Oleh Selvianus Hadun
What is to come? This question is seeking for the truth. It is in a quest of the reality of what is to come. Asking for what is real and yet not certain of what will come. The question is somehow searching for unknown that is to come, but there is the assurance that something or someone will come. The assurance cannot assure oneself of what is to come. The only thing that one can assure of is that there is something or someone to come. The one who is to come will give a certainty to the questioner upon his question of what is to come. The certainty of to come does not give an absolute time; either it is in the present or in the neither future nor even speaking of the past.
Venturing further into the content of the question, it is speaking of the future. “What is to come” is asking for what is there in the future. It is about the phenomenology of time of what is to come. It is never speaking about past. “The past is always already past, a past that was never in the present, never live through.”[1] The time that is being given by Derrida is referring to the future. The time is for the coming of the One. The One who is coming is uncertain in time. Although it is indeed He will come. The time for his coming is uncertain. This uncertainty makes us to search beyond of our ordinary time. His time is not as our ordinary time such as our past, present, and future. His time is something that is extraordinary. It is such as so because we never come to know when His time will come or when will be His arrival. It is something to keep us awake. Keep vigil, He is coming.
Who is He to come? This question will lead us into a deepest understanding of the time that is to come and at the same time will answer the first question of what is to come. To know who is to come is necessary in order for us to know what is to come. Although Derrida does not have faith in the Lord but he believes that the One who is to come is the Messiah. The coming of the Messiah is not the same with the coming of others which is in ordinary time. It is because of the Messiah is the One to come who causes the Messianic time. The time is not the same as an ordinary time. The one who is to come is the One who is the beginning and the end of all time. He is to come. He is the answer of the question of what is to come. The One who is to come is the Messiah.
When will You come? In human’s daily relationship often encounter such this question. It is asking for a certain time of One’s coming. Venturing into an ordinary time indeed one would frankly give an answer to that question in time wherein the receiver of the question is in a certainty of his time. This question reflects a deepest meaning in one’s life. It stays in uncertainty of time to give such an answer to “when do you come.” Indeed in such a personal perspective this question is simply reminding us to keep vigil for the One who is to come. To stay awake for the life that is to come. It is never in the present. The life that is to come is always in the future. Hence when Derrida speaks of the Messianic time, he is never speaking of the present but rather speaking of the time of the future.
The time that we are waiting for is unknown. It is identical with the time of our death. We do not know when it comes. It is like a horror time. It comes and gone without any acknowledgement of the one who is experiencing the time of death. As Derrida would narrate it to us that “death is indeed the source of a peculiar horror, not anxiety over the possibility of death, but the horror before its impossibility, the horror that death does not come, like the insomniac to whom sleep does not “come.””[2]
The uncertainty of the time of ‘when will you come’ (italic is mine) is enlightenment to us wherein it gives us a way of safeguarding the undetermined possibility, and the chance of ‘when will you come’, that of the Messianic side of coming. In this level of the uncertainty possibility of the coming of the messiah, one may think of that the Messiah will not come. This kind of realization derives from uncertainty of the time of the One who is to come. There could be skepticism of the coming of the messiah. And even the concept of Messiah would be destroyed by the uncertainty of His coming. On may think that, since I do not know when He will come, I just simply ignore that He is coming. Whether he is coming or not I can stay on my way of life. Although in the Catholic perspective, it is the way of putting oneself into the skepticism of one’s faith.
The very idea of messianic time is that the One who is to come is to come, He is coming. It is not that He ever would not arrive. There is the possibility that he will come. His coming would make the very function of the messianic time. On account of the coming of the messiah, the function of the Messianic idea is to inflame, to bring to mind the coming of the Messiah, “Viens or Venez”[3]. The coming of the messiah is something that gives us a distinction between our ordinary time and His time. It is to shield from our common time. The time of the messiah is in an extraordinary and it is not in the present but rather is always in the future. “The Messiah’s coming is actually never actually correspond to an actual historical appearance in ordinary time.”[4] Whatever situation in the messianic time, it is protected by the prudence of his essence.
