I’m learning to pay attention to thing that crop up during the week. This week it was the term liminal space—a time between one thing and the next.
Jesus, following his Baptism, goes into the Judean wilderness for forty days and forty nights. It’s a time-span that calls to mind both the flood of Noah’s time and the long wandering of the Children of Israel. It’s meant to imply something that goes on for a long time, something beyond mere human measure. It could be exactly forty days. It could be less, or it could be more. Jesus, for all we know, could have been out in the wilderness for years.
I often imagine that Jesus spent that time thinking about what he was going to do. How do you go about healing the world? How do you get people to understand that the God of the universe is deeply in love with Creation wants a relationship with it? How do you redeem a world?
In the midst of this, there was temptation. The Devil came along and offered a few suggestions on how to accomplish this monumental task. Jesus could meet the needs of the world through their stomachs or capture their attention with awe. He could just take over and rule the world. All of them made sense. Every option was one that could change the world. But none of them were the right choice. And so, Jesus remained in this in-between, this liminal space.
Ten years ago, this year, I graduated from seminary. On a warm, beautiful, clear day in late May, I and my classmates received our hoods and diplomas and stepped out into the world. Two months after that, I was living back in the city that had been our home before, looking for work, and having no idea what I was supposed to do. A year after, I was in a job I did not enjoy and in which I would be for almost five years.
Those years led to the position I have now, one I love and that allows me to grow and to be challenged every day. But, I am still in liminal space. I still feel in-between, feel that I am waiting, and listening, and trying to discern how I can do my part in the healing of the world.
How about you? Have you wandered into the wilderness this year, or have you been in this space for forty days and nights? Have you given in to temptation or, like me, are you wondering if you have?
The story that begins this season is a strange one. It’s the one right before everything begins to happen. It doesn’t seem to advance the narrative like the birth, the baptism, or the calling of the Twelve. You’d almost begin to think it had nothing to do with the redemption story.
Unless, it’s where that story begins.