7\ Kafka’s paradox? The Messiah comes “when no longer necessary”? After unveiling, when penultimacy no longer needs a singular bearer, mediation gives way to immediacy, the singular office gives way to a shared participation, many bearing the pattern once concentrated in one.
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28/ Offstage, then, the herald nurtures the quiet grammar of mustard‑seed hope—readying the Kingdom for Empire's ruin, erecting the scaffolding of New World Creation ahead of doomsday theatrics, and flipping the dreaded Apocalypse into an overture of redeemed ecology and polity. 29/ The sunburst of the messianic, then, is not another arrival as much as a collective recognition—the moment when the pharmakon is revealed and the Real is no longer hidden in paradox but seen in the faces of those who bore the ungovernable mercy of God faithfully. 30/ In that recognition, the hidden prophet is no longer needed—for what they carried is now seen. But until then, they are indispensable: thresholds in human form, walking between what is and what shall be, bearing in their bodies the living syntax of an emerging Kingdom. end/ The hidden prophet vanishes not in absence, but in unveiling. When the Real becomes visible to all, concealment ends—of the truth, and of the one who held its flame. This is not disappearance, but consummation. The eschaton made manifest. The Kingdom, at last, living aloud.
Open original document@pauljpastor end/ As for ‘waiting’? Augustine: “What then is time? If nobody asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to someone who asks, I don’t know", where Agamben, a contemporary leader among Gentiles drawing on Jewish sources, speaks emphatically of "living the penultimate things."
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Translator’s introduction to Agamben’s ‘Church and the Kingdom’. What is messianic in Benjamin's conception of messianic time, as in Paul before him and Agamben after him, is not what is to come but what is already here. Messianic time rejects a historical dialectic of progress and its logic of deferral; it rejects the positing of the completion of a historical task in an indeterminate future. To many, ‘messianic time’ suggests waiting for the Messiah to come, redeem mankind and complete human history…For Agamben, however, messianic time means, as it did for Ben-jamin, the very opposite of such waiting, and for this reason he places his focus not on the ultimate but on the penultimate. In ‘The Church and the Kingdom’ he thus speaks of ‘a transformation of the experience of the penultimate’, and elsewhere remarks that, “given that messianic time is not another sort of chronological time, living the last things, the ultimate things, means, above all, living the penultimate things."