Place in the Bible

The Bible bears witness to a longstanding tension between materiality and spirituality. Isaiah denounced sacrifices and other outward rituals of faith, if they were not accompanied by a personal, inner sense of commitment to God. (Isaiah 58) Jesus commended a publican who quietly, sincerely prayed his own prayer of confession, over the Pharisee who asserted that he had done everything required of him, in an outward sense. (Luke 18.9-14) Yet it is clear in the Bible that habit-forming ritual practices are also praised and required, whether that is fastening mezuzim on the doorpost, (small boxes containing the words of the Shema )  or setting up altars, or sharing a Passover meal.

Judaism is a profoundly material faith, concerned with what people eat and wear, how they sow, grow and harvest their food, how they treat their bodies, in sickness and in health; circumcision is commanded, tattooing and cutting the forelocks forbidden, for example, and ritual bathing is a vital prelude to worship. It is not surprising that the Creation stories of Genesis emphasise that God made the world of material stuff, and declared it to be good (Genesis 1)

For Christians too, matter matters. In Jesus, the Word became flesh  and dwelt among us(John 1), despite our continual tendency to try to turn him back into words again. Neither Jewish nor Christian faith can be disembodied, a matter solely of thought or ideas.

Place is an inescapable feature of materiality, since everything has to be somewhere, and is limited to the one particular spot it is in. It is not surprising, therefore, that place is of major importance in the Bible. Abraham was led to a new land, Moses led back to a Promised Land, the prophets warned of the loss of land to invading armies, or promised a return to it from exile in Babylon.

The much fought over city of Jerusalem, with the golden Dome of the Rock
on the site of Herod's Temple.  

The New Testament, written around or shortly after the destruction of Herod’s Temple and the expulsion of the Jewish people from Jerusalem, wrestles with the idea of place in a different way, asserting that the kingdom of God now exists not in geographical land, but in the person of Jesus, and in the lives of those who follow him. Place is not abolished, but rather transformed.  The Old Jerusalem which is about to be, or already has been destroyed, is contrasted with the new Jerusalem, which will “come down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Rev 21.1) ; it is not contrasted with no Jerusalem at all. There will be “a new heaven and a new earth” not no heaven and no earth. Jesus himself is raised not as an incorporeal spirit, but as a very definite flesh and blood body, and ascends to heaven still bearing the scars of his crucifixion. There was also a profound value put on the care of the neighbour – the word derives from the Old English word “bur”, which means a dwelling (“bower” comes from the same root) ; the neighbour is the one who dwells “nigh” to us, the one who is where we are. In Greek, the same sense is conveyed by the word Jesus uses in his famous story about neighbourliness, the Good Samaritan. The Greek word, plesion, which he uses is actually an adverb meaning “near by”. The neighbour is the “nearby one”, the one who happens to be here where I am, whether I feel any particular affection or kinship with them or not.

While there is certainly a sense in which Christianity sought to transcend boundaries and borders, asserting that there was “no longer Jew or Greek” (Galatians 3.28), perhaps in part a response to their exclusion from the sacred “here” of Jerusalem, the new communities they founded were anything but placeless, giving high priority to gathering together, creating a sacred place by their presence in it, engaging in the physical rituals of baptism and Eucharist. The sanctification of “here” might have taken a different form to that of Judaism, but it was no less important.