The Suffering Servant unites these strangers, ritually impure or unclean by the standards of some orthodox rigorists, as a present enactment of that eschatological end of unified tribes, languages, and nations–as well as the destruction of the ideological barriers and hegemonies that characterize the relationship between competing empires and their subject peoples.

The intertextual affinities are compelling–figural linkages directed at and by the Spirit of God and his Messiah, in other words, by the Trinity.  First, the reader is reminded of Jesus’ entry into (and exit from) the wilderness at the behest of the Spirit in Luke 4: 1, 14.  Likewise, the Spirit both draws Philip to the Ethiopian, to the reading of the messianic text, and away from the same and to another destination.  Indeed, The Spirit descends and empowers at baptism as it did at Jesus’ baptism, at which the Father openly affirmed his Son’s identity/mission and the Spirit’s rightful, substantial affinity with the Son.  The Ethiopian, at one time quite “distant” from these happenings, is swept up into the apocalyptic work of God.  Also, the ascended Son is at work in Philip, carrying forward the mission of God to heal, renew, and reconcile all creatures to Life.  Jesus lives both in reception and forward movement.  Jesus, then, permeates the entire scene; he is found as that which animates the instructor, recipient, and even text. 

The baptism of the eunuch also evokes memories of the exodus from Egypt.  This baptism signals the redemption of the past–the evils of the past by recapitaulating them through the death, resurrection, and ascension of the Son of Man.  North Africa would always be associated with the captivity, bondage, and death of the Hebrews.  From where slavery and subjugation had reigned comes a friend of God, a point of reconciliation and unification.  Greece/Rome, North Africa, and Israel find themselves at the juncture of God’s Word, Baptism, and Spirit.  The nations must meet one another where the Word of Life is proclaimed and fulfilled.  The place of enslavement, empire, and the “hard heart” bent upon self-preservation confronts a place of mutual reception.  Here, the ”pharaonic heart” that attempts to stave off God’s deliverance of the oppressed is resolutely dissolved, thereby releasing God’s people into the journey.  In this case, the receptive heart and consequent immersion of the eunuch–a profound reversal of the Pharaoh’s heart that resists the cries of the suffering servant(s)–serves as a paradigm of political practice.  The “royal” or imperial, along with the carriers of the messianic message, are both called to listen closely to, and be immersed into the judgment of, the suffering servant.  Both direct their energies to the center, where the messiah embraces all of his brothers and sisters, hence unseating the royal from the place of decision and control.  A messiah offered up for his own undoes the distant, pretentious claims of rulers, powers, and/or wealthy officials that, regardless of promises of “better days,” effectually reinforce callousness toward the flesh and blood struggles of those that have built their cities.  This catechetical listening and creaturely humility, therefore, is the true enactment of reconciliation with Christ at the center, where one finds the thoroughgoing union of hands from different nations or peoples that at one time only resisted and fought one another.

Our familiarity with the Works of Mercy, which are themselves primarily derived from Gospel texts, is sufficient to remind us about the centrality of extending mercy toward the poor,  oppressed, imprisoned, and hungry.  In fact, modern philanthropic sensibilities and movements of social justice often are dependent upon the drive to offer mercy and assistance to those who struggle to meet basic needs at and beyond subsistence level.  This approach, sadly enough, can become a form of “dangerous compassion” to the extent that it underwrites a most rigid caregiver/patient relationship, whereby care, compassion, and even redemeption is delivered unilaterally–namely, from the caregiver to the “patient” or “client.”  Hence the call to go “beyond charity,” as John Perkins has repeatedly urged.  The dissolution of this form of perverse paternalism, by which the poor are, by and large, subject to the kindness of others has been initiated in a number of works, including that of Jean Vanier.  Vanier , founder of the L’Arche movement, has been a key proponent of a social or community ethic in which those most often considered the shameful and unproductive (the profoundly disabled and afflicted) residents among us are placed squarely in the center of community and, moreover, are deemed the core members of the community.  Those who live with these core members are not their “caretakers” in the usual sense, but intimate friends with whom they share all of life.  The relationship is constituted in a bilateral fashion, each person living into the joys and frustrations of the other. 

