Aphorism of the Day, July 31, 2017
The Gospel of John does not include an account of the Transfiguration. In the Transfiguration story, a visionary event, the face of Jesus is "lit up" indicating that Jesus is light to this world. The writer of John skips the story and goes directly to metaphorical equivalence uses an "I am" phrase. In the Gospel of John, Jesus is not reported to be on the Mount of Transfiguration but he is reported as saying, "I am the Light of the World." Note the contrast: The Transfiguration event is a visionary situational event of Christ appearing as light whereas in the Gospel of John, Jesus declares himself to be Light. Light in the Transfiguration story lines up comparatively with Moses whose face was lit up on Mount Sinai. In the Gospel of John the very notion of light and the implications of light become a metaphorical identity for Jesus.
Aphorism of the Day, July 30, 2017
Jesus said a scribe trained for the kingdom of heaven is one who can bring out of his treasure what is old and new. A scribes occupation assumes that the scribe is a "writer." Writing is a technology of memory which allows thoughts and ideas to be retained in written form with a stability that usually does not happen in an oral culture. A scribe is not just a calligrapher copyist of the Scripture; a scribe also writes commentary to bring out of the wisdom source Holy Spirit, new applications of "old" words. The universal commonness of human experience even across time means that correspondences with the "old" text of Scriptures can be found in one's current situation. Some naïve interpreters of the Bible believe that the meanings and details of Scripture are as static and stable as the imitation which occurs when one copies a written text. To explicate the treasure of correspondence between the ancient text and one's current situation is the treasure hunt of the scribe of the kingdom of heaven. Read the Scriptures and go forth and be the playwright of one's own life by writing a Scripture inspire script for living today.
Aphorism of the Day, July 29, 2017
Jesus recommended that we be scribes trained in the kingdom of heaven. A scribe was a reader, interpreter and expositor of the available texts who found in the written traces of the "old" text new insights for living now. Such a scribe knows that reading is always in the now, so an "old" text should be seen as new in current, "right now," experience. It is foolish to think that a text exists only in the past that is gone. An old text is new when it is read because reading occurs in the now. In our reading we seek to know a continuity of Spirit with the genius expressed in the Scripture even though we know the eternally continuing Spirit will inspire us to arrange and rearrange our lives to apply the genius of past wisdom into our lives now.
Aphorism of the Day, July 28, 2017
Jesus likened the realm of God to correspond to the one who knows jewelry who discovers the perfect pearl and sells everything to purchase the perfect pearl. What is the pearl of our lives? What is the organizing principle around which we have sacrificed everything to honor? Is it the genuine pearl of the Gospel message of knowing God or have we run after "artificial" pearls that have glitter but fail to represent the reality of the divine presence?
Aphorism of the Day, July 27, 2017
From the Psalms: "I will incline my ear to a proverb * and set forth my riddle upon the harp." Jesus as a communicator is presented as a wisdom teacher who used proverb, aphorism, parable, hyperbole and riddle to teach. One had to become an insider to crack the meaning of his riddle. Wisdom insight come as disciples have their lives transformed to be able to perceive that one lives in God's realm. The practice of wisdom means that one does not enforce meanings; one is patient to see a person become constituted to be able to under the unobvious as obvious.
Aphorism of the Day, July 26, 2017
The Gospel of Matthew editor put five parables of the kingdom as pithy aphorisms to evoke a sense of what it means to perceive the kingdom of heaven. Small insignificant beginnings can become the scaffold of cultural advance. The effects of the kingdom are like the uncanny effects of yeast. The kingdom is known with the excitement of an "inside" trader: "I know the value of something that others don't." The kingdom is the excitement of finding the chief value of one's life around which to organize one's life. The kingdom is like sorting a net full of the catch of the day in that we occasionally have to decide what is worth keeping as what we want to define our character. We have to "throw away" that which did not contribute to excellence.
Aphorism of the Day, July 25, 2017
The kingdom of heaven is like yeast? How so? It is a stealthy awareness which grows from within people even when the external order seems to be controlled by kings, presidents, armies and leaders of business. The kingdom of heaven is the inside job of access to God-awareness that can winsomely occur anywhere, anytime.
