The Play of Icon and Idol among the Sheep and Goats: What is Seen and Unseen in the Kingdom of Heaven

³¹ “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. ³² All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. ³³ He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.
³⁴ “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. ³⁵ For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, ³⁶ I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’
³⁷ “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? ³⁸ When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? ³⁹ When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’
⁴⁰ “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’
⁴¹ “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. ⁴² For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, ⁴³ I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’
⁴⁴ “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’
⁴⁵ “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’
⁴⁶ “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.” [Matt. 25:31-46, NIV]




I have commented on this passage recently, in light of John Caputo's recent presentation at Peter Rollins' Belfast bash in April 2015. In this post, I would like to pursue how vision, the gaze, works in a dialectic of Marion's saturated phenomena of the idol and icon. The gaze upon either phenomenon leads to bedazzlement, as such phenomena cannot be grasped within the intuition, nor can the intention take aim. Instead, these saturated phenomena saturate the gaze, the intuition, and overcome the receiving self. The idol reflects the gaze so overwhelmingly that the self is overcome by its own reflection; the icon refracts the gaze and overcomes the self not with its own reflection but by bending back toward the self which is itself now seen.


The phenomenological reduction of Matthew's parable of the sheep and goats takes a good amount of air out of the tires of the 'muscle car' that drives the receptions of the inheritance of the sheep and the punishment of the goats. By collapsing the glory, the assembled nations, the seat of judgment, and the economy of reward and punishment (25:31-32; 46), we are left with an animal farm whose versions of vision release the event (25:34-45). The Matthean Jesus has already spoken of the parables and of vision:




¹³ This is why I speak to them in parables:

“Though seeing, they do not see;
    though hearing, they do not hear or understand.

¹⁴ In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah:

“‘You will be ever hearing but never understanding;
    you will be ever seeing but never perceiving.
¹⁵ For this people’s heart has become calloused;
    they hardly hear with their ears,
    and they have closed their eyes.
Otherwise they might see with their eyes,
    hear with their ears,
    understand with their hearts
and turn, and I would heal them.’

¹⁶ But blessed are your eyes because they see, and your ears because they hear. ¹⁷ For truly I tell you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see but did not see it, and to hear what you hear but did not hear it. [Matt. 13: 13-17, NIV]

The hermeneutics of the parable is the self coming to a new heart in metanoia. Jesus places quite a premium on the breaking or softening of a thickened, hardened heart. In these lines of Matt. 13, Jesus invites his audience to don Isaiah's healing lenses.



"When did we see you," say the sheep and goats to the Lord. What is seen and unseen depends on whether one sees through Isaiah's eyes or other eyes. Some eyes discern the idol and others, the icon. Neither the sheep nor the goats saw the Lord in the face of the other, yet the sheep respond to something, a call, heard or unheard, that haunts the face of  the other: they act upon something insisting, bringing something into existence. The sheep see the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger iconically. The Lord, though invisible to them, is made visible in the event of their acts of mercy. The light of the other shines upon them, and they are seen by something in the face of the other. They act from their very selves opened up and emptied to receive---in a play of kenosis and apophasis---an unconditional call, a pure call and pure gift. The sheep grow a pair of eyes in the newness of their emerging selves, which are now poised to respond to the phenomenality of the self of the given.


The goats are also overwhelmed; they, too, ask 'when did we see you?' But here, the hungry, the thirsty and the stranger remain invisible in the glaring, bedazzling light of the idol. Their vision is blinded by the gaze reflected back upon them. They do not see the other, but merely a version of themselves that never enters the flesh of the other. The goats are not seen; no light shines upon them, as so they are left in the dark, clueless that they have missed the appearance of the invisible Lord and a opportunity to make visible the invisible. They do not hear the call because they do not see the hungry, the thirsty and the stranger, even though could speak about them matter-of-factly. It was not only the Lord that was invisible to the goats, but their brother in the other, their selves before the selves of a phenomenality that never enters experience.


Do goats therefore diminish the saturated phenomenon to mere object, or an impoverished phenomenon? Shall we reframe the story like this: when phenomenology sits on its throne of judgment it will separate the see-ers of saturated and poor phenomena, gather all the universities and churches, and take them to task for mistaking phenomena for mere objects. There is something to this preposterousness. Whether we privilege the given which gives itself unconditionally, or the recipient whose gaze is constituted by givenness, such a phenomenology invites hierarchy on either side of the phenomenological moment. Are all saturated phenomena 'better' than less saturated phenomena? Are the selves within the given ordered to degrees of givenness? Are some 'gifteds' more gifted than other 'gifteds': are some recipients better prepared than others to have their selves opened and replenished? Are there degrees of negative capability, of the gaze to see?


