In Catherine Keller’s brilliant essay titled Derridapocalypse along with Stephen D. Moore in her book Intercarnations, occurs this striking passage from Jacques Derrida, one of my favorite Philosophers.
Derrida here quotes an anecdote about the Messiah by Maurice Blanchot, in which the Messiah appears one day at the gates of Rome, but disguised as a beggar or leper - a dissimulation designed to defer his advent, as it turns out. One of those who lays eyes on this ragged Messiah does see through his disguise - but tellingly elects to reveil rather than reveal him, putting the degenerating question to him: “When will you come?”
For the Messiah, in order to be the Messiah, can never actually be present, can never actually have arrived, any more than justice - justice beyond the law, that is - or hospitality - hospitality beyond reciprocity - can never simply be assumed to be present, to have arrived. To assume their arrival would be to evade their demands.
Derrida’s “messianicity without messianism” would be a “waiting without waiting”, which is to say “a waiting for an event, for someone or something that, in order to happen or ‘arrive’, must exceed and surprise every determinant anticipation.
The Messiah keeps coming as the hungry, the naked, the sick, the homeless, the poor, the prisoner (cf. Matt 25:35-45). We dread this appearance of his. Instead, we keep looking for a Messiah who comes in great glory, splendor and power to bring in his justice and spill the blood of all his enemies. Ironically, we don’t seem to dread this terrible bloody appearance of his. We keep looking for a supernatural one time novum that we miss the messianic moments that come and go every day. The novum then becomes the norm.
As Caputo would say, the very function of the Messiah is not to arrive, but to be coming, to evoke or provoke the come. The Messiah is always to come. For Caputo, it is the impossibility of the arrival is, at the same, the condition of its possibility. It nourishes our desire for the event and so keeps the future open.
It is this possibility and the openness that propels us, if we have the eyes to see, the Messiah whose specter looms over us, the Emmanuel who is always with us in the “poor you will always have with you”. Yes, the Messianic leave behind its traces, its specter looms, leaving behind rich residues that have the potential to determine the future.
May we hear the bells loud and clear this Advent.
Advent 2019.