Who is God for Jesus? The Saturated Phenomena and Coins of the Realm

To ask who God is for Jesus is to answer the question of the hypostatic union. To answer the question of the hypostatic union is to participate in the relationality of the human and the divine. The hypostatic union as relationality is what Christians call the Christ-event. To speak of the Christ-event is first and foremost to speak of the event: the event that haunts theology, philosophy and the very core of the conundrum some call the human person. I do not mean all these linkages to mime the hysterical syllogisms in Woody Allen's Love and Death. I mean them to get to the very heart of the event, which is risky business not without a sense of humor, a sense of haunting.


Caputo, Zizek and Marion all speak to the event. For Caputo, the response to the insistent call releases the event; for Marion, the pure call pulling a self into individuation constitutes the event; for Zizek, the 'frame' brings the event into focus. These are all big events, the main events in the circus of Being and becoming. I suggest that these events are the same event. The Christ-event is such an event. Its relationality oscillates between the human and divine, never resting in a moment in the between, but always in the creative space insisting and consisting in response. The divine is unconditional, a sovereign without sovereignty; the human interdigitating, placentalizing in its liminality, yet always gazing upon the iconic other. The event in incarnational---a person has emerged, a person whose insistence is not confused with its existence---a person in which logos is not confused with its flesh: person as saturated phenomenon.


Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and unto God what is God's [cf.  Matthew 22:15-20; Mark 12:13-17; Luke 20:20-26]


God's sovereignty is without sovereignty where Caesar reigns, and yet God's sovereignty subverts this Roman sovereign, so says a very subversive Jesus who has won the admiration of his challengers, if not their faith. Jesus presents a very different kingdom and kingship as he holds the coin of the realm in his hand, reads it, and brushes it off (the text is not explicit about whether Jesus holds the coin in his demonstration---I read the coin in Jesus' hand and fingers). This eventive sovereignty constitutes the hypostasis coming before the flattering voices bearing the coin; they present it to Jesus for unconditional and final judgment. That pronouncement overwhelms the intuition of his challengers and foils their intentionality: they marvel and move on---what is this flesh, this event; icon or idol?


The marvelous authority that pronounces upon the coin announces a Kingdom suddenly upon those who marvel. The authority of Jesus comes from a sovereignty that is powerless to liberate or evoke a tax revolt, yet poised to avert violence and secure the public peace unconditionally. Such authority derives from a kingship without kingship, certainly not a kingship alongside Caesar's. The Christ-event frames earthly kingship within the hand of something unconditional and without anything recognizable as sovereignty, even as the edges of the coin frame the image of Caesar. The weakness of God yields to the face on the coin as it devalues its commerce in the kingdom coming. The event is in the hand.


When I speak of a 'sovereignty without sovereignty' I mean to conjure Caputo's and Derrida's 'religion without religion.' I mean 'sovereignty in the second position precisely as they mean religion in that second position. I also read the pericopes of the tribute coin as presenting God's sovereignty within the context of Caesar's. The saturating unconditionality of Jesus' pronouncement is the very insistent call calling for a response in the event. In these versions of unconditionality the event is released in the marvelous bedazzlement that causes Jesus' challengers to retreat. If they retreat to challenge him another day that event is the idol; if marvel leads to metanoia, that event is the icon. The texts are silent; they do not pronounce on the event.


Instead, the pericopes of the coin embrace a haunting: the aporia of a Christ-event whose instantiation in the hypostatic union is the union of the human with a divine question mark after its sovereignty. The saturated phenomenon of the person of Jesus proclaims a kingdom whose sovereign's sovereignty is without sovereignty. Yet this sovereign has the audacity to call out an invitation to metanoia, to a self open to the call, poised to be created anew in a response. Such is the event of the emerging self whose response to the pure call is already anterior to the arrival of the subject. The very 'lack' constitutive of the self is that openness to the initiative of unconditional call from a sovereignty without sovereignty.


Caesar's realm is not the only realm whose currency is the coin.




“What do you think, Simon?” he asked. “From whom do the kings of the earth collect duty and taxes—from their own children or from others?”


“From others,” Peter answered.


“Then the children are exempt,” Jesus said to him. “But so that we may not cause offense, go to the lake and throw out your line. Take the first fish you catch; open its mouth and you will find a four-drachma coin. Take it and give it to them for my tax and yours.” [Matt. 17:25-27, NIV]

The collectors of the temple tax at Capernaum ask for a rendering from Jesus and Peter upon their arrival. They are not willing to extend professional courtesy at this moment: they want the whole copayment. In his perhaps most convoluted miracle, Jesus locates a rare fish, puts it on Peter's line, and provides payment in coin for the two of them. The fish's coin subverts the sovereignty of the temple itself by identifying Jesus and Peter as 'others.' The temple disowns their own by the tax itself. The tax visits the absurdity of the coin in the fish's mouth upon the temple tax and therefore upon the temple itself, for it lives by its commerce. The moment is high comedy and very risky business; the tax collectors are the butt of the joke, and by extension, so too the temple, financed by a coin coughed up by a fish (Matthew does not depict the actual transaction that Peter will make, but that does not deprive his community of the dark, grotesque comedy of the scene, which is left to the imagination. It is a scene not terribly unlike the scene where those juicy sandwiches are given to those cops in the rear of the restaurant in Casino).