The economy of the gift that outrages Caputo in the natural reading of  the frame of Matt. 25:31-46 is either read through the play of the icon and idol, animal and flesh of the stranger or it is not. If it is, then it plays out in the justice-to-come. The acts of mercy visited upon the hungry by the sheep, do not seem to be visited upon the goats by the king. Yet, in the kingdom, the mood is subjunctive, not performative. Verses 41 and 46, viewed from the icon, do not condemn, but warn and invite. If we translate 41 as "continue, if you like, on the path (πορεύεσθε) of the idol, to the fire prepared for the devil and his angels," then it is an invitation to metanoia, a change of heart, and an opening of the vision past the idol into the icon. Similarly, v. 46 depicts a choice between the idol and the icon, a choice between penalty (κόλασιν) and life. 


Thematically, the sheeps and goats follow the virgins with their oil and the servants with their talents. The kingdom is suddenly upon all of them, and they all get an invitation to life. Parabolically, the king that separates the animals according to the flesh does so with the same voice as the Lord of the wedding banquet (25:11) and the master of the servants (25:19). Silly virgins and judgmental servants are invited on the same journey as the goats of the idol. Unless their fates are sealed in a divine predestination, sealed off against hope, sealed off from metanoia, a crossroads awaits them all.


Finally, all parables in the NT demand the erotic reduction that opens unto these crossroads. Despite the disconcerting content of some, especially those in Matt. 25, they are prayerful and non-judgmental; they are loving. Neither performative (in the Austin/Searle sense) or declarative speech acts, their subjunctive moods create the mood for their "perlocutionary" acts. Indeed, Marion has given us a remarkable means for evaluating the event of parables in his discussion on the discourse of love in "What Cannot be Said" (The Visible and the Revealed, Fordham Univ. Pr., 2008, 110-118). "The perlocutionary act produces its effect...beyond the dictum...to overwhelm, and possibly seduce someone...[P]erlocutionary acts prove to be nonconventional...it is difficult to say where convention begins or ends...I can predict this effect" (111-12). Conventional parables and other parabolic locutions, acts of love all, are the perlocutionary acts that dictate their own hermeneutics. The event of love harbored in each parable receives its voice between the voice of their speakers and their hearers; for in the song of the parables, seeing is a way of loving, and loving is a way of knowing. Both are food for the heart, the food of love that moves it to metanoia. If such music be the food of love, play on.

Coins in a Fountain: The Coin Tricks at Capernaum and Jerusalem

Ad fontes!

Back to the thing itself!

More water, Gunga Din!

quemadmodum desiderat cervus ad fontes aquarum ita desiderat anima mea ad te Deus [Ps. 42]


Few would argue that Jesus was arrested, tried and executed for his unwavering allegiance to Rome and the Temple. Something else was definitely going on. Was the issue Jesus' subversion of the norm? Even a toothless subverting source is better off the scene, better off dead, from the perspective of a dedication to the status quo: business as usual and normal operations. I have suggested in a recent post that Jesus, in his manipulation of currency, subverted an invitation to subversion and the sovereignty of Caesar (a reading of Matt. 22), and also subverted the sovereignty of the Temple (a reading of Matt. 17). The historical critical method can only do numismatics (and locate Torah-sources and traditions) for these interesting pericopes, and while its true that Matthew's 'render unto Caesar' find itself within the broader Synoptic tradition and therefore more amenable to the method, the Temple tax pericope is attested only in Matthew, and of less interest to historical method where it bears even less fruit. Since Roman and Temple taxes persisted well after Jesus left the scene, even unto the demise of both, one might rightfully wonder just what kind of subversion I am identifying here (and in the gospels in general).


The last thing I am interested in is reducing Jesus and the Christ-event to the merely subversive. That approach has been done and leaves us with a failed political rebel among countless other failed rebels in the dust bin of history. The Christian tradition certainly acknowledges the political and economic dimension of the challenges Jesus presented to his time and place, but it does not understand that dimension apart from the announcement of the Kingdom of Heaven, the Incarnation and the Redemption (and indeed so much more). Nonetheless, the 'coin tricks' at Capernaum and Jerusalem in their own way announce the Kingdom that unconditionally lays claim to any and all earthly kingdoms. At Capernaum, Jesus makes a coin appear, and at Jerusalem he makes a coin disappear. So where is the subversion?


