Chapter 10 - The Event in Person

Summary

In the final chapter, I examine the question of revelation by looking again at the Emmaus story. In the generally accepted reading of this text, it is a story about moving from blindness to sight. I argue that the event of revelation is more nuanced than this reading allows. God is revealed to the disciples in the event of their burning hearts on the road, in a presence in the affect to which they only advert afterwards (Lacoste). The disciples personally recognise Jesus in the event of the breaking of the bread, in the saturated phenomenon of his appearing and disappearing (using the tools of Marion, otherwise). And Cleopas and his companion reveal the God of Jesus Christ in the event of their joyful witness to the other disciples back in Jerusalem, and in their personal transformation (Romano). That divine revelation might be one of the possibilities of a hermeneutic of the event allows sufficient ambivalence between the immanent and the transcendent to accommodate readings that might sometimes be plausible either way. Learning to discern the movements of the affect takes seriously, however, the possibility that God reveals Godself in experience through a love that appears to freedom.