Aphorism of the Day, July 24, 2017
The Gospel writers refer to the kingdom of God/heaven as a secret that can only be known to those who are privileged to be insiders. It sounds rather exclusive but it is simply the mystery of the conditions being right for some people to embrace and understand a message when others do not. Some people tout the language of "predestination" as some sort of exclusive status. Predestination is but the crisp language of saying that this happened instead of that so that predestination rather than being the conscious pre-determination of things to happen according to an intervening God, it can simply be a faith orientation to the obvious, namely to what has happened. The Gospel writers were trying to deal with the obvious fact that some people were persuaded by the message of Christ and that persuasion was obvious in the transformation of their lives. The Gospel writings are also about the obvious fact all did not accept the message of Christ. The New Testament has a positive message but the churches arose in response to the opposition to the Gospel. Without being a strict Hegelian of citing thesis, antithesis and synthesis to give insight to the growth of historical ideas, one can note that dissatisfaction with the dynamics of an existing paradigm makes easier the conversion to a new paradigm.
Aphorism of the Day, July 23, 2017
The parable of the weed and the wheat presents the wisdom of knowing that the conditions of freedom intertwine conditions of good and evil together. The moral universe is always in the flux of the constellation of contextual judgments based upon the appraisal of whether something is good, bad or evil faced by the appraising party. The patience of God is an affirmation of the freedom conditions which inhabit all occasions and events with agents having degrees of freedom relative to their own natures.
Aphorism of the Day, July 22, 2017
Language converts the events of time into a time-lapsed version of time because words and language stand in place of experienced contexts. Of necessity language is reductive in relaying what is not language. Parables are story units which "speed up" time. The Parable of the wheat and the weed is a time-lapsed story about a patient God who is not time-lapse because the divine is everlasting. Our era of time-lapsed stories of cinema and television tend to make us impatient because we want the great problems in life to be resolved in the way in which they are resolved in a two hour action adventure movie. A dilemma in life has to do with being patient in life even while being profoundly urgent about exacting appropriate measures of justice. Justice delayed is justice denied and uneven justice for people in our world creates the condition of being uncomfortably patient tinged with a sense of helplessness about how to effect justice for all.
Aphorism of the Day, July 21, 2017
An insight from the parable of the weeds and the wheat is the acknowledgement of the tolerance of the conditions of freedom which permits for good and evil. By destroying the very conditions of freedom, the very basis of morality and the limited free agency of persons would disappear. Freedom is the underlying condition for the validity of morality. Without choice, there is no morality.
Aphorism of the Day, July 20,2017
The parables of the kingdom of God/heaven are wisdom stories to instill to the listeners nuances of perceiving that we live always, already in God's realm. In nostalgia one could look to "David's kingdom" as the model kingdom or one could look at a reign of a future David-like ruler (messiah). The parables of Jesus are not about the past or future realm of God but about recognizing the present and always realm of God.
Aphorism of the Day, July 19, 2017
The conditions of freedom in the world means that life is experienced as a mixture of "good and evil" or as the parable mirrors, "wheat and weeds." The probability of good and bad co-exist in the greater field of freedom. To attempt to "surgically" remove all that is bad would imply the cessation of the very conditions of freedom which in turn would invalidate the very value of what is good and what is bad. The conditions of freedom like farming have cycles and there are times of harvest when the produce is sorted from what is discarded. The parables of Jesus about the kingdom or "realm" of God provide insights about living in the realm of God known too as the realm of freedom.
Aphorism of the Day, July 18, 2017
One of the features of stories in language art is that time flies because language presents time-lapsed presentations of what is happening. One might say that in our modern world that we live by time-lapsed presentations of news presentation and television and cinema and manifold video/virtual/cyber media. In a movie, the great problems get presented and resolved in but 90 minutes. The actual effect of continuous presentations of time-lapsed stories is that we can become impatient with "real time" life. Probably the fickleness of public opinion has to do with our being enslaved to the impatience bred by the constant diet of time-lapsed life in video and writing. Impatience can happen when life does not really imitate time-lapsed speed. The parable of the Weed and the Wheat is a time-lapsed story which presents the counter message of the real time patience of God.
Aphorism of the Day, July 17, 2017
The Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds gives us an insight about the mutuality in the differences between values. The sun shines on both weed and wheat indiscriminately. The soil supports the growth of weeds and wheat in such intertwined ways that one cannot get rid of the weed without sacrificing the wheat. The symbiosis between weeds and wheat means that God is patient and not rash about thinning the crop. God is very patient about the divine attribute of freedom which is shared with all. One cannot remove the ground of freedom by seemingly removing all of the "weeds" from the garden of creation.
Aphorism of the Day, July 16, 2017
Parable is "word art." One get trapped into how the "word art" imitates real situations and in contemplating the art one is to carry the value analysis that occurs during the contemplation of the "word art" into the real situations of one's life. The Gospels are examples of "word art" and they include the further genre of "word art," the Parable.
