The Messiah is Always Someone Else

From the Sketches in Messianism series...

Every now and then someone will take a fancy that they themselves might be the messiah. Occasionally someone might become quite convinced. This is of course frowned upon and associated with tales of farce and disaster. But there is a softer, more diluted version, in which it is said that we are all, collectively, the messiah we await. Or, from a Christian perspective, that we are the returning Christ, and so on.

I've heard this quite often. There's a sort of pragmatic mysticism about it. Certainly, from Christian quarters, the notion is sometimes used as an appeal to good sense, warding off right-wing second-coming fantasies about an apocalypse that is expected to destroy enemies of the West. There's also something in this idea that serves to mitigate the madness of anticipation that is rather common to messianic sensibilities.

I am a disbeliever. The messiah is always somebody else, and never myself. I think the idea that we, collectively, are the messiah, is a collapsing of the messianic idea. I also think that, in spite of its best intentions to diffuse destructive cultish fervour, it leads to things more troubling than that of the odd individual with a messiah complex.

Messianism is characterised by its own particular structural sensibility. It's like a plant turning to face the sun, or like two columns leaning inward to make an arch. There is the agency of faithful life that orients itself toward some hope, which remains distant, strange and other. Meanwhile, this hope, with its own autonomy and agency reaches back toward faithful life, to meet it in good faith. The present age of loss leans toward images and whispers of an age to come. But the present cannot bring about the age to come by its own powers. It would only reproduce itself over again in the act of force. It relies on the grace of this other; this age to come, which longs backward, in love, to redeem, emerging on the horizon by its own agency.

This rather mystical sounding second part of the messianic vision is a source of anxiety because it is unknown and out of our control. In its unknowability it is at risk of being the subject of controversy, division and conflict. Is it this or is it that? Will it land in your favour or mine? Does it even exist? Will it ever come? This unstable realm of the unknown could so easily be solved by absorbing the second part of the image into the first: by assimilating the messianic into our own keeping and agency.

To simplify this structure into one neat thing, from a tenuous dialogue to solid monologue, is to collapse everything that makes it messianic. It is no longer messianism, which lives in the longing of questions unanswered. Instead, it becomes one linear, forward-moving thing: it becomes progress. There is nothing here greater than the tip of the spear: the fastest advancing human agent; the loudest voices and the winning players. This is a managerial worldview, which carries the wound of power from which it cannot save itself or anyone else. After five hundred years of progress, it has become difficult to predict which of our innovations will destroy us first. I don't consider progress to be a sensible diffusion of the messiah complex, but a multiplication of it, and a normalisation of its delusional instabilities. I prefer to stay with the trouble of creaturely good faith, toward possibilities beyond myself.

There is an idea that commonly floats around Christian circles, that one might help a person by being the hands and feet of Jesus who lovingly goes to meet them. Very well, but it's worth noting that in the messianic texts this formula is reversed. The messiah is not embodied by the first person, the I, who goes to help some poor Other. The messiah is embodied in the second or the third person, the Other to whom I offer help. The messiah is never I, but always somebody else.