This week I’d like to offer four Bible
readings on the theme of pilgrimage. That sounds a bit obvious, given that we
are here in Santiago, one of the world’s greatest pilgrim destinations. While
we are here, we shall I’m sure learn a lot about the significance of the Camino and the pilgrimage to Compostela.
But what’s particular to this and every other pilgrimage also represents what’s
true of our human existence as a whole, which is why the symbolism of life as a
journey or pilgrimage is universal. Something of this is what I’m hoping we shall explore through the biblical texts I’ve chosen. They will, I hope, help us to reflect on pilgrimage in its relation to different aspects of life. Tomorrow I want to look at our search for meaning and truth, how pilgrimage represents “faith seeking understanding” as we try to make sense of the world’s life and our own. Next day we shall explore the ways in which pilgrimage takes us into dark places of suffering and pain, and how the actual or metaphorical journeys help us to respond to these acute questions life throws at us. Finally on Thursday, I’ll say something about recognition and hope, how pilgrimage brings disclosure, expresses God-given hungers and longings - for fulfilment, for illumination and for God.
As we are travelling through the Year of St Luke, I’m taking as the basis passages from that gospel. Of all the four, Luke is most clearly organised around the theme of the journeys Jesus makes – as a child, as the Son of Man, as the risen Lord. Indeed, I want to suggest to you that Luke’s image of Jesus is that of the archetypal pilgrim. I hope passages in the Hebrew Bible will shed light on Luke’s story. We shall use these readings in the daily offices before my talks.
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Let’s begin by looking briefly at our readings at evening prayer. My reflection is that pilgrimage is transformative because at its heart it is about the offering of life to God. And the offering of life has two outcomes: a deeper wisdom, and a renewed reverence that translates into our commitment to walk before God in our own life and immerse ourselves in the world’s life not as bystanders but participants.
In that snippet of liturgy from Deuteronomy, the worshipper is instructed to bring the offering of first fruits to “the place that the Lord your God will choose”, the text’s way of referring to the central shrine of Jerusalem where the people were commanded to journey at the three pilgrim feasts every year. It’s a symbol of acknowledging the source of all that is good about the land they have inherited, and recognising God’s mighty acts of deliverance and protection. They have made a safe journey, like we have today, and their first duty is to demonstrate their thankfulness by making this symbolic offering that stands for the good earth on which they stand, their life together in this place, the memory of how they got there, and their acknowledgment that God is the source and end of it all. The offering of life is the offering of everything that we have and are and aspire to be. No doubt all this is enfolded in the acclamation at the start of the pilgrim psalm we recited: “I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord!’”.
Going to the house of the Lord brings us to our reading from St Luke. The pilgrim feast this time is Passover and the holy family are doing what the Torah commanded and going up to Jerusalem. This isn’t Jesus’ first visit to Jerusalem, Luke tells us – his parents have already brought him to the temple to be presented after his birth. Then, the infant of forty days is compared to those two people of great age, Simeon and Anna, who receive him so gladly. Now he is twelve, and here he is again in the same place with others who are his seniors, “sitting among the teachers listening to them and asking them questions”.
Like the other pilgrim feasts of first fruits or Pentecost, and Tabernacles, Passover is a celebration of God’s words and works whose story brings memory into the present and transforms the future. In all three, the whole of life is gathered up and offered in gratitude and hope. I wonder whether this isn’t part of what Luke is getting at when, alone among the gospels, he gives us this precious narrative of Jesus’s childhood, this unique window on what one writer called “the hidden years”. Spanning as it does the interval between Jesus’ birth and his baptism, is Luke telling us something about the vocation of Jesus to be in his Father’s house as the representative human being who is already acknowledging that his life is not his own but must be offered up? Is Luke inviting us and all humanity to find our welfare and peace by following Jesus in that journey, that sacred pilgrimage into God’s very presence?
For Luke, Jesus is the emblematic man who realises the destiny we were created for in God’s image. This is why he concludes this episode in the same way that he concludes the Presentation story just before it, by recording that “Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in divine and human favour”. He might have said that the divine image went on being formed in him, not only as Son of God who must be about the things of his Father” (another way of translating “being about my Father’s house”), but as Son of Man too, the archetypal human being who is exalted in the vision of Daniel. And in the flow of the narrative, this embodiment of wisdom, stature and favour will be put on open display before God and humanity in his baptism, and then driven out to be tested in the wilderness. We’ll come to that tomorrow.
For now, and with the sense of still having only just arrived here in Santiago after our long journey, let’s stay with the image of Jesus himself arrived at the temple as the destination of that childhood pilgrimage. It would have been lovely if we could, so to speak, have recaptured our own childhood as we walked up the steps and entered the Basilica of Saint James through the Portico of Glory for the first time. I don’t know of any other church with such a marvellous sense of arrival. I was in tears the first time I came here. It was as if this mighty pilgrimage church was welcoming me home with its doors wide open, like the father’s arms open to his prodigal son, and inviting me to find my true self in God once again. I say “it would have been lovely”, because alas much of the Cathedral is under scaffolding at present and we can’t get inside through this great entrance. We’ll have to imagine it from the photos we’ve seen. But as we do, let’s also imagine the young Jesus coming into his Father’s house at that stage of life where he is becoming aware, can begin - I won’t say to find himself but certainly - to understand himself and articulate his own vocation. And to offer his life to God and glimpse how his destiny would come to be shaped as the Child and Servant and Pilgrim of God.
This, I’m sure, is the spirit in which we’ve come on pilgrimage to Santiago: like Jesus, to offer our lives afresh, to become more aware of the presence of God, how he is shaping our lives and destinies, discern and even begin to articulate the journey he invites us into and what he asks us to be and do. This is what we wish and pray for one another as we greet one another in the words of the ancient pilgrim road: Buen Camino! Ultreia!
Santiago, 13 May 2019
Psalm 122, Deuteronomy 26.1-11, Luke 2.41-52
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