Opinion | Start Looking, and You’ll See Roads All Over the Bible

Jesus hungered for the same things we do: to tuck into a tasty dish amid noisy banter and easy laughter. What we would give these days to pull in close around a table for dinner with friends, elbows bumping, passing heaping plates from hand to hand?

Priests and pastors across the church have been grasping for metaphors to help us make sense of this time away from the table, and one another. Some have framed it as a fast from communion. Others have struck upon the metaphor of the wilderness: an arid, unforgiving desert traveled by the Israelites for forty years. We haven’t been quarantining for 40 years, but at least in the wilderness, the Israelites had one another.

I’ve been drawn to a different metaphor. Jesus gathered people (especially around tables), but he also scattered them. Early in the Gospels, Jesus sent his newly recruited disciples out to heal and cast out demons. They didn’t have much in the way of supplies, and in two accounts, they’re sent not in pairs, but entirely alone.

Start looking, and you’ll see roads all over the Bible. These solitary travelers journeyed in situations of great uncertainty, much like our own. Their destinations may have been clear, but their futures were less so. Somewhere along the way, however, they always encountered something unexpected: the astonishing presence of the sacred.

Jacob, for instance, ended up in a wrestling match with God as he journeyed. A court official of the Ethiopian queen is baptized by the side of a thoroughfare. Two disciples trudging along a dusty byway, having heard the news of Jesus’ death, find that he was walking with them all along. And Paul hears God’s voice and ends up blind on the way to Damascus.

A road is an unlikely metaphor for a pandemic that has us stuck at home. But what happens when we see ourselves as purposefully scattered — sent out on an unexpected journey, traveling solo? In the bible, the road is often a place of desolation and isolation, but also of encounter. A road has direction; it carries us from an old life to a new one.

Perhaps there’s something about being jolted away from our rituals and routines for a time that helps us see their value in new ways. We never planned to walk this path, but it’s given us a shock of clarity. At once, we are suddenly unemployed, attempting to both parent and work full time, hesitating about next year’s college plans, or fearful of illness.