Open Messianism
From the Sketches in Messianism series
Elie Wiesel once recalled the following anecdote about the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber:
“Addressing an audience of priests, he said something like this: ‘What is the difference between Jews and Christians? We all await the Messiah. You believe he has already come and gone, while we do not. I therefore propose that we await Him together. And when He appears, we can ask Him: were you here before?’ Then he paused and added: ‘And I hope that at that moment I will be close enough to whisper in his ear, ‘For the Love of Heaven, don’t answer.’’”
No doubt, this story rather grates against what is, for some, the only game in town. In various religious circles, one would be forgiven for believing that the point of a messiah is to be right about them: that one wins or loses the game by being correct or incorrect. The messiah is like a scoobie-doo moment, when the answer is finally unmasked, or like a gameshow in which the box is finally opened and contestants discover whether or not they picked the right one.
The Buber anecdote lays bare the absurdity of the messiah as an object of knowledge to be squabbled over by different parties. The thing itself is quite lost here. And what is the thing? The messianic idea was never meant to be somebody’s right answer. The messiah is an event, a happening, an interjection in a world that cannot break its own dialectic of violence. The messianic event is something that occurs with or without one’s correct marking of it. It is the event that matters, not my rightness. The messiah is an autonomous other, an arrivant, a eucatastrophe who transforms the world; not a right answer who pops out of a box so that a particular religious group can pat themselves on the back.
This is not to say there’s nothing to be wrong about. Whether the telling is Jewish or Christian, those “studying war” or “destroying the earth” or “grinding the faces of the poor” would be awkwardly poised on what those traditions call The Great and Terrible Day. Across these traditions and beyond any religious tradition, to dream together toward images of a world finally allowed to rest into the depths of its creaturely goodness is an exercise in metanoia, a brave re-orientation: this is the messianic task, open to all without distinction. So yes, there is such a thing as vindication. But any messianic vision that is reducible to being right for the sake of being right, or of correctly guessing the box of salvation, is an objectification, an instrumentalisation, an impious and blasphemous domestication and appropriation of the messianic. The arrivant is nobody’s team mascot.
Beautifully put, David, thank you for this one. I was already humming "eucatastrophe" before you got to that word, and it seems to me that the eucatastrophic, messianic possibility almost depends on us getting it wrong, making a mess, and the meaning of that mess getting turned wonderfully inside-out. There are stories in the gospels where it seems to me like, even after Jesus delivers his punchline, everyone insists on missing the joke, and the willingness to tell stories that way is part of what I find trustworthy. The one leap of faith I can't make, which leaves me outside the fold of certain kinds of Christianity, is to imagine that there's some magic line that was crossed after Easter or Pentecost or whatever, where the lovably fallible collection of friends gathered around Jesus is suddenly transformed into an institution that doesn't constantly misunderstand and get things back-to-front, but is in possession of all the right answers, if only everyone would listen and do as we're told. And yet, as you say, this isn't an easy, anything-goes position, there are still things we can say ain't right. Talking with our friend Andrew last night about interpretations of the parable of the talents and the tradition of Midrash, we were agreeing that any wisdom story worth its salt is carrying a stack of meanings, some of them seemingly contradictory, but this doesn't mean we can make it mean whatever suits us: we're dealing with a small infinity of readings, a bounded infinity, rather than the formlessness of a boundless infinity. None of which is news to you, I'm sure, but it's good to try wording these things together.
I thought this rhymed with this quote from Meister Eckhart: We are all meant to be mothers of G-d. What good does is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly but does not take place within myself? And what good is it to me if Mary is full of grace if I am not also full of grace? What good is it to me for the Creator to give birth to his Son if I do not also give birth to him in my time and culture? This, then, is the fullness of time: when the Son of Man is begotten in us.