Aphorism of the Day, July 15, 2017
The parables of Jesus were teaching tools as mnemonic devices in an oral culture. One can remember a principle embedded in a story easier than a list of "brute" theological "facts."
Aphorism of the Day, July 14, 2017
What makes agricultural success? Does God maintain the world like a highly sophisticated agribusiness farmer trying to control all elements that pertain to the success of the crop? The parable of the sower presents the insight of God as an indiscriminate broadcast seeder who aims the handful of seeds toward cultivated soil but the wind carries some of the seeds to unintended places. The parable of the sower admits the mystery of randomness in the success of God's word in the lives of people. When a person cannot accept one's good news, it may be that the conditions that persuade agreement and commitment are not present. In our day of political and religious polarization we have come to hold that people can hold the same religious beliefs differently enough to present challenges to effective cooperation and collaboration. The parable of the sower is an acknowledgement of the mystery of why some people come to believe what they come to believe. This is perhaps why the words of Jesus to the early evangelists who experienced rejection were: Shake the dust off your sandals and move on. You can force people to agree or accept your good news when they are not ready.
Aphorism of the Day, July 13, 2017
The Gospels are parables and they include parables. They are parables of the life of Jesus which instantiate the beliefs, the liturgical and spiritual practices of the early followers of Jesus. Just as the parables attributed to Jesus create "word lenses" through which followers attained insights, so too the Gospels themselves are "word lenses" through which the church interpreted the meaning of the life of Jesus in the lives of those who found those "word lenses" significant for the transformation of their lives.
Aphorism of the Day, July 12, 2017
A parable is an interpretive lens though which one can see the world. There is no pristine seeing of the world; it is always contextually interpreted. The Parable of the Sower was an interpretive story that was spun by Jesus to enable listeners and later readers to gain insights on why the Gospel was successful with some people and not others. The brilliant insight is this: Gospel success depends upon the right conditions. Why can't the conditions be right for everyone all of the time? The parables of Jesus reveal a submission to the freedom of the organic order. Spiritual transformation happens within the acceptance of the freedom of the organic order of this world. Parables provide insights without trying to imply precise final explanations as to why things happen.
Aphorism of the Day, July 11, 2017
A fallacious approach to biblical words is to assume that because things are written in the Bible, they have been caused to happen in that way. The Parable of the Sower does not tell us what causes the Gospel to be successful, it only refers to the vague insight of the condition being right in the life experience of the person who hears the Gospel and responds in the ways that express life transformation. Predicting the success of the Gospel is as precise as predicting the exact time of when it will rain. It rains when the conditions are right. One can be completely right about predictions if one says it will happen when conditions are right.
Aphorism of the Day, July 10, 2017
Some of the parables of Jesus are followed by commentary to "explain" the meaning of the enigmatic parable. The parable of the sower is a wisdom story that gives insights about why the a message is successful for some and not for others. The parables do not "solve" a mystery as much as they acknowledge the mystery of the freedom of why things happen. Why is something successful? The context has to be right. This is pretty much a vague, but true answer as to why anything happens. The freedom of constantly changing "life contexts" means that success, failure or indifference can happen anytime. Freedom is the Merry-Go-Round in the times of people's lives that even the Gospel must ride.
Aphorism of the Day, July 9, 2017
In Paul's writing, he seems to describe sin in an extreme form as abject addiction. Sin is the experience of being so out of control of one's life that one need higher power intervention. Through addiction and idolatry might be psychological features of sin, sin is unique to the life situation of each person. My sin isn't worse than yours; it's different. The Bible is not about legislating metaphors for what you need to define as your sin; rather the Bible provides personal examples of people who have known and confessed their understanding of how they came to believe that they had failed to live up to what they believed God wanted them to be in excellence. Jesus said to take his yoke upon us. Being yoke means we are pulling together and that we don't pull the load alone. The yoke of Christ as regard the load of our sins is to know that Christ is with us as interior presence but also in the fellowship of fellow travelers who are yoked with us in the task of mutual care as we try to aid each other in the experience of grace.