Temple and kingdom of  'the kings of the earth' are subverted and contextualized within the advent of God's kingdom. The weak sovereignty of God is stronger than all the strength of the kings of the earth, as Paul might say (cf. 1 Corinthians). Such strength is not located within the grammar of earthly power, but within the unconditional subversion of that power. We have seen this kind of subversion elsewhere, as in the dialogue between the Johannine Jesus and Pilate.


By looking only at coins, a glimmer of who God is for Jesus already emerges. The symbols of sovereignty in the realms of the earth are what a 'sovereignty without sovereignty' is not. There is no image of God or Jesus on any coin; such would be meaningless in either kingdom of the world or of God. The commerce of the kingdom is love, and it has no face but the face of the other, who in the Gospels, has no face, except the one called by love into being. If the concerns of those concerned with subverting the norm are legitimate---if, for example, people like Phil Snider have concerns for a theory of homiletics (read: hermeneutics) that is not so lop-sided in its privileging of human action over divine initiative---then perhaps a place to begin is in the coin of the realm.

The New Normal and Zizek's Event

Slavoj Zizek's recent work, Event (Melville House: Brooklyn NY, 2014), captures something essential in what the media would have us describe as 'the new normal.' The emergence of a new 'frame' which announces the arrival of something new (political, esthetic, religious, etc.) marks what Zizek calls the event, a concept greatly indebted to Badiou's notion. The book is also an extended love letter to Jela Kricec, journalist, intellectual, and Zizek's bride of 2 years (Event is dedicated to her, his 'event'). "There is, by definition, something 'miraculous' in an event (4)," and something even apparently theological, as the book opens and closes on the Trinity. 

But it is the eventive miracle of love that makes Event one of Zizek's most personal, perhaps confessional, statements. One frame through which a reader can peer into the book's most important theme is indeed the 'miracle' of love: "when you fall in love, you don't just know what you need/want and look for the one who has it---the 'miracle' of love is that you learn what you need only when you find it" (118). And that is another essential theme of Event: one plays in the discourse within which one is shaped and shapes.

In typical fashion, Zizek utilizes an odd film, Strella, to illustrate the reframing of the family, as an event. The plot is dense (I have not seen the film nor could I access a trustworthy review, so I rely on Zizek's reputation as a consummate film critic), and involves a father (Yiorgios) who is imprisoned for murdering his own brother for sexually abusing Yiorgios' son. After a long prison term, he is finally released and seeks his long lost son, Leonidas. He spends his first night of freedom with Strella, a prostitute, but also a transsexual. Yiorgios is at first unaware of Strella's transsexuality, but upon learning of it,  falls in love with her and continues the relationship, until the trauma of learning that Strella is in fact Leonidas, who was aware all along that Yiorgios was his father. The relationship is shattered, but the film closes with Leonidas/Strella taking care of a dead friend's son, and Yiorgios coming back into his son's and 'grandson's' life, establishing a "completely normal" family (168).

Interestingly, Zizek proposes Strella as a test of Christian family values and offers the obvious ultimatum: "embrace this authentic family of Yiorgios, Strella and the adopted child, or shut up about Christianity."

Really, Zizek lobbing one in for Christianity? Of course, Zizek strongly advises that we bracket the father-son incest, allowing Yiorgios' "disgust" to empower the sublation. But even if we give Yiorgios a pass, how do you solve a problem like a Strella? Do we "resist the temptation to mobilize the psychoanalytic apparatus" (168) here too? Anyone, Christian or not, must want to understand something about Leonidas' deception and deliberate incest. Yet, Zizek is in love, and we must look at Strella through his gaze. Amor vincit omnia meets amor fati.

So does Christianity shut up here in Zizek's world and release the event or does it participate in 'the undoing of an event' (143 ff.)? The bishops have their work cut out for them next year as the Synod on the Family continues. Does Christianity know of the new normal, the new frame that constitutes the event of the family? Love in Zizek's world turns its gaze on the image of the heart of a family. In mythic terms, Strella rewrites the the final book of the Odyssey in modern Greek terms. Laertes, Odysseus and Telemachus standing battle-ready announces the political event of primogeniture; like them, Yiorgios, Leonidas/Strella, and the anonymous child stand upon the horizon of something new, buttressed on love, the miracle of love---if love in 'this' family is not a miracle, then there are no miracles. True, Leonidas seeks the father, Yiorgios seeks home, and they find what they need when they find each other in Zizek's event. Is love the only psychoanalysis, interpretation, Leonidas needs? Is love what will conquer the trauma in this family?

Zizek always disturbs us, haunts us. Having just completed a once-through of Absolute Recoil, which plays Deuteronomy to Event's Exodus, I would wager that Event is Zizek's book of love, and Recoil is his book of desire. I would say that his challenge to Christian family values is indeed a lob all to easy to hit out of the park.

Zizek's Ghosts

From Ghoulies and Ghosties,
and long-legged beasties,
and things that go bump in the night
Good Lord, deliver us!

