Biblical Motif of Liminality

Biblical Motif of Liminality 

Class Readings: Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture

October 12, 2015

Wilderness as a liminal space of spiritual transformation runs as a theme throughout the entire Biblical account, always connecting interior, spiritual transformation to an external, physical place. In Genesis, God placed Adam and Eve in the intimate setting of a garden, where they walked and communed with God freely. Abraham was called by God to leave his home country, trek across the perilous north African desert, and settle in an unfamiliar land. Moses received the ten commandments in the midst of a smoky, fiery cloud atop Mount Sinai. Elijah was called by God to dwell beside a dried up brook and receive his food from a raven. King David grew up as a shepherd boy, protecting his flocks from the wild animals that roamed the untamed country side of Israel. 

In the New Testament John the Baptist preached a gospel of repentance, the coming of the messiah, and the establishment of the kingdom of heaven on earth out in the wilderness. Jesus himself was driven by the Spirit out into the wilderness for forty days before beginning his ministry and often hiked to the top of the rugged, arid mountains that line the Sea of Galilee to pray in solitude. In first century Israel the mountains were a place where revolutionaries would go to preach their message. The landscape Jesus chose to speak in undergirded and authenticated the true revolutionary nature of his message of the kingdom of heaven. The one common theme that ties all of these great Biblical characters together is that they experienced spiritual transformation and encountered God in a wild place. 

The Israelite’s journey through the wilderness in the Old Testament mirrors the inner salvific pilgrimage that all Christians experience in the New Testament. If the Old Testament teaches us the power of experiencing theophany through the external landscapes of the earth, the New Testament invites us to explore the backcountry of our own hearts. In the Biblical narrative, the physical and metaphysical are always pointing to each other. As Turner puts it, “if mysticism is an interior pilgrimage, pilgrimage is exteriorized mysticism.”(p.7) Wilderness, as a Biblical motif, is a liminal place where an individual becomes exposed to beauty and imposed by mystery. It is in this threshold of potentiality that an individual becomes open and available to spiritual transformation by observing life as a unified whole where everything belongs, beholding and coming alive to the beauty of creation, encountering a wild, mysterious God who cannot be controlled or manipulated, and becoming awakened to mindful, prayerful, living.