A Pilgrim and Alone

THE SON OF MAN has nowhere to lay his head." There is no trace of self-pity in Jesus' brusque reply to a starry-eyed disciple wannabe as he brought him down to earth. Yet these words reflect the loneliness of a pilgrim far from home.

Pilgrims and Pilgrimages

The Bible is full of pilgrims. "Pilgrim"-peregrinus in Latin-originally meant someone from abroad, although it came to mean a wanderer or even something that doesn't settle down, as in the tonus peregrinus of chant, which modulates between keys. Many of the pilgrims in the Bible are refugees, exiles, and displaced persons. Adam and Eve were exiles from Paradise, and they started it all. Anthropologists tell us that much of the human family descends from wanderers who trekked out of Africa and along the littoral of the Indian Ocean and then to all the corners of the earth. But "pilgrim" came to mean something more than coming from someplace else. It most often means someone who is going someplace in response to a call of faith.

Abraham, our Father in Faith, is the first pilgrim in that sense. Called by God to leave Ur of the Chaldees, he put his trust in God and obeyed and journeyed to a land that God would show him. There, he again believed God, who promised him that in his descendants all the nations of the world would find a blessing. God also promised the future possession of the land and sealed his promise with a covenant. Later, his descendants left Egypt in the great paschal pilgrimage that is called the Exodus. Today, the Church looks to a different Pasch and a different parting of waters, and she glories in calling herself a Pilgrim People.

The word "pilgrimage" is also applied to journeys to religious shrines. Jesus made many pilgrimages to Jerusalem during his lifetime. In our day, many people make pilgrimages to Rome, the Holy Land, and to shrines throughout the world. These pilgrimages differ from that of Abraham or of the People of God in some important respects. In leaving Ur and in leaving Egypt, those early pilgrims were leaving behind the life and security they had known. They were leaving home. They had no clear idea where they were going. They were risking everything and knew they could get there only by entrusting themselves to God. Their pilgrimages were a one-way ticket, destination relatively unknown.

Jesus as Pilgrim

Jesus set out on a similar pilgrimage: "He set his face for Jerusalem." That short phrase encapsulates his determination to trek toward the death that lay ahead as he entrusted himself to his Father.

We might guess that Jesus' pilgrimage began with his baptism in the Jordan and the subsequent rounds of the towns of Galilee, where he preached in the synagogues the good news of the coming of the Kingdom. We would not be entirely wrong. Yet Jesus' obedience draws us to a series of texts that show us that his lonely journey had begun long before and that his trek toward Jerusalem was simply the final stage of his ascent.

Though he was in the form of God, [Jesus] did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, and...he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross (Phil 2:6-8); and Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered; and when he was made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him (Heb 5:8-9).

Many people today are not comfortable with what these texts say. Our high Christology has often led us to downplay the full human collaboration of Jesus in the work of salvation while he was "in the flesh." We tend to see Jesus as sovereign Lord, in the light of the Resurrection. We can easily overlook the human cost to him throughout his life, long before he came to the cross. Or we think of him as the Incarnate Word, with so much emphasis on his divinity that we cannot imagine a real man made to deal with all the adversities of life.

Sometimes we read in religious books that Jesus did things "to set us an example." We may come away with the impression that God's Word was "going through the motions" of a human life but not living it fully. Yet the Scriptures show us that his life was more real than the life of any of us. We go through life with a lot of wishful thinking and denial. Jesus lived every moment in truth and to the fullest. No one would have ever said to Jesus, "Get a life."

Could it have been any other way? God loves us into existence and is creatively present to us at every moment as he gives us our being. When the Word became man, he did not obliterate Jesus' human nature. Rather, he perfected it-and all his human ways of knowing and choosing-through an even greater presence, a personal presence. Jesus' lived a more intensely human life because of it. He was more the obedient servant and pilgrim, not less, because of it.

To understand the connection between obedience and the pilgrim, let us go back to the notion of a one-way ticket. The true pilgrim leaves home for good. What was Jesus' home?