - country about to celebrate its 250th birthday?

Winthrop’s words were a warning – not a boast or a brag. So they must be for us. Jesus himself was warning – or, perhaps, we might prefer to say challenging – us to do what it takes to make the city’s light shine. Centuries earlier, Isaiah warned what we need to do: remove from your midst oppression, false accusation and malicious speech; bestow your bread on the hungry and satisfy the afflicted; then light shall rise for you in the darkness, and the gloom shall become for you like midday.

So, if our country seems so exceptionally gloomy right now, we should know why.

Back in 1630, John Winthrop instructed his compatriots on what it would take to make this city upon a hill shine: We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.

But what have we as a nation done instead? Not that obviously! Nor much of what Jesus in his great Sermon on the Mount commands us. Last week we heard Jesus’ introduce his invitation to join his kingdom, his Beatitudes. No politician is lobbying to post the Beatitudes in schoolrooms. But the Beatitudes and Jesus’ follow-up warnings about salt and light and being a city upon a hill are at the heart of Jesus’ challenge to the rich and powerful alternative kind of city we have become instead.

In a world which admires the rich and glorifies their scandalous misbehaviors, it is the poor whom Jesus has pronounced blessed. In a country which unleashes armed violence against its own citizens, it is those who mourn their murdered neighbors in Minneapolis who are pronounced blessed. Amidst an obsession with unjust power, domination, and control, it is those who hunger and thirst for justice for their immigrant neighbors who are pronounced blessed.

In his The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith famously warned that the virtually universal human tendency, the "disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and powerful, and to despise or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition" is the "great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments."

Membership in the kingdom of God, the only true city upon a hill, both challenges those virtually universal sentiments and the behaviors they inspire, and also invites us and directs us and enables us to change – to change ourselves and to change our world, one person at a time, one day at a time.

As we sang together at Saint Patrick's Cathedral a few days ago on the eve of our new Archbishop’s installation: Shame our wanton selfish gladness, Rich in things and poor in soul, Grant us wisdom, grant us courage, Lest we miss thy kingdom’s goal.

Homily for the Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, February 8, 2026. (Isaiah 58:7-10; Matthew 5:13-16).

Photo: President-elect John F. Kennedy's "City upon a Hill" speech, Massachusetts legislature, January 9, 1961.