"Show me the money," says Jesus to the Pharisees' disciples and the Herodians (Matt. 22:19). Reading the image on the coin, Jesus identifies Caesar, and the coin disappears into the coffers of the Roman treasury. All that remains is the possibility that something might appear that belongs to God. "The way of God according to the truth" stands against the trap---the invitation to insurrection, subversion---and subverts an invitation to a subversion of the "imperial tax" (Matt. 22:16-17). The subversion of a subversion leads only to 'marvel.' Caesar has his name all over the denarius, and Jesus asks his interrogators what God has His name all over: marvelous. Yet this marvel of Jesus' wisdom and authority exercises a new, exciting and very subversive sovereignty over the very structure of taxation. The currency of earthly kingdoms is devalued in Jesus' suddenly appearing Kingdom, which somehow dictates how it is to be used to open upon that which belongs to God.


The structure of taxation in the Temple cult fares no better than Rome's in the Kingdom of Jesus.  Matt. 17 presents an interaction absent in the other Synoptics. "What do you think, Simon, do kings tax their very own, or other than their own? Peter said, 'other than their own.' 'The children are exempt,' said Jesus." The logic of the Kingdom accomplishes two tasks here. The first condemns the Temple for taxing other than their own; the second removes the 'other than their own' to be children of another order. The Temple and its tax disown those from whom it collects. There is an unmistakable humorous tension in this moment. Peter doesn't want Jesus to be seen evading taxes, and Jesus wants Peter to catch a glimmer of the truth while avoiding offense. Ostensibly, the collectors of the Temple tax wait at the door. We think we know what will happen next: a fishing trip and eventual payment of the tax. The text moves on to the counting of brothers, and we are left to imagine how the payment is made.


The tradition of the temple tax finds its origins in the Mosaic codes (Ex. 30:11-16). In 1st century Palestine the temple tax was already a big business. The collectors will collect the tax or make some big trouble. Do they go fishing, too, I wonder; do they wait for Peter to return with the money? Returning to the Temple precincts without the money seems unlikely. Since they collect the tax from 'outside the family,' a family of wealth and privilege, those outside the family most likely have worked hard for the money, and the tax would be some kind of burden on them. That burden might even be constitutive of the tax. If so, Jesus sourcing the tax whence he does is already a bit subversive.  The collectors want coin, not fish, so either Peter needs to catch a fish and sell it fast, or find the coin exactly where Jesus locates it. If so, it's found money, perhaps even a lost Temple tax, especially if it is as Jesus says it would be: the exact denomination and value. Maybe one of these selfsame collectors dropped it in the lake at some point earlier in the story. Or maybe Jesus saw that one of the tax collectors dropped the coin where he stood, and winked that information to Peter who doesn't go fishing at all, but instead went dusting the threshold. Could be; who knows. Matthew tells us nothing of the actual hand-off of the tax. So, we are left with a rather pointed fishing trip and a coughed up shekel.


Unless, of course, this story, unique to Matthew, is not a numismatic piscatorial exercise at all; but a word to the wise. The Temple imposes its tax on ta me onta (cf. 1 Cor. 1), the 'nothings' of this world that make nothing out of ta onta, the 'somethings' of this world (cf. 1 Cor. 1:28). In the Kingdom of Jesus, a sovereignty without sovereignty exerts the power of weakness in the kingdoms of the earth.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.

Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven  [Matt. 5:3, 10]


The nothings, ta me onta, already are in the space and the conceptual field of the advent of the Kingdom, though they pay taxes in coin to the kings of the earth. Blessed are the taxed, those thought of as other, for they nullify the taxers and the children of kings. The Kingdom is like a stag drawn to the font of waters, as those who thirst for righteousness, the insisting 'pure call,' are drawn to the weak force of God.
The two coins found in these biblical fonts affirm forms of life within a Kingdom whose weakness overpowers the strong forces in those kingdoms where the commerce of taxation holds sway. The economy of the coin carries no weight with Jesus. The lingua franca of the Kingdom is of a different order, and while the coin of the koine is still something to the somethings, the nothings (suddenly in their midst) nullify the somethings, and allow what belongs to God to appear.

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.

Goats, Sheep, and The Animal That Therefore I Am

Words are as naked as goats and sheep, as are Matthew's in his naked gospel already clothed in the power of the Church.  In his recent work, John Caputo has referenced Derrida's cat, who looks upon human nakedness with the eyes of a naked animal, resulting in embarrassment. In his recent discussion at Peter Rollins' Belfast festival, Caputo has no time, precious time, for cats, but makes room for goats and sheep and the naked power of a church that subverts the unconditionality of the event harbored in the naked, hungry, the sick, the stranger and imprisoned.