Aphorism of the Day, July 8, 2017
One can get the impression in Paul that "sin" is elevated to its most extreme manifestation, destructive addiction. Paul took the notion of sin from living in the state of "religious defilement" and defined it as living in the condition of being out of control in one's life. I can't be the ideal person that I want to be? Sin is the condition of losing the maximal conditions of personal freedom in one's habits. "I cannot do what I want to do; some force or condition does not allow me a freedom which should be mine. Wretched man that I am; who will deliver me from this body of death?" The Gospels and the writings of St. Paul can seem to valorize the extreme. People who are "extremely" sinful can be extreme in going in the opposite direction toward goodness since they experienced how low they can go and can come near to destroying their lives. What about the person who has the composition and life experience not to be extreme in any behaviors? Such a person who does not see the need for an extreme life makeover, does not make the effort in "extreme" righteousness. St. Paul wrote that we should not increase our sin in order to increase our experience of grace, but he hints that we may not really appreciate grace and forgiveness if we have never come to the experience an extreme need for forgiveness. Does St. Paul make Christianity into a 12 Step program even if everyone does not seem to need the program in the way in which Paul needed it? "I don't need as much grace as you do, since I have not become as extreme in my addiction." One might note that one's past habits can rule the present. Paul was complicit in religious persecution and murder to the point of calling himself the "chief of sinners." His entire ministry may be seen as sublimating compensation for the fact that he had been complicit in the death of people like St. Stephen.
Aphorism of the Day, July 7, 2017
Caught in habit that you cannot kick? Did the devil make you do it? Paul said it was "sin" that made him do the things that he did not want to do. In Paul, sin is the engagement of projected desire upon an object that leads to addictive behaviors. Another name for this kind of addictive behavior is "idolatry." In idolatry one's desire is focused upon an object such that it becomes an psycho-magnet compelling repetition of behaviors which leaves one out of control and one feels bifurcated into an "I" who is controlled by "sin" which has attained an alter-personality. Sin is a wrong relationship, a wrong management of one's desire such that one begins to lose control of one's behavior. Interdiction through the sobriety of fasting from a seeming programmed harmful repetition, can be achieved through an experience of the Higher Power of the indwelling Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, July 6, 2017
For St. Paul, sin was the burden of his life in that sin was the habitual tendency to be unable to do and perform what one regarded to be the moral ideals of one's life. Sin was the condition of knowing what was right but being unable to perform it because one's behavior were locked in by addictive patterns. The rest promised by Jesus comes because being yoked with the "graceful presence of Christ" one tolerates oneself as a sinner even while one recovers from the effects of one's sins and ignorance through the gradual practice of self-control which comes through progressive enlightenment.
Aphorism of the Day, July 5, 2017
Jesus said, "Take my yoke upon you." This is a metaphor referring to the technology of pulling a heavy load. Life can be a burden which is often wearisome. A double yoke allows two animals to pull the load in coordination. Being yoke with Christ is not a promise to avoid burdens in life; it is the experience of someone pulling alongside us sharing the load. The lifestyle offered by Jesus was not an escape from the problems of living; it is a wisdom path to orchestrate and manage all of the particular conditions of freedom that can come to us in life.
Aphorism of the Day, July 4, 2017
Jesus quoted this in referring to the conformity demands of the public: ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.’ John the Baptist and Jesus were not religious in the way that many people wanted them to be. They did not "conform" to the existing religious paradigms. Since they "stood out," the pejorative was used to designate their "aberrant" behaviors. They were called demonic, mad, sinners, trangressors of ritual practice, glutton and drunkard. John and Jesus were proposing individual escape from being but "social clones" in proposing the power of one's freedom to resist the "everyone's doing it" syndrome.
Aphorism of the Day, July 3, 2017
In the ironic words of Jesus, "Father, you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants." This may be like the Arab riddle for those who believe that God has 100 names but human beings only know 99 of the names begging the question, "Why does the camel have a silly grin on his face?" Answer: Because he knows the 100th name of God and he's not telling. An infant is someone who is not an active language user and a metaphorical way to express mystery is to say that there are things which have not come to language yet.
Aphorism of the Day, July 2, 2017
Imagine a child who has left the religion of her parents and then she attempts to convert her parents to her new faith by saying they can convert and retain most of their faith if they simply embrace the new. This may be what is happening in the Gospel of Matthew. The Jewish architects of the Christian message become worried about the rejection of the parent faith community and so they try to convert the "hold out" community members to the notion that the innovations of Gentile Christianity were compatible with the practices of the synagogue.
Aphorism of the Day, July 1, 2017
The Gospel of John does not include an account of the Transfiguration. In the Transfiguration story, a visionary event, the face of Jesus is "lit up" indicating that Jesus is light to this world. The writer of John skips the story and goes directly to metaphorical equivalence uses an "I am" phrase. In the Gospel of John, Jesus is not reported to be on the Mount of Transfiguration but he is reported as saying, "I am the Light of the World." Note the contrast: The Transfiguration event is a visionary situational event of Christ appearing as light whereas in the Gospel of John, Jesus declares himself to be Light. Light in the Transfiguration story lines up comparatively with Moses whose face was lit up on Mount Sinai. In the Gospel of John the very notion of light and the implications of light become a metaphorical identity for Jesus.