The coming of the messiah is also somehow creates a skepticism. From the point of view of the Catholic Church that “Christ has died, Christ has risen, and Christ will come again.” Personally it sounds questionable. Christ was born to save mankind. God, the Father has sent Him in the form of human. He suffered and died for us, that is the part of his mission of saving mankind in the world. Then, he is coming, he will come again, physically it is to say the moment of reborn. He was there in the form of flesh, and so his being there is somehow not yet complete. The messiah’s being there is not His coming. Derrida said that even He is there, in the flesh, present in ordinary time, such a present can never be amount to his coming. Although it is the very shallow understanding of Him and he is not to be understood by the human capability. In the other hand, He will come again in the flesh, but his coming will not be understood by the human intellect. His coming is unknown and it is not noticeable by the human senses or human’s perspective.
By looking at the perspective of the Catholic teaching, the Messiah is here, now at this present time, and today. Then, the question is that why we have to wait for his coming when he is already here. We understand that waiting for his coming is an obligation for us who put our trust in him. The logic behind is that since there is someone who is to come, indeed there is also the relation with the one who is waiting. It is far indeed if the Messiah is to come. In the above it has stated that He is here, now and today, but this refers to another time. It would create another question that is “when is this now?” A now here does not project into the ordinary time as what we experience in our daily time. The “now” is destined to the time of the One who is to come, that is God. That is the reason the time of the one who is to come is belong to the time of the Messianic. The Messianic now does not stay stable at the main resident of the ordinary time but it creates a separation to distinguish between the ordinary and the extraordinary time which refers to the time of the Messiah. The Now gives emphasis on the coming of the Messiah.
What does the Messianic today, or the now? Here Derrida is telling to us about our willingness to respond to the One who is coming. How do we respond personally to the coming of the kingdom of God which is to come? As John Kaputo narrates in Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida that “the messianic “today” means if you are willing to respond by your passivity and your patience to the coming of the messiah, for messiah’s kingdom is always to come, the very meaning of the messiah is the kingdom to come, of what is structurally coming, even as it makes an urgent demand upon us now.”[5] The way that we human being supposed to do is to surrender ourselves totally to the one who is coming patiently. Hi is basically never arrived. And yet when he arrives seems it sweeps away everything. The moment He arrives, that is the moment he is gone. We actually cannot catch with his time. His time is unique. It is far away to the time that we have which is so called ordinary time.
Here John Kaputo is actually to bring about the concept of justice. Justice cannot wait for us to approach but rather we are required to keep vigil and wait for the coming of the Just. The Just one is justice. Waiting for the coming of the just must be renewal and be realized in every time. It is identical with Jacques Derrida’s concept of justice which is to be faithful to the coming of justice. Let ourselves making justice happens, now, today in this present moment of our life. The reason that we have make justice happens is that the justice cannot wait for us in order for him to come. We have to be responsible to do the truth to the coming. We need to do good and patiently waiting in order for Him to come, for his coming will cause the Messianic time, which is the era of the Messiah. The epoch of the Messiah then is never be in the present but rather is always in the future. Hence the time of the Messiah is the future messiah.
The perfect paradox of the coming of the messiah is that of the sacrifice of Abraham. This paradox is somehow narrating about the coming of the Lord to Abraham’s son, Isaac. In the paradox wherein Isaac asked to his father Abraham “father, here are the fire and the wood, but where is the sheep for the holocaust?”[6] This question is the sign of uncertainty of the son towards what is prepared. He is asking for what is about to happen. In the spirit of fatherhood which is enlightened by the power of the Holy Spirit Abraham answer Isaac; “God will provide for Himself a sheep for the holocaust, my son”.[7] The careful and loving answer of Abraham moves our mind greatly into what is to come is the will of God. we do not know what Abraham saw in the Spirit, because he did not speak of the present but rather he is speaking of the future, as he says “God will provide for Himself a sheep.” In the answer of Abraham, we can see his concern of the future, yet his son speaks of the present as he says that “here are the fire and wood.” The language of Isaac is really different from the language of Abraham wherein Isaac speaks of present in the form of “here”, while in the side of Abraham he speaks of what he does not sure of what will happen and when it will happen. It shows in his language when he says “God will provide”.
