/lit/ - Literature

>As human beings we only have, paradoxically, a partial vision of the absolute, because otherwise the human being would die (it is not possible to see God and live). Human freedom demands that we closely examine the absolute (revelation) in the facet of its weakness, in the fragility that reveals the human in the divine, the divine in the human. Because if the absolute was revealed in its totality it would annul our freedom, which rests on the ambiguous. We can perceive it from there, but do not possess it, do not receive it completely (‘now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror’

>Christianity takes the concept of messianism from Judaism, but Judaism knows more than one interpretation of what the messianic is. In a certain tradition the presence of the Messiah brings the end of time as an unforeseen succession of facts, the final consummation of history. But his arrival was not always accompanied by the end of the world: certain other traditions, to which some formulations of Christianity were not foreign, foresee a temporary reign of the Messiah, a centrality of Jerusalem to which the nations must yield, with their gods, to recognize in the Messiah the universal government. Indeed, certain expressions of apocalyptic Judaism are also aware of an eternal reign of the Messiah, who transforms human existence and reverses history, establishing his sovereignty even over the temporal process.
Against these different conceptions of the victory of the Messiah, Jesus re-interprets, according to Luke’s Gospel, his own situation: ‘Did not the Christ have to suffer these things and then enter his glory? And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself’

>Thus Jesus appears as a Messiah who becomes the bearer of a programme of non-power, who bears the reality of a submitted people, not as the liberating superhero but from a history without fundamental power, not closed, not predetermined, not even its own victory. History remains open, waiting for the divine judgement, which is prolonged in mystery. In the midst of this history, the Messiah makes present that which transcends human reality, not from the place where this is overcome but from the place where it is deprived of its humanity, where it is reduced to a number, where it is subordinate to the law of death and to the sovereignty of the strongest. The Messiah who has to judge history, as reflected in the book of Revelation, has become present within it as a victim, as the slaughtered Lamb, who has gathered together the peoples, races, nations, and languages through his victimal blood and not his conquering power. It is the intrahistorical challenge to imperial power, but it does not oppose it as another empire, at least within history, but as its counterpart, as the voice of its victims, through the Lamb, himself a victim, who nevertheless is the true and just criterion of this history.

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