What is Pilgrimage? Part 1: Israel's Experience

pilgrimage 1: a journey … to a shrine or sacred place 2: the course of life on earth.

 

This dual definition from Webster’s Dictionary immediately establishes the elusive nature of pilgrimage, especially for the Christian.  On the one hand, pilgrimage is integral to the human response to God. In a sense from the moment Adam and Eve are driven from the Garden of Eden they are on a quest, wooed, led, protected, yet also in a way, eluded, by God.

 

Abraham, Isaac and Jacob possess the land of Israel by promise yet “have no lasting home” (Hebrews 13:14, always wandering through it and beyond it in response to God’s call.

 

Israel’s formative experience is the pilgrimage out of slavery in Egypt into the freedom and plenty of the Promised Land.  They experienced all the dimensions of pilgrimage: the excitement of leaving behind the familiar and safe in order to follow God’s leading into the unknown; the times of frightening danger followed by mind-numbing monotony; times of plenty mixed in with real deprivation; all of it seasoned with experiences of ecstatic wonder as God surprised them over and over again with his gracious, demanding presence.  When they crossed the Jordan they had arrived at their geographical destination; more fundamentally, they had become the people who belong there.

 

Elijah’s flight to Mount Horeb has something of the nature of pilgrimage, as do the wanderings of the prophets and seers of Israel and Judah.  The Exile and Return reprise the Exodus and fix in the consciousness of Israel the centrality of Jerusalem and the Temple for the true worship of the Lord God.  The Torah calls for the three annual pilgrimages to Jerusalem to worship but it is clear that this was often not observed in pre-Exilic times.  It took the experience of Exile to bring home the importance of holy encounter in the Holy Place and Jews flocked to Jerusalem for Passover, Pentecost and the Feast of Tabernacles in post-Exilic times up to the destruction of the city in AD 70.

 

Psalm 84 sums it up well.

How dear to me is your dwelling, O Lord of hosts!

My soul has a desire and longing for the courts of the Lord;

my heart and my flesh rejoice in the living God. …

Happy are they who dwell in your house!

they will be always praising you.

Happy are the people whose strength is in you!

whose hearts are set on the pilgrim’s way. …

They will climb from height to height,

and the God of gods will reveal himself in Zion.