Aphorism of the Day, March 31, 2019
The Parable of the Prodigal Son highlights that growth in perfection is always relative to the life situation of the person. Whether we seem to be normal, upstanding law-abiding people or rebellious, addicted, law-breakers, the issue of repentance is always about getting better from our current situation and not judging another harshly for needing different repentance strategies than we need for ourselves.
Aphorism of the Day, March 30, 2019
Ask yourself how the parable of the Prodigal Son was implied in the post-Pauline churches which were generating the Gospels as a way of illustrating practices that has come to pertain in the Pauline churches. The parables of Jesus in his own time, probably highlighted his ministry to "lapsed Jews=ritually non-observant," whereas in the post-Pauline churches his ministry was implied to be to all the Gentiles as well.
Aphorism of the Day, March 29, 2019
About Jesus it was said, "This man eats with sinners." This meant that he who was supposed to be a ritually observant Jew interacted with those who were defiled because they were not ritually observant Jews, and it was impossible for a Gentile to be acceptable company for someone who was ritually observant. If by being ritually observant was the only way that one could be a "proper child of God," then lots of people were living in alienation from being children of God. The parable of the "Prodigal Son," was told to indicate that God with a loving heart welcomes even the "obvious" rebellious child to reclaim one's status as a child of God. God hosts a party for those who recognize that they were made in the image of God and return to their original blessing.
Aphorism of the Day, March 28, 2019
If the parable of the Prodigal Son is written down and read in the time of the ascendancy of the Gentile church it may have been applied as a part of a polemic in the separation of the Jesus Movement from the church. Jesus as a Jew, is presented as being the one who was inclusive of Gentiles when in his own time, he probably had less exposure to Gentiles.
Aphorism of the Day, March 27, 2019
One can easily make the parable of the Prodigal Son, better named as Parable of the Forgiving Father, about personal piety and personal forgiveness. It is more aptly summarized as the inclusivity of God. The entire context concerned who Jesus included in his company and why he was criticized for it and how he did it.
Aphorism of the Day, March 26, 2019
The context for the parable of the Prodigal Son is that Jesus was hanging out with non-religious people, people who needed what he had to say. Religious establishments have become more about their own maintenance of their membership and who is in or out, rather than the work of appealing to people who really want a message of hope.
Aphorism of the Day, March 25, 2019
We might be tempted to interpret the parables of Jesus as being applicable to the apparent conflict between Jesus and religious figures of his time. In so doing we may miss the archetypical features of the parables as models of life. Prodigal Son, unforgiving brother and generous forgiving father: these are models of behaviors which everyone can participate in even as we assume the loving father bespeaks the definition of God is love.
Aphorism of the Day, March 24, 2019
God as always already future can be note in the divine name of "I am that I am," since "to be" does not have a present tense in Hebrew, it might be better translated as "I will be who I will be." God as omni-becoming or pure creativity who shares a degree of creative freedom with all that is not God but contained in God, means future total surpassability in occasions of everything and thus would honor the genuine freedom to account to weal and woe and also never assume to knowing the possible as actual.
Aphorism of the Day, March 23, 2019
Burning bush theophanies and speaking to a Rock for it to be a source of water? Modern people of faith with schizoidal discursive practice entertain themselves with D.C. Comic superheroes because entertainment the place where imagination can allow one's life not to be ruled by empirical verification. Do these things happen in real life? No, and we know how to separate the art forms from actuarial behaviors governed by following the rather uniformity of natural causes. Somehow we will not let the Bible stories be the art of ancient people who did not have so many forms of divided discursive practices as we have in our modern world. Give them a break, a charitable break. More identity is formed in our cultural myths than from our "real" histories.
Aphorism of the Day, March 22, 2019
The life of Moses is presented in three trimesters, each lasting forty years. At the end of his second trimester, he was confronted by the divine presence and voice. He was convinced that his own adequacy would not make him successful in leadership; rather it was the all-sufficiency of the One who was the Plenitude to fill in all human lack.