Aphorism of the Day, July 30, 2017
Jesus said a scribe trained for the kingdom of heaven is one who can bring out of his treasure what is old and new. A scribes occupation assumes that the scribe is a "writer." Writing is a technology of memory which allows thoughts and ideas to be retained in written form with a stability that usually does not happen in an oral culture. A scribe is not just a calligrapher copyist of the Scripture; a scribe also writes commentary to bring out of the wisdom source Holy Spirit, new applications of "old" words. The universal commonness of human experience even across time means that correspondences with the "old" text of Scriptures can be found in one's current situation. Some naïve interpreters of the Bible believe that the meanings and details of Scripture are as static and stable as the imitation which occurs when one copies a written text. To explicate the treasure of correspondence between the ancient text and one's current situation is the treasure hunt of the scribe of the kingdom of heaven. Read the Scriptures and go forth and be the playwright of one's own life by writing a Scripture inspire script for living today.
Aphorism of the Day, July 29, 2017
Jesus recommended that we be scribes trained in the kingdom of heaven. A scribe was a reader, interpreter and expositor of the available texts who found in the written traces of the "old" text new insights for living now. Such a scribe knows that reading is always in the now, so an "old" text should be seen as new in current, "right now," experience. It is foolish to think that a text exists only in the past that is gone. An old text is new when it is read because reading occurs in the now. In our reading we seek to know a continuity of Spirit with the genius expressed in the Scripture even though we know the eternally continuing Spirit will inspire us to arrange and rearrange our lives to apply the genius of past wisdom into our lives now.
Aphorism of the Day, July 28, 2017
Jesus likened the realm of God to correspond to the one who knows jewelry who discovers the perfect pearl and sells everything to purchase the perfect pearl. What is the pearl of our lives? What is the organizing principle around which we have sacrificed everything to honor? Is it the genuine pearl of the Gospel message of knowing God or have we run after "artificial" pearls that have glitter but fail to represent the reality of the divine presence?
Aphorism of the Day, July 27, 2017
From the Psalms: "I will incline my ear to a proverb * and set forth my riddle upon the harp." Jesus as a communicator is presented as a wisdom teacher who used proverb, aphorism, parable, hyperbole and riddle to teach. One had to become an insider to crack the meaning of his riddle. Wisdom insight come as disciples have their lives transformed to be able to perceive that one lives in God's realm. The practice of wisdom means that one does not enforce meanings; one is patient to see a person become constituted to be able to under the unobvious as obvious.
Aphorism of the Day, July 26, 2017
The Gospel of Matthew editor put five parables of the kingdom as pithy aphorisms to evoke a sense of what it means to perceive the kingdom of heaven. Small insignificant beginnings can become the scaffold of cultural advance. The effects of the kingdom are like the uncanny effects of yeast. The kingdom is known with the excitement of an "inside" trader: "I know the value of something that others don't." The kingdom is the excitement of finding the chief value of one's life around which to organize one's life. The kingdom is like sorting a net full of the catch of the day in that we occasionally have to decide what is worth keeping as what we want to define our character. We have to "throw away" that which did not contribute to excellence.
Aphorism of the Day, July 25, 2017
The kingdom of heaven is like yeast? How so? It is a stealthy awareness which grows from within people even when the external order seems to be controlled by kings, presidents, armies and leaders of business. The kingdom of heaven is the inside job of access to God-awareness that can winsomely occur anywhere, anytime.
Aphorism of the Day, July 24, 2017
The Gospel writers refer to the kingdom of God/heaven as a secret that can only be known to those who are privileged to be insiders. It sounds rather exclusive but it is simply the mystery of the conditions being right for some people to embrace and understand a message when others do not. Some people tout the language of "predestination" as some sort of exclusive status. Predestination is but the crisp language of saying that this happened instead of that so that predestination rather than being the conscious pre-determination of things to happen according to an intervening God, it can simply be a faith orientation to the obvious, namely to what has happened. The Gospel writers were trying to deal with the obvious fact that some people were persuaded by the message of Christ and that persuasion was obvious in the transformation of their lives. The Gospel writings are also about the obvious fact all did not accept the message of Christ. The New Testament has a positive message but the churches arose in response to the opposition to the Gospel. Without being a strict Hegelian of citing thesis, antithesis and synthesis to give insight to the growth of historical ideas, one can note that dissatisfaction with the dynamics of an existing paradigm makes easier the conversion to a new paradigm.