Enter Banquo's Ghost.

Why do you dress me in borrow'd robes?


Had Derrida, Caputo and Keller never written a haunting, spooking word, Zizek would still spook us, haunt us, and go bump in the dark. Lately I've been quoting Macbeth wondering about his clothes. I'm spooked, as was Cawdor. While he never visits Shakespeare's play, Zizek does play on Macbeth's stage when he asks, che vuoi? Once poor Macbeth asks his famous question to the disbelief of his friend Banquo, he spends the rest of his life addressing his world from those robes he freely seeks and dons. It is irrelevant to Macbeth that he never wears those borrow'd robes legitimately. He becomes (or more accurately, tranforms or rewrites himself into), as Zizek might say, the very object of the desire of the other. All the rest spooks the castle.

Zizek uses several characters to illustrate the che vuoi. He especially likes the fantastically unlucky Roger Thornhill, who responds to the assertion that he is the spy George Kaplan, by becoming (some version of) George Kaplan (The Sublime Object of Ideology, 2nd ed., Verso:London, 2008, 125. All subsequent (page numbers) refer to this edition). Though he never makes the conscious connection between che vuoi? and 'borrow'd robes,' the terms function the same way. Zizek's question, "why am I what you are saying that I am?" (126) is equivalent to Macbeth's question. Sometimes the result is comic, as in Hitchcock's North By Northwest, or Woody Allen's Play it Again Sam; but sometimes the result is tragic, as in Zizek's reading of the Antigone or his reading of the Annunciation through Rosetti's Ecce Ancilla Domini (126f).

Bearing in mind Zizek's commentary on film, pictorial art and fiction, I would like to briefly examine the Lucan Annunciation, and John's and Mark's Passion narratives to discover the event seeking release in the robing and disrobing that takes place there.


“How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”

“I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May your word to me be fulfilled.” Then the angel left her. [Luke 1:34;36, NIV]



Interpreted through the lens of Rosetti's painting, Zizek focuses on the implicit sexuality of Mary, but Luke's portrait is simpler: a Mary reluctant to be dressed in borrow'd robes. Regardless, the Lucan Mary takes on the mantle of the mother of 'the Son of the Most High' (1:32), as she moves from ecce to fiat. Mary becomes the object of desire of the Other; she dons the robes, and having asked 'why am I...', becomes she whom 'all generations' will call blessed (1:46-56). The price of blessedness is steep, though as her heart will be pierced by the cross.

“This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. And a sword will pierce your own soul too.” [Luke 2:34-35]


Simeon's 'sword' is double-edged. In the Passion narratives, Jesus resists donning borrow'd robes, yet others, ghostly and haunting, disrobe in attempts to displace the object of their desire in their role as the Other. Caiaphas can't seem to disrobe fast enough, and tears his clothes off (Mark 14:63). The foregone conclusion takes on the shape of blasphemy against the established order, but the keriah betokens the loss about to occur. The loss is the loss of everything known about God, and the profoundest grief is laid bare before the assembly as if the rending of the cloth had rent Caiaphas's own heart asunder. Simeon's 'sign' of infamy has revealed the heart of the Sanhedrin.

The Roman prefect Pilate also wears his heart on his sleeve. He asks if Jesus is a king, that is, if Pilate's fealty should be paid to Jesus instead of Caesar; but Jesus rebukes him, refusing those robes, which must be transformed into the very mockery of royalty before Jesus finally dons them by force of royalty (John 18:33-38; 19:4-6). And yet, the rebuke sets Pilate's mind to free Jesus, and only failing that, can he settle on free himself of Jesus. At the Crucifixion, the crowds insist that Jesus don the robes of the God they create, but that God never appears, demonstrating that the emperor/false God has no clothes. The mysterious garments on Golgotha are gambled away into the Tradition.

In an interesting twist of time and place, the scantily clad young man who loses his garment in Gethsemane, runs off naked at the betrayal of Jesus, perhaps the last one to flee from the scene (Mark 14:51). The linens are displaced; they hearken to another scene, one not pregnant with disaster. They are properly placed as figura of the death linens (Mark 15:46). Robert Barron has suggested that the garment was baptismal garb, the sindon (σινδόνα ), which constitutes a double anachronism. The fleeing young man clearly has no clothes, so ill-fitting they apparently were.

Zizek's ghosts are not unlike Ibsen's; they are creatures of habit, predictable and haunting. Captain Alving demands to know why the living are George Kaplans, while the living remain complicit in the incest that is the syphilitic desire of the Other. Caiaphas, Pilate, the crowds make similar demands of Jesus, who finally demonstrates for them that there is, after all, no Big Other. Instead, the impossible excess insists itself into existence of saturated phenomena of the event that reveals the sublime (Zizek, 226ff). The very ambivalence and ambiguity of the un-named, un-interpellated, impossible: "[t]he Sublime is therefore the paradox of an object which, in the very field of representation, provides a view, in a negative way, of the dimension of that which is unrepresentable" (230). Here is Zizek at his most apophatic, making room for the un-nominated excess that lives between Vorstellung and Darstellung.