Ecclesia as Diaspora

For the Christian community to join with Israel in the diasporic work of mission is to insist that the work by which we ‘seek the peace of the city’ and according to which we await the New Jerusalem to come is no less a concrete flesh-and-blood reality than the singular event of Christ’s cross and resurrection. For it is only as such that the Christian is given over to the excess of God’s perfect agape that is the Spirit’s work in history. At the same time, to make the Christian messianic claim is to insist that Israel’s obedience to Jeremiah’s command to seek the peace of the city was itself always-already an embodied sign of the coming reign of God. So it is precisely by way of the reality of and her participation in Christ’s apocalyptic historicity that the Christian joins with Israel in embodying the coming of God’s reign as a mode of apocalyptic hope. For only as it joins Israel in diaspora does the Christian ‘not yet’ become something other than a theological dilemma concerning the ‘delay’ of the parousia and become rather the condition for the political cry of ‘come’, a cry for the messianic inbreaking to occur everanew, in the very contingencies of our own ongoing histories, into the reality of the ‘already’.

Christ, History, and Apocalyptic by Nathan Kerr, p187