Aphorism of the Day, July 23, 2017
The parable of the weed and the wheat presents the wisdom of knowing that the conditions of freedom intertwine conditions of good and evil together. The moral universe is always in the flux of the constellation of contextual judgments based upon the appraisal of whether something is good, bad or evil faced by the appraising party. The patience of God is an affirmation of the freedom conditions which inhabit all occasions and events with agents having degrees of freedom relative to their own natures.
Aphorism of the Day, July 22, 2017
Language converts the events of time into a time-lapsed version of time because words and language stand in place of experienced contexts. Of necessity language is reductive in relaying what is not language. Parables are story units which "speed up" time. The Parable of the wheat and the weed is a time-lapsed story about a patient God who is not time-lapse because the divine is everlasting. Our era of time-lapsed stories of cinema and television tend to make us impatient because we want the great problems in life to be resolved in the way in which they are resolved in a two hour action adventure movie. A dilemma in life has to do with being patient in life even while being profoundly urgent about exacting appropriate measures of justice. Justice delayed is justice denied and uneven justice for people in our world creates the condition of being uncomfortably patient tinged with a sense of helplessness about how to effect justice for all.
Aphorism of the Day, July 21, 2017
An insight from the parable of the weeds and the wheat is the acknowledgement of the tolerance of the conditions of freedom which permits for good and evil. By destroying the very conditions of freedom, the very basis of morality and the limited free agency of persons would disappear. Freedom is the underlying condition for the validity of morality. Without choice, there is no morality.
Aphorism of the Day, July 20,2017
The parables of the kingdom of God/heaven are wisdom stories to instill to the listeners nuances of perceiving that we live always, already in God's realm. In nostalgia one could look to "David's kingdom" as the model kingdom or one could look at a reign of a future David-like ruler (messiah). The parables of Jesus are not about the past or future realm of God but about recognizing the present and always realm of God.
Aphorism of the Day, July 19, 2017
The conditions of freedom in the world means that life is experienced as a mixture of "good and evil" or as the parable mirrors, "wheat and weeds." The probability of good and bad co-exist in the greater field of freedom. To attempt to "surgically" remove all that is bad would imply the cessation of the very conditions of freedom which in turn would invalidate the very value of what is good and what is bad. The conditions of freedom like farming have cycles and there are times of harvest when the produce is sorted from what is discarded. The parables of Jesus about the kingdom or "realm" of God provide insights about living in the realm of God known too as the realm of freedom.
Aphorism of the Day, July 18, 2017
One of the features of stories in language art is that time flies because language presents time-lapsed presentations of what is happening. One might say that in our modern world that we live by time-lapsed presentations of news presentation and television and cinema and manifold video/virtual/cyber media. In a movie, the great problems get presented and resolved in but 90 minutes. The actual effect of continuous presentations of time-lapsed stories is that we can become impatient with "real time" life. Probably the fickleness of public opinion has to do with our being enslaved to the impatience bred by the constant diet of time-lapsed life in video and writing. Impatience can happen when life does not really imitate time-lapsed speed. The parable of the Weed and the Wheat is a time-lapsed story which presents the counter message of the real time patience of God.
Aphorism of the Day, July 17, 2017
The Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds gives us an insight about the mutuality in the differences between values. The sun shines on both weed and wheat indiscriminately. The soil supports the growth of weeds and wheat in such intertwined ways that one cannot get rid of the weed without sacrificing the wheat. The symbiosis between weeds and wheat means that God is patient and not rash about thinning the crop. God is very patient about the divine attribute of freedom which is shared with all. One cannot remove the ground of freedom by seemingly removing all of the "weeds" from the garden of creation.
Aphorism of the Day, July 16, 2017
Parable is "word art." One get trapped into how the "word art" imitates real situations and in contemplating the art one is to carry the value analysis that occurs during the contemplation of the "word art" into the real situations of one's life. The Gospels are examples of "word art" and they include the further genre of "word art," the Parable.
Aphorism of the Day, July 15, 2017
The parables of Jesus were teaching tools as mnemonic devices in an oral culture. One can remember a principle embedded in a story easier than a list of "brute" theological "facts."