Matthew, after a few words about some bright and not so bright virgins, and some variably talented servants, makes some time for goats and sheep:

  “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his
glorious throne.  All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.


   “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in,  I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’


  “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’


“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’


 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.  For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink,  I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’


  “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’


He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’


  “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.” [25:31-46]



Caputo gives all his attention to the surprise of the 'righteous,' who are perplexed, as they do not recall when they ministered to the Lord. They have simply responded to the 'pure gift' and its unconditional beckoning in its pure givenness, and further, the response is without why. He surmises that Matthew has subverted this core of his own parable by framing in within an economy of reciprocity---of reward and punishment. This reading certainly remains within Caputo's general hermeneutic, and the reduction to the pure gift is certainly a phenomenological gesture, even if I have grafted a bit of Marion upon Caputo's approach. Yet, despite Caputo's nod to the 'critique of idols,' he seems to remain within the gaze of the idol. Perhaps the problem in this reading centers on ignoring the equal surprise of the 'cursed.' The economy of exchange that works its mischief upon the gift works equally upon the givenness that does not result in a response of generosity and hospitality. Are the 'cursed' simply bad phenomenologists, or non-phenomenologists, and are they sent to eternal punishment for a stingy hermeneutic? Is Matthew paving the way to hell with sloppy heuristic intentionality?

Caputo tells us the economy of the kingdom is about the pure gift and the response to its call as a pure call. I support that assertion, but I also want to know more about that economy  which Matthew purportedly subverts with an economy of exchange. Matthew likens the kingdom, the kingdom in which the 'righteous' live, to the use of one's own gifts. This is all risky business and investments do not always pan out. When Caputo looks at this pericope in his The Weakness of God (263ff.), he captures something of the Levinasian other in the unconditionality of the event. Here, after It Spooks, Levinas is all specter, but he still haunts Caputo reading Matthew and presenting to a non-specialist audience. Nonetheless, the logic of the Kingdom's economy splatters its commerce among the righteous and the cursed. No, no, say the wise virgins to the silly ones, "go buy your oil" (but the exchange doesn't open 'til 9 AM!). Yes, yes, says the master to the servants who have read the perspectus carefully, garnering impressive earnings from their god-given talents.  No, no, and a double no to the one who sits in judgement of the economy of the kingdom. Is this an endorsement of neoliberalism or Matthew presenting the face of the other, which in the kingdom is the face of the self in the other, the face of the divine in the other, the divine in the stranger. Caputo freely acknowledges that being turned to the other is not only without why but without desire for reciprocity (Weakness, 264). 

The economy of exchange is absent from the Kingdom, but so is it absent from the economy of Matthew's Gospel. That economy is not one of exchange, or reward, or punishment; it may be one of the revocation of what some moral theologians call the 'fundamental option' for God. The kingdom is the reign of love and the acts of the righteous and the cursed respond to a pure call, a pure gift; Caputo stipulates this much, but he seems not to accept an invitation into the iconic within these gifts of the stranger, the hungry. The cursed in the pericope are blinded by the idol, and, bedazzled by their own reflected gaze, cannot respond with hospitality, which is the response to the icon of the stranger and the hungry. Levinas lays in wait, haunting the other, waiting to be called out as the specter. If Levinas remains invisible, and Caputo says the Lord is invisible in his Belfast talk, then he gets to hoot, bellow and rattle chains forever. Ghosts are like that. Perhaps it is Marion's critique of the idol that lets Levinas freely give himself in the face of the other.

The givenness then, of the stranger and other lovers in Matthew, gives itself completely and unconditionally in relationality to the 'righteous' whose very selves individuate their subjectivity before it, subjects called in the erotic reduction which points away from the idol and toward the icon. The brutality Caputo ascribes to Matthew and his ilk visits injustice to the good news in his presentation of the kingdom. Matthew wants his entire community to be sheep, hence the moral of his fable, though he is not so foolish as to deny that there will be those who will not see the face of the other because they look the other way, or pretend it is invisible.

In Belfast, Caputo has denied the saturated phenomenon and finds Matthew's approach a rather poor phenomenon of mundane economy. He sees 'more of the same' and forecloses on the gospel's hospitality toward the other. He is blinded by power, the power he sees emanating already in Matthew's ekklesia. But to put Constantine's sword in Matthew's hand is not deconstruction but reconstruction, which needs to be deconstructed. Goats, sheep and men are all naked animals in the kingdom, as it was in the beginning. It helps us see better, and any embarrassment is short-lived. The Kingdom has a King, even if his royal warrant is unconditional yet without sovereignty.