James Alison on Jesus as the Other

“… the irruption of what is utterly other, utterly gratuitous, is not simply a delightful thing. It is a terrifying one… What is other to us, in a more distant sense, if you like, the ‘removed’ other, like visiting a foreign country whose language we don’t know, and whose culture we don’t understand, is both exciting and frightening…

“Well, if that’s true of the ‘removed’ other where we do have a certain sense of shared basic human sensitivity with the locals, then how much truer is it of the ‘utterly’ other, the purely gratuitous that in its first manifestation is both exhilarating and terrifying. However, the risen Lord was not only utterly ‘other’, for it was possible for the disciples to recognize him. After a bit they were able to say, ‘It is the Lord’. However, this was not a case of encountering something familiar in the midst of what was other… No, what the disciples were able to experience was that the wholly, gratuitously other, was made present to them as a giving back of someone familiar. Not someone from this side gone there, but someone from there given in a wholly new way, that was yet a continuation of the way they had sensed him as being given while he was with them before his death. This meant that the wholly, gratuitously, utterly other was no longer simply strange, but, without ceasing to be other, was a presence of recognizable, familiar, love for them. This was the beginning of the recasting of the deisciples’ perception of God, the wholly ‘other’, in terms of Jesus, the risen Lord.”

James Alison, Knowing Jesus (Springfield, IL: Templegate, 1994), 15.

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