Aphorism of the Day, July 14, 2017
What makes agricultural success? Does God maintain the world like a highly sophisticated agribusiness farmer trying to control all elements that pertain to the success of the crop? The parable of the sower presents the insight of God as an indiscriminate broadcast seeder who aims the handful of seeds toward cultivated soil but the wind carries some of the seeds to unintended places. The parable of the sower admits the mystery of randomness in the success of God's word in the lives of people. When a person cannot accept one's good news, it may be that the conditions that persuade agreement and commitment are not present. In our day of political and religious polarization we have come to hold that people can hold the same religious beliefs differently enough to present challenges to effective cooperation and collaboration. The parable of the sower is an acknowledgement of the mystery of why some people come to believe what they come to believe. This is perhaps why the words of Jesus to the early evangelists who experienced rejection were: Shake the dust off your sandals and move on. You can force people to agree or accept your good news when they are not ready.
Aphorism of the Day, July 13, 2017
The Gospels are parables and they include parables. They are parables of the life of Jesus which instantiate the beliefs, the liturgical and spiritual practices of the early followers of Jesus. Just as the parables attributed to Jesus create "word lenses" through which followers attained insights, so too the Gospels themselves are "word lenses" through which the church interpreted the meaning of the life of Jesus in the lives of those who found those "word lenses" significant for the transformation of their lives.
Aphorism of the Day, July 12, 2017
A parable is an interpretive lens though which one can see the world. There is no pristine seeing of the world; it is always contextually interpreted. The Parable of the Sower was an interpretive story that was spun by Jesus to enable listeners and later readers to gain insights on why the Gospel was successful with some people and not others. The brilliant insight is this: Gospel success depends upon the right conditions. Why can't the conditions be right for everyone all of the time? The parables of Jesus reveal a submission to the freedom of the organic order. Spiritual transformation happens within the acceptance of the freedom of the organic order of this world. Parables provide insights without trying to imply precise final explanations as to why things happen.
Aphorism of the Day, July 11, 2017
A fallacious approach to biblical words is to assume that because things are written in the Bible, they have been caused to happen in that way. The Parable of the Sower does not tell us what causes the Gospel to be successful, it only refers to the vague insight of the condition being right in the life experience of the person who hears the Gospel and responds in the ways that express life transformation. Predicting the success of the Gospel is as precise as predicting the exact time of when it will rain. It rains when the conditions are right. One can be completely right about predictions if one says it will happen when conditions are right.
Aphorism of the Day, July 10, 2017
Some of the parables of Jesus are followed by commentary to "explain" the meaning of the enigmatic parable. The parable of the sower is a wisdom story that gives insights about why the a message is successful for some and not for others. The parables do not "solve" a mystery as much as they acknowledge the mystery of the freedom of why things happen. Why is something successful? The context has to be right. This is pretty much a vague, but true answer as to why anything happens. The freedom of constantly changing "life contexts" means that success, failure or indifference can happen anytime. Freedom is the Merry-Go-Round in the times of people's lives that even the Gospel must ride.
Aphorism of the Day, July 9, 2017
In Paul's writing, he seems to describe sin in an extreme form as abject addiction. Sin is the experience of being so out of control of one's life that one need higher power intervention. Through addiction and idolatry might be psychological features of sin, sin is unique to the life situation of each person. My sin isn't worse than yours; it's different. The Bible is not about legislating metaphors for what you need to define as your sin; rather the Bible provides personal examples of people who have known and confessed their understanding of how they came to believe that they had failed to live up to what they believed God wanted them to be in excellence. Jesus said to take his yoke upon us. Being yoke means we are pulling together and that we don't pull the load alone. The yoke of Christ as regard the load of our sins is to know that Christ is with us as interior presence but also in the fellowship of fellow travelers who are yoked with us in the task of mutual care as we try to aid each other in the experience of grace.
Aphorism of the Day, July 8, 2017
One can get the impression in Paul that "sin" is elevated to its most extreme manifestation, destructive addiction. Paul took the notion of sin from living in the state of "religious defilement" and defined it as living in the condition of being out of control in one's life. I can't be the ideal person that I want to be? Sin is the condition of losing the maximal conditions of personal freedom in one's habits. "I cannot do what I want to do; some force or condition does not allow me a freedom which should be mine. Wretched man that I am; who will deliver me from this body of death?" The Gospels and the writings of St. Paul can seem to valorize the extreme. People who are "extremely" sinful can be extreme in going in the opposite direction toward goodness since they experienced how low they can go and can come near to destroying their lives. What about the person who has the composition and life experience not to be extreme in any behaviors? Such a person who does not see the need for an extreme life makeover, does not make the effort in "extreme" righteousness. St. Paul wrote that we should not increase our sin in order to increase our experience of grace, but he hints that we may not really appreciate grace and forgiveness if we have never come to the experience an extreme need for forgiveness. Does St. Paul make Christianity into a 12 Step program even if everyone does not seem to need the program in the way in which Paul needed it? "I don't need as much grace as you do, since I have not become as extreme in my addiction." One might note that one's past habits can rule the present. Paul was complicit in religious persecution and murder to the point of calling himself the "chief of sinners." His entire ministry may be seen as sublimating compensation for the fact that he had been complicit in the death of people like St. Stephen.