Indeed God will provide for himself a sheep, in the form of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the Son of God, who is coming as the Redeemer of the World and human kind. He is the Messiah, who is to come. The story of the sacrifice of Abraham gives us a deepest meaning of the coming of the messiah. He was patiently waiting for the provided sheep for the holocaust for he knows that the sheep will come and yet he does not know when it will come. One thing that he was sure of is that the sheep will come. It is only a matter of time. The coming of the Messiah is a matter of time, yet there is an assurance that the Messiah will come.
The Messianic time is the prophetic time. Since the Messiah who is to come is a prophet, hence the time of this prophet may also be called as the prophetic time. He is a just and merciful prophet. The time of to come is the time of the justice to come. As it is narrated by John Caputo that, “for the most unjust thing of all would be to close off the future by saying that justice is present, that present time is just.”[8]
The other image of the coming of the Messiah that we can see is Dying. We are never sure of dying. It comes like a thief in every time it comes when we are not aware of his coming. In the human side, we believe that dying happens but we do not know when the time of the dying is. The point here is that we are to keep vigil of his coming. The certainty of dying is there. Yet this certainty leads us into skepticism when we are not sure of the time of its coming. We could possibly say perhaps tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and so on so forth. It is identical with the coming of the Messiah. We cannot estimate of his coming. The time of his coming is like dying. Dying, there is no determination time for it. The only assurance is that dying will come.
It is important to know that dying is not the same as death. Dying, Blanchot would say that it is the “step beyond.” It is the step to come. Dying is never in the present. It is still to come. In the other hand, death is an event that is finite in our ordinary time. Death has arrived when it sweeps away the present life. Life is gone in the moment of the arrival of death. Death is the event of the present. It is the present since it takes place in an ordinary time. This ordinary time arrives at a certainty of time. While dying in the other side is a non-arrival event. It is an event that is to come. It is about the moment of the future which we actually do not know anything about its time. It is like the time of the Messiah. We know not the time of the Messiah.
The concept of the Messianic time is linked together in Blanchot’s notion of dying. He says that “the arrival of what is to come (the coming of the Messiah) is nothing we can control or master, nothing over the self which has any authority or powers of disposition, nothing the self can actively bring about but something summoning our deepest passivity.”[9] Here the concept of dying for Blanchot is giving us a lesson being patient and a passivity surrendering ourselves to the one who is to come. For Blanchot, there is no present for dying, no living present, no moment on the stage of living time upon which death could make its entrance; there is no time to die. Dying belongs to the one to come. Dying is not a possibility, it is not a power but rather it is the ruin of oneself. In the simple understanding would say that dying is the fragility, the patience and the passivity.
The concept of the coming of the messiah is also can be seen in the story of the foolish women and the wise women in the Bible. They were all at the same moment that is waiting for the coming of the bridegroom. They knew that he is coming, but they do not know at what particular time he will arrive. The ten of them were all preparing the torch with oil. It is sad that there were five women who were preparing their torch with oil but no an extra oil for their torch. In the contrary, the five wise women did prepare their torch with extra oil. The five wise and the foolish women were all at the same state of waiting for the coming of the bridegroom. They keep vigil. In the other side, the five foolish women were lacking of oil to keep vigil until the coming of the bridegroom. The moment the bridegroom arrives, the oil of the foolish women was all consumed. While the five wise women’s oil were still intact with their torch for they had prepared for the extra. The five foolish women here are the sign of not keeping vigil to the coming of the bridegroom.
[1] John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (United State: Indiana University Press Bloomington, 1997), 78.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid., 79
[5] Ibid., 80
[6] The homily
[7] Ibid
[8] John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (United State: Indiana University Press Bloomington, 1997), 112.
[9] Ibid
de Kuleng.id 
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