Fundamental to this account of community relationship and sociality is the reception of mercy from the poor.  In Works of Love, Kierkegaard makes a striking case for “mercifulness” as a work of love ”even if it can give nothing and is capable of doing nothing.”  We are tempted to think that the scale of the monetary donations is directly proportional to the “heart” or mercy that initiated the act of charity.  If this is the case, then the wealthy have secured all prerogative in the realm of gift; that is, the wealthy initiate charity while those without such financial wherewithal must simply assume their rightful place as recipients of charity and mercy.  This is, in Marxist terms, a tragic and yet highly effective heap of ideological chicanery.  To be sure, it acquiesces before the vicissitudes of a socio-economic structure that concentrates wealth in the hands of the few who, apparently, are also the generous and merciful few that will ameliorate the condition of the poor.  But, as we know, this type of giving has changed little to nothing at the structural level.  Kierkegaard, in characteristic fashion, provokes us to enter the cries of Abel and the urgent appeals and dire warnings in the Epistle of James and (1) Peter 3:7, by virtue of which we come to know how the worker groans to God about our patent failure to pay justly and our concomitant failure to speak about how the poor and wretched may practice divine mercy. 

“To be able to be merciful”, Kierkegaard asserts, is far greater than having money and hence the ability to give.  My embrace of traditional philanthropic or charitable sensibilities (the “default” mode of interpreting donation) has not only tended to disregard the unequal distribution, and disproportionate hoarding, of wealth and goods that should be shared with others in order to maintain their vitality in all its dimensions, but it has also denied the needy the ability to give precisely because the “giving” that counts remains financial (and even material) giving.  Viewed more generally, in other words, we have substantially denied them, in our ”money-worship,” the ability to give per se because we tend to equate merciful giving with notable monetary gifts.  By means of a deft exposition of the gospel account of the poor widow’s donation of two “pennies” and an alternative version of the Samaritan story (in which the Samaritan has no money for accommodations or extended care), Kierkegaard is left, near the end of the chapter, begging the poor and wretched to practice mercy in light of our mercilessness–”do not be unmerciful enough,” he pleads, “to call down the punishment of heaven upon [the] mercilessness” of the rich (299).  We are, therefore, in desperate need of the mercy of the poor.  The poor’s mercy is the mercifulness that counts; it is the mercy of ”the eternal.”  We cry out for the money to meet this and that need, to build more hospitals and launch new social programs, but without any appreciation of mercifulness.  Mercifulness is what we will talk about in the new heavens and the new earth, not money and programs.  “Mercifulness is how it is given,” whether in a penny or in thousands upon thousands.  Mercy, in light of this construal, does not have to ”do something” spectacular, because,  in such case, this display would simply distract us from seeing the most essential aspect of the giving:  the mercifulness.    

Kierkegaard, then, posits the poor as exemplars of the mercy of “the eternal” and thereby subverts the tendency to construe the poor as merely recipients of mercy and aid.  Jon Sobrino, in No Salvation Outside the Poor, goes beyond this and theologically deepens and articulates the life of the poor.  Namely, he places them squarely within God’s economy of salvation.  Put another way, he situates the poor, by virtue of their mercy, within the salvific work of God.  It is precisely their bearing the rich as a burden, while still remaining merciful, that stands as a sign of God’s own steadfast love and mercy.  This is not, as may seem to some, a thoroughgoing romanticization of the poor and (socio-economic) poverty. Sobrino directly acknowledges the tragedy of sin among and between the impoverished (mysterium iniquitatis). 