Aphorism of the Day, July 7, 2017
Caught in habit that you cannot kick? Did the devil make you do it? Paul said it was "sin" that made him do the things that he did not want to do. In Paul, sin is the engagement of projected desire upon an object that leads to addictive behaviors. Another name for this kind of addictive behavior is "idolatry." In idolatry one's desire is focused upon an object such that it becomes an psycho-magnet compelling repetition of behaviors which leaves one out of control and one feels bifurcated into an "I" who is controlled by "sin" which has attained an alter-personality. Sin is a wrong relationship, a wrong management of one's desire such that one begins to lose control of one's behavior. Interdiction through the sobriety of fasting from a seeming programmed harmful repetition, can be achieved through an experience of the Higher Power of the indwelling Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, July 6, 2017
For St. Paul, sin was the burden of his life in that sin was the habitual tendency to be unable to do and perform what one regarded to be the moral ideals of one's life. Sin was the condition of knowing what was right but being unable to perform it because one's behavior were locked in by addictive patterns. The rest promised by Jesus comes because being yoked with the "graceful presence of Christ" one tolerates oneself as a sinner even while one recovers from the effects of one's sins and ignorance through the gradual practice of self-control which comes through progressive enlightenment.
Aphorism of the Day, July 5, 2017
Jesus said, "Take my yoke upon you." This is a metaphor referring to the technology of pulling a heavy load. Life can be a burden which is often wearisome. A double yoke allows two animals to pull the load in coordination. Being yoke with Christ is not a promise to avoid burdens in life; it is the experience of someone pulling alongside us sharing the load. The lifestyle offered by Jesus was not an escape from the problems of living; it is a wisdom path to orchestrate and manage all of the particular conditions of freedom that can come to us in life.
Aphorism of the Day, July 4, 2017
Jesus quoted this in referring to the conformity demands of the public: ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.’ John the Baptist and Jesus were not religious in the way that many people wanted them to be. They did not "conform" to the existing religious paradigms. Since they "stood out," the pejorative was used to designate their "aberrant" behaviors. They were called demonic, mad, sinners, trangressors of ritual practice, glutton and drunkard. John and Jesus were proposing individual escape from being but "social clones" in proposing the power of one's freedom to resist the "everyone's doing it" syndrome.
Aphorism of the Day, July 3, 2017
In the ironic words of Jesus, "Father, you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants." This may be like the Arab riddle for those who believe that God has 100 names but human beings only know 99 of the names begging the question, "Why does the camel have a silly grin on his face?" Answer: Because he knows the 100th name of God and he's not telling. An infant is someone who is not an active language user and a metaphorical way to express mystery is to say that there are things which have not come to language yet.
Aphorism of the Day, July 2, 2017
Imagine a child who has left the religion of her parents and then she attempts to convert her parents to her new faith by saying they can convert and retain most of their faith if they simply embrace the new. This may be what is happening in the Gospel of Matthew. The Jewish architects of the Christian message become worried about the rejection of the parent faith community and so they try to convert the "hold out" community members to the notion that the innovations of Gentile Christianity were compatible with the practices of the synagogue.
Aphorism of the Day, July 1, 2017
Holy means distinct, different and special. The God of the Hebrew Scripture was holy and special among the "gods" of the heavenly counsel. This "unique" God was understood in the development of Israel as a people who were trying to know themselves as unique and holy in their devotion to their Holy God. They developed "purity rituals" to mark themselves as unique, special or distinguishable from those who worshiped other gods. When the outer signs of uniqueness, separation and segregation become barriers to inclusion of "outsiders" then the religious paradigm places limits upon the growth of the community. The Christian paradigm departed from the synagogue paradigm by giving up external markers of "Jewishness" in favor of compromise to Gentile cultural habits tolerated as compatible with devotion to Christ. For the Gentile Christians, being "in the world but not of world," no longer meant being circumcised or observing dietary customs of Judaism. Christianity erased the rituals of exterior markings of "holiness" with a proclamation of an inner Holy Spirit as the determining sign of inclusion in a faith community. Still, Christianity has developed inclusion rituals to consolidate and inculcate members into community practices for community identity. With the development of inclusion rituals, Christian practice became its own segregation in difference and distinction. Overthrowing previous inclusion rituals did not exempt Christians from developing their own in new social contexts.
