THE MESSIAH OF EIGHTH AVENUE

I think I almost tripped over the Messiah. Late one Saturday afternoon, right there in squalid Manhattan-cum-Calcutta, on Eighth Avenue between 43rd and 44th.

The sighting was neither august nor extraordinary even in New York, where the august and the extraordinary forever collide in belligerent cacophony. This was not the Messiah of Handel, or St. Pat’s, or Madison Avenue. This Messiah was just another wretched street person propped up against a filthy wall, huddled amidst tattered cardboard and yesterday's Times and similar urban flotsam in futile defense against the December chill. Another garden-variety bum among bums, a vaguely annoying bit of the cityscape to which native and tourist quickly become oblivious.

He alone caught my attention, but not by dint of bellicose panhandling or noisy street preaching. There he sat, one grimy pants leg bunched above his knee, fumbling with a hospital style bottle of saline and two rolls of formerly sterile gauze, clumsily trying to irrigate and bandage a festering wound on his shin. No better than the other impervious passers by, or at least fearful from ominous tales of big city terror, I did not stop to offer assistance.

I might have found the image less compelling, easier to doff off, had it not been for two mink clad matrons on their way to a matinee. "Isn't that just disgusting?" one prated loudly to the next, pointing at the Messiah. Not tragic. Or heartbreaking. Or even pathetic. Disgusting.

Disgusting. Just the way the Messiah is supposed to be. My mind leapt impulsively to a fragment of Talmud that has become part of my personal liturgy for the conclusion of the Day of Atonement:

Rabbi Joshua ben Levi, hungry for the Messiah to come and redeem the world from its travail, approached Elijah the Prophet to ask where the Messiah might be found.

"He may be found," Elijah responded, "wounded and disfigured, wrapping and re-wrapping his soiled bandages. He sits among the diseased poor. Go see for yourself."

So Rabbi Joshua went among the diseased poor and confronted the Messiah: “When, Master, will you come?"

"Today. "

Elated. Rabbi Joshua departed. But as the sun set, the Messiah had not yet come. Elijah appeared and asked. "What did he tell you?"

"Surely he was lying to me," Rabbi Joshua answered, "for the day is over and he has not arrived."

"You are mistaken," Elijah said, "for the Messiah was merely quoting Scripture to you: Today . . . if only you would listen to my voice.”

With all due respect to my colleagues in ministry, I believe that the Messiah's advent is not hastened, but only deterred, by theological abstraction and nitpicking. Nor am I particularly sure that this long awaited Messiah is one single person bearing a particular curriculum vita. I do know, however, that his spirit dwells not among the minks and the after-theater crowd at Sardi's, but wounded and disfigured among the diseased poor, more likely robed in corrugated cardboard than in majesty.

And I believe that the Messiah's festering sores are no more than the inevitable result of the blows that people of power and advantage heap upon the underprivileged: the willful dismantling of systems of health care, education and social welfare, the framing of an economic system in which the prosperity of the few is financed by the continued victimization of those whose burden is already too great to bear. His repulsive disfigurement is little more than a mirror image of the repulsive greed and callousness by which we are disfigured.

"When, Master, will you come?"

My guess is that this place will be set aright when we behold the purulent wounds of the poor and powerless and react with some emotion more humane than disgust, when we see more in their disfigurement than eyesore and clutter. For, what is the Messiah other than the force that galvanizes us to bridge the chasm between the world as it is and the world as we know it could be? And what is the Messianic Era other than a time when our first instinct toward the broken of body and spirit will be empathy, not revulsion?

We seek the Messiah in all the wrong places, in the antiseptic safety of our cathedrals and theological tomes and pious hymns and hosannas, when he is right there on Eighth Avenue between 43rd and 44th. He sits huddled among the diseased and hopeless, for that is the place from which either the world's final damnation or its ultimate redemption will spring forth. Again and again he binds his wounds, hoping that someone might notice and be moved to care. And, for as disfigured and base as he may seem, he knows only too well the passage from Scripture upon which human destiny rises or falls: "Today . . . if only you would listen to my voice."

The coincidence was just too startling. You see one sitting among the destitute poor, painfully, methodically wrapping and re-wrapping his bandages. And you dare yourself for a fleeting moment to think: Is it possible to look at a garden-variety bum and know by instinct that you have beheld the face of Messiah?

Go see for yourself . . .