Aphorism of the Day, March 21, 2019
Moses encounter with God at the burning bush might be called "Of tetragrammatonology," a pun on the Algerian born Jewish French philosopher Jacque Derrida who wrote a revolutionary book entitled in English, "Of Grammatology." As I see the account of the presentation of the tetragrammaton, it is a written name of God to represent the phonetic event of Moses hearing the name of God. After the purported hearing of the name of God, it became represented by four letters and yet those four letters are not to be pronounced because they only represent a great Mystery which cannot be represented in vocal form. Derrida is famous for generating the notion of "deconstruction," a further development of Heidegger's notion of "destruction." The tetragrammaton may represent the abnegation of omni-textuality in that deconstruction is the erasure of every linguistic "idol" which becomes such by appearing and seeming to last too long in duration. The idol can only disappear or be deconstructed when the the foreground and background of text merge to one flat plain where nothing is distinguished so everything disappears and is deconstructed until further articulation events creates the separation of foreground from background in the entire discursive universe.
Aphorism of the Day, March 20, 2019
Moses' life in the number forty. Leaves Egypt alone in disgrace at 40. At 80 returns to Egypt to lead the people out of Egypt. Spent 40 years leading the people of Israel to the Promised into which he was not permitted to go. 40 days and nights on Mt. Sinai/Horeb to receive the law. And at the end of his second forty years he had the revelation of The Name, Adoni=The Lord, The Holy One, Blessed is He or in the Greek, the four letters, the tetragrammaton, the unpronounceable יהוה which English translators dared to translate and pronounce as Jehovah or Yahweh. It may seem as though the unpronounceable name of God due to its holiness is what theologian call the apophatic or the via negativa, the negative way as the starting place with God. God is so different that whatever one says about God, God is not that, or God cannot be contained by any human utterance on which human understanding is understood. However when it comes to the default position of humanity, namely, having language, one is saying something positive in and with language when one says that God's name is unpronounceable or God as God is unknowable by human being. Thinking that we can escape language by positing something outside of language is falsified by saying with language, "something outside of language."
Aphorism of the Day, March 19, 2019
"I am that I am," is the translation of the unspeakable name of God, and one can see how theologians could adopt through Heidegger the notion of God as HOLY BEING. In deconstructive post-modernism one might want to say that such Being co-inheres with the Word which signifies it since lingualocentricism is the default position of humanity. To even refer to what is not human, one uses words to do so.
Aphorism of the Day, March 18, 2019
People confronted Jesus with the horrific deaths of persons whose blood after they died was desecrated by Pilate. Also, some opined about the people who died when a tower fell upon them. In the free conditions of the world, people have power to injure and kill, but also gravitation can cause heavy items to fall on people who are in the wrong place at the wrong time. And when death happens people speculate about why they happened to specific people as if there might be some comfort in knowing why the free condition result in sudden death of some people and not others. And if people are going to speculate about why we die when we do, what state of being does Jesus recommend for us? The state of repentance. We should go to our deaths in the state of repentance, which is essentially, holy education of the continual renewing of our minds in getting better. Freedom is the energy of continuous creativity but in that freedom there can be the actions of getting worse or getting better. Repentance means that we complement the state of creative freedom best by always getting better.
Aphorism of the Day, March 17, 2019
For empiricists who are troubled by visions of the afterlife, they should note that hope itself is an empirical experience even though it is so protean that it cannot consistently conform or be replicated in "test tube" experiments. Hope creates visions of afterlife and para-life. We always already life in hope's creation of a para-life, the day dream life which accompanies whatever is going on in our "external" world. The para-life of hope is both escape from what life is not yet for us now to an alternative and if it is only escape, it might cause atrophy of action. But if it is the presentation of an abstract difference of what is, it can inspire alternate creative and new response.
Aphorism of the Day, March 16, 2019
Hope is the powerful proclivity of always having a future even though the empirical verification bookend of human mortality contradicts this. The Bible is a book inspired by hope and the promise of what a future might be. One of the results of having closed canons of Scripture is the assumption that only Bible stories of hope have the final authority and so we can be tempted to "worship" events of the past without embracing the freedom to endlessly hope and tell our new stories of hope in our time and in new ways. The Bible as a paradigm of the fact that stories of hope must be told should be seen as a permissive literature for us to embrace telling stories of hope in our