“Immediately he made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds” (Matt 14:22). And then, “early in the morning he came walking toward them on the sea; but when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, saying, ‘It is a ghost!’, and they cried out in fear” (Matt 14:25–26).
Both incidents come from the Gospel passage which is offered in the schedule of lectionary readings for this coming Sunday (Matt 14:22–33). The first excerpt, telling of a crossing of the Sea of Galilee by boat, reports a liminal experience, as the disciples cross over from one side of the lake to the other side. The second excerpt tells of a thin place moment, when the eyes of the disciples are opened up to see Jesus in a new way. Both liminal experiences and thin place moments are important in the Christian life. And often they are interconnected and occur almost simultaneously, as in this story.
Liminal experiences occur at times of transition, when we move from one place to another. The word liminal comes from the Latin word līmen, which means “a threshold”. Technically, that is the place that marks off one space from another. Its origin was the strip of wood or stone at the bottom of a doorway, which was crossed in entering a house or room.
The thresh is the place where one treads as one enters a room. So the threshold is where you take hold of the thresh, where you put your foot as you walk into a new room or new place. Anthropologists define liminality as “the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a ritual”. It is the moment when participants no longer hold their preritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete.
Sociologists say that in the liminal stage of a rite, participants “stand at the threshold” between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way, which completing the rite establishes. I wonder how that might apply the story of Jesus sending his disciples away, across the lake, while he went “up a mountain” to pray. Why has he sent them on ahead of him? What kind of experience was he anticipating that they might have, without him?
The concept of liminality was developed in the early twentieth century sociologists. It was applied particularly to religious rituals marking the movement of a person from one stage to another. More recently, usage of the term has broadened to the political and cultural arena, alongside the religious or faith area.
During liminal periods of all kinds, the experts tell us, “social hierarchies may be reversed or temporarily dissolved, continuity of tradition may become uncertain, and future outcomes once taken for granted may be thrown into doubt. The dissolution of order during liminality creates a fluid, malleable situation that enables new institutions and customs to become established.”
[I found this on Wikipedia, which references the source as Agnes Horvath, Bjørn Thomassen, and Harald Wydra, Introduction: Liminality and Cultures of Change (International Political Anthropology 2009). Accessed 18 March 2019.]
That’s where the disciples found themselves, as they sailed across the lake, pushing from land on one side of the lake, heading towards the land they could see on the other side, but on the water, in the midst of the lake: in a liminal moment.
And the liminal moment is precisely where change takes place, where a new reality can be experienced. In liminal moments, a thin place might be experienced. Is that what happened to the disciples on the lake, as they saw a figure walking towards them? A figure that they recognised as Jesus—for when “the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, saying, ‘It is a ghost!’ And they cried out in fear” (14:26).
In the Celtic world, thin places are those places where the veil between this world and the otherworld is porous. They are places where human beings on the earth sense that they are standing in a place where the sky opens up, as it were, and they are drawn into a strong connection with the world beyond—with the spiritual realm, with the place where the deity is, with heaven, if you like.
The thin place is the place where the thick, dividing barrier between “heaven” and “earth” is lessened, where it becomes thin—a place where a person feels that they could reach out and “touch God”.
Thin places are often experienced where there is a sense of mystery in the landscape, or where there is a deep sense of belonging to the land as a sacred place, a sense of being so deeply earthed, yet at a place, paradoxically, which opens up to reveal something of a transcending reality, enabling contact beyond the immediate time and place. This is particularly the case among peoples whose connection to place has remained unbroken through the ages—indigenous people in Australia, in the United States and Canada, and Celtic people in Ireland and Scotland.
For the disciples, the Sea of Galilee was familiar territory. Indeed, four of them had made their living by fishing in that sea before they encountered Jesus and responded to his call to “follow me” (4:18-22). Would they have regarded that sea as a thin place where they could encounter God? Perhaps it had become a holy place for them, as they carried out their daily tasks, and felt that the difference between themselves and the sea was falling away?
Earlier in Matthew’s narrative, the disciples had been in a boat with Jesus on the sea (8:23), when a dramatic experience took place. Crossing the sea, a huge storm whips up the water. Mark’s earlier account had described this as a lailaps, a ferocious wind (Mark 4:37); Matthew modifies his version, such that the disturbance of the water was explained as being due to a seismos, an earthquake (Matt 8:24).
In both versions, the sleeping Jesus is woken, and he stills the storm (Mark 4:39; Matt 8:26). Seeing this, the disciples have an epiphany; the moment has opened up a new insight into Jesus for his disciples, as they utter the words, “What sort of man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him?” (Matt 8:27). In asking this question, the disciples are alluding to Psalm 107, which affirms of God, “he made the storm be still, and the waves of the sea were hushed” (Ps 107:29–30). In like manner, another psalm praises God that “you rule the raging of the sea; when its waves rise, you still them” (Ps 89:9).
The question of the disciples is rhetorical; it is clear that when Jesus stills the storm, he is manifesting divine powers. Indeed, Matthew’s reworking of the story to introduce the earthquake links this “thin place” experience with other moments in the story of Jesus when the divine interposes into human life—as Jesus dies on the cross (27:51, 54), as soldiers keep watch at the tomb (28:2), and at the predicted “beginning of the birth pangs” at the coming “end of the age” (24:7–8).
That moment on the sea, in the midst of the earthquake-indicted storm, is a liminal experience that functions like a thin place for the disciples; the reality of God’s presence is glimpsed by the disciples. So it seems that on the second journey across the lake to “the other side” (8:18; 14:22), another thin place experience takes place for them. The ferocious wind and the battering of the waves places them, once again, in a precarious situation. Did they have in mind the earlier experience,when Jesus stilled the storm? The terra that leads them to exclaim” it is a ghost” (14:26) suggests that they were quite discombobulated.
Jesus had sent the disciples on across the lake ahead of himself, while he took time to go “up the mountain by himself to pray” (14:23). Jesus, of course, is often up a mountain in Matthew’s Gospel: early on, when he is tested by the devil (4:8); then as he teaches his disciples (5:1–8:1), after he had cured many people beside the Sea of Galilee (15:29), and when he is transfigured (17:1–9); and in the very final scene of the Gospel, after his resurrection (28:16–20).
The mountain, in earlier stories, had been the place where Moses engaged with God (Exod 19:3–25), where Joshua is appointed to succeed Moses (Num 27:12–23), where Solomon builds the Temple (1 Ki 5:5; 6:1–38), where Elijah experiences “the sound of sheer silence” (1 Ki 19:11–18), and where generations of faithful Israelites worshipped the Lord God (Ps 99:9). In Matthew’s narrative, Jesus is on the mountain to draw near to his Father—to find his own thin place, as it were.
So this narrative has elements that invite us to consider our own faith journey; to reflect on the liminal moments in that journey, when we have moved from one place, through a transition, into another; and to ponder when it was that we felt closest to God, to the extent that we were at a thin place, where we could reach out and touch God. The story we hear this coming Sunday, a story about Jesus and his disciples, invites us yet again to ponder our own story.
An Informed Faith 