Theological Deep Dive
We are on the cusp of the holidays. Thanksgiving comes first, then Christmas, and as an after thought, New Years. Thanksgiving is a harvest festival with a focus upon bonds between family and friends. Christmas is complicated. There’s the commercial dimension, which already has emerged a week before Thanksgiving, and there is the religious dimension which is more complex than the quaint story of baby Jesus, Joseph, Mary, some farm animals, and singing angels. The story has waning influence in society at large, despite the resurgence of the politically violent evangelical right.
The desire for more peace and increase in well-being has always been universal, to which our stories from Homer’s Iliad to Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life film bear witness. This is precisely the point of the Jewish anticipation of the Messiah’s appearance, and the Christian contention that such a divinely appointed person has arrived. (The Christmas story/Christ event)
I read these lines by Slavoj Zizek on the subject:
A precise line of distinction [can be drawn] between Jewish Messianism and Christian teleology: for Christians, history is a process directed toward its goal, redemption of humanity, while for the Jews, history is open-ended, undecided, a process in which we wander without without any guarantee of a final result…. This approach nonetheless shirks (as Christians themselves often do) from drawing the full consequence from the basic shift from Judiasm to Christianity with regard to the Event, best encapsulated with regard to the status of the Messiah; in contrast to Jewish messianic expectation (where the arrival of the Messiah is forever postponed, forever to come, like Justice, or democracy with Derrida) the basic Christian stance is that the expected Messiah has already arrived, i.e. that we are already redeemed: the time of nervous expectations, of precipitously rushing toward the expected Arrival, is over, we live in the aftermath of the Event, everything — the Big Thing — already happened,
Paradoxically, the result of this Event is not atavism (“It already happened, we are redeemed so let us just rest and wait….”) But on the contrary, an extreme urgency to act: it happened, so now we have to bear the almost unbearable burden of living up to it, of drawing the consequences of the Act.
— excerpt Excursions Into Philosophy, “Father forgive them, for they know what they are doing” by Slavoj Zizek
