a possibility that inhabits the name, what that name is trying to express while never quite succeeding, something that the name recalls but never quite remembers, promises but never quite delivers.

where the Messiah never actually shows up, where the Messiah is the name of the pure structure of hope and expectation. In that understanding, if the Messiah did show up he would ruin everything, for then there would be no future, which is a way of saying that history would be over.

the world but by the church.

When we speak of something (say the United States) being “worthy of the name” (say, democracy), we are speaking of the event that name contains.

The church is not the answer. The church is the question, this question, the gathering of people who are called together by the memory of Jesus and who ask this question, who are called together and are put into question by this question, who stand accused, under the call, interrogated and unable to recuse themselves from this question, and who com

To interpret is always a high-wire act, balancing oneself on a line stretched across an abyss and in constant danger of constructing idols of its own imagining.

“happening” (arriver) without ever quite “arriving” at a final, fixed, and finished destination. We cannot simply “derive” (dériver) direct instruction from it, but we must instead allow it a certain drift or free play (dérive), which allows that tradition to be creative and reinvent itself so that it can be, as Augustine said of God, ever ancient

“deferral,”

like a long-term substitute teacher—praying for the kingdom, whose coming Jesus announced and which everyone was expecting would come sometime soon.