The Face of the Other

From the Sketches in Messianism series

“In the early years of Christianity, it was customary in a Christian household to have an extra mattress, a bit of candle, and some dry bread in case the Lord Jesus should knock at the door in the form of a stranger without a roof…”

In this vignette from the past, Ivan Illich draws on a trope that has always haunted the messianic idea: the messiah figure who is not some distant enigma or some super hero who tarries at the end of time, but in fact walks among us every day. The Messiah appears, disguised as the stranger, the other, the person who is stood before me… whose presence is, in effect, a question: what will I do?

Illich reiterates this idea routinely in his conversations with David Caley, in Rivers North of the Future. It is, for him, a central tenet of faith, and the heart of his social and political worldview. It constitutes his understanding of what is meant by that contested term, “gospel”. He relates this trope, of the Messiah who appears in the form of one person and then another, to the story of the good Samaritan, though perhaps it connects more directly to another parable: the story of the sheep and the goats. Here, the messiah figure describes a judgment day in which it revealed that this character who has remained hidden, haunting radical imagination at the margins of history, was not absent after all. The Messiah appeared to all parties in the form of the person without food, or shelter, or clothing, or the imprisoned.

There are many echoes of this. The practice of leaving a spare place at the table and the door ajar at the passover goes back to early rabbinic Judaism (though the place is for Elijah, who is the harbinger of the Messiah). A similar idea comes up in the book of Hebrews: “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing so some have entertained angels without knowing it”. This harkens back to Abraham’s angelic visitations in the Book of Genesis. There is a sense, reaching all the way back through Judaism that you can never be sure who is really stood before you. Each person arrives as a strange and unknowing messenger of possible futures. Every encounter is a fault line, a moment of truth where you live out the politics of the future toward which you have set your face. This isn’t a test, but a revealing of what is really happening. This trope calls to virtues: friendship and hospitality. Both of these involve the risk of the unknown. Both neglect history’s imperatives of power and control. To welcome the messianic arrivant is a political gambit.

I’ve written a fair bit in this series about what I have called messianic apophasis: about the otherness and autonomy of the Messiah. The Messiah is always somebody else; always to the side of knowledge and power and never an objectified idea, or an instrument of religious or political control. And yet, paradoxically, there can be no messianic recognition without encountering some reflection of our own hope in this other… some stirred memory of a dim future.

It would be easy to keep all this in a box of ideas; to keep the messianic in the long grass of obscurity and unknowing. But the unknown need not be distant or esoteric. The unknown is a matter of imminence and possibility. How many of history’s discontents have revolved around controlling the problem of the unknown other? Messianic imagination transforms the unknown into a realm of possibility, awe and resurrecting encounter.

As Illich sees it, and as the parable of the sheep and goats tells it, you don’t really know who it is that you encounter in the person stood before you. But within this vision you can know something. You can know that wherever you engage the energies of hospitality, friendship and mercy (these which we have elsewhere described as weak messianic power) the door is ajar to the possibility of resurrection.

Messianic imagination among the pantheon of ideas is nothing. Encounter is the only meaningful locus of anything described here.