The salvation God effects, in Sobrino’s assessment, is one in which the poor figures prominently because “the world of wealth believes that it already possesses ‘salvation’ and the means that lead to it, precisely in virtue of its not being the world of the poor  It cannot conceive that salvation might come to it from without, much less from the poor” (71, italics mine).  This is among the clearest of Sobrino’s claims in his somewhat fragmented and unsystematic ruminations on the salvation that comes from the poor.  Because we in the modernity have either embraced or acquiesced before the rather strident absolutization of scientific prowess and wealth accumulation, it has been easy to, as a corollary, to embrace “salvation from above.”  However, if we were to immerse ourselves in ”the people” (primarly, the forgotten, the infirm, the poor) in such a way that does not emerge from a privileging of ”the people of God“, then we would side closely with those to whom Jesus not only gave names (e.g., Lazarus) and new life, but with whom he spent a large portion of his time–with whom he identified (Matt. 25). 

Although Sobrino’s language at times betrays a definite voluntarism, and is thereby insufficiently participationist or eschatological, the tenor of his essays is unequivocal.  Salvation must “pass through” the poor–it must, in appropriately Lukan terms, occur in eschatological solidarity with the poor so that it may be manifest in lived history that the last are and shall be first.  Sobrino’s emphasis on historical transformation amplifies the virtues of the poor.  In particular, Sobrino highlights the poors’ appreciation of life itself and their resilience in sharing goods and caring for fragile, broken human life, so that the non-poor may with eyes opened and softened hearts receive their hope.  If they are hopeful, then we must, as Sobrino comments, “hope they also have hope for the rest of us” who dwell in a culture of insatiable appetites and can so easily take life itself for granted.  Hence, we need the poor to disrupt our reified chain of mechanisms that includes consumption , discontentment, and further seemingly compulsory “novel” consumption.  In such a predicament, Sobrino urges, it appears we must “let ourselves be saved by the poor” (pg. 90), or even “be evangelized by the poor.”

It is, then, what the poor embrace in life itself that must awaken the non-poor, especially the rich who constitute the minority population of the world. This awakening is inextricably linked to resurrection.  The vindication of the Messiah–the justice brought to this victim–effectively mediates, and serves as the first fruits of, a salvation for and through the victims.  The victims, in Christ, stand eschatologically counterpoised to the idols that created them–idols, in tragically ironic twist, that are teeming with promises of salvation in the here and now.  Let us not be fooled, as Sobrino asserts:  where there are idols there are victims.  The poor are the ideal site for counter-idolatrous action, a place that exposes the lies of Progress, equal opportunity, and the like, while the fertile soil for alternatives is cultivated.

Hence, the “apocalyptic rectification” (to borrow from J. Louis Martyn) inherent in Messiah’s arrival, and the messianic community which the Spirit forms, is called to live in the “now-time.”  It is now that everything must change (and is changing)–it is now that self-denial must foreground the way of kenotic servanthood that absorbs and cancels our obsession with, and thoroughgoing fear of, death.  This time of now bespeaks a relentless demand, an urgency that can only be satisfied because, as Benjamin insisted, the Messiah hears and sees the miseries of all the oppressed and silenced communities that have endured “un-living” wages and consequent disrepute.  There is no time in which they should not be heard–the Messiah always hears them and lives for them.  Baptism is thus a fruitful ecclesiological image:  it is those immersed or buried in the world of death and also carrying an indestructible promise at the very same time that can arise from, without annulling, that suffering.  The baptized can now live in the elevation of life out of death at each instant of encounter with the famished, disgraced, afflicted–among both the poor and the rich; indeed, the buried and immersed may find just this reversal when responding in bold speech and faithful action.  In this vein, Tripp York writes, “For the Anabaptists, their baptism of water–an act of civil disobedience that immediately implied execution–was primarily intelligible because it assumed the possibility of the baptism of blood” (93, The Purple Crown).  The immersed, therefore, must act now because they follow the way of the cross and cannot deny such a cross.  And the cross is that on which the death of an enemy of the state is achieved–more certainly, the method of the powers and principalities that have already lost and will not be revived, of that which was judged in its own judgment.  We can, therefore, be paradoxically humble and bold in seeking land reclamation, work for the poor, as well as affordable food and housing for the marginalized and forgotten.  We can seek rent control and, beyond that, new communities in which profit and security is not the goal of condominium and home owners.

Rubenstein, in a rather impressive rhetorical flourish, highlights how wonder is itself what intrudes, against all possibility, upon this form of representational might: [w]onder would have to break into the time-space in which it is most unlikely–the one in which beings are least preserved, least cared for, most objectifed, most abandoned. There, where wonder could not be, the eruption of wonder would be truly wondrous”(33). In the end, this more about a mood or disposition, as Heidegger urges, rather than a technique or skill. Put in more robust terms, wonder and truth are joined in a way of being, a way of that informs all things. I can assume a proper technique in building a small model airplane, but I will resist what patience or wonder the building process could instill in me if I am doing so in order to prove I am able, better, or superior; if my disposition is to merely compete with human beings.

First, as briefly alluded to above, apparatuses are inescapably human–in fact, they are rooted in the all-too-human desire for happiness and the good (however distorted or skewed it may be).  Perhaps there is an implicit Augustinian sentiment here regarding the parasitic relation of evil to good.  Nonetheless, most remarkable for the present purpose is Agamben’s argument concerning the processes of subjectification and desubjectification intrinsic to the generation and continuance of any apparatus, from cigarette smoking to repentance (he uses, “penance”).  By this duality or, better yet, dialectic, Agamben identifies first and foremost the power of the apparatus to capture a desire and create”subjectifications” from within this “captured” state.  If I devote myself to the field of agriculture, for example, then a new I is constituted upon the negation of the old I, all the while assuming the old I.  The constitution of the new I obtains by it becoming the subject of agrarian practices, commitments, and nomenclature (indeed, subject to a series of new techniques of governance).  Hence, I become, as one would say in Spanish, disponible:  I am available, sensitive, free, and/or open to all things agrarian. 

Agamben explicitly identifies, following Foucault’s lead, the process of repentance or penance as one notable apparatus.  He specifically articulates this in terms of the constitution of the new I, in its truth, in relation to the untruth of the old I. This ”splitting” of the subject–the generation/negation dialectic–is a necessary part of the apparatus.  Crucially, Agamben insists that each apparatus creates a specific type of subject; it is, therefore, not merely an issue of using the apparatus “in the right way” (21).  Modern apparatuses, Agamben insists, are anything but neutral (cf. James K. A. Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom) precisely to the extent that many do not “give rise to a new subject, except in larval…or spectral form” (21).  In other words, I do not receive a new I in the established practice of  prime-time sitcom viewing; rather, I undergo desubjectification without any redemptive, corresponding subjectification. 

All of this simply invites a fresh re-consideration of the counter-apparatus of metanoia, especially in light of the “massive processes of desubjectification” that, according to Agamben, amply characterizes modern societies.  In our present state, he insists, we acquiesce to every gaze of surveillance and to every technology of speed–we do not participate in our own processes of subjectification and desubjectification.  Modern govermental systems rob themselves of virtue (or simply the distance necessary for self-criticism)  by further proliferating apparatuses to which to submit–the “global,” the effectiveness of espionage and violence, the systems of information dissemination.

In metanoia, we undergo or enter into a rapture of wonder.  How are we made new?  We do not know.  The Open, God in his triune love, does not merely gaze at us in a self-protective mode.  He graciously gives the new subject her life.  Like other apparatuses, we are made open to reconstitution, but, in the case of theosis, the new is overwhelmingly better.  Here, there is no indifference in the relation of the processes of subjectification and desubjectification; rather, there is a reciprocal entry of God’s presence (not simply his action) into his governance of bodies and souls and our entry into God’s transformative presence here and now.  This is all carried out in wonder–thaumazein.  This suspends our hubristic metaphysical pretensions and yet also intitiates our proper metaphysical musings, but only from within a process of acceptance (of truth and untruth, or “godly grief”, as in 2 Cor. 7:10) and subsequent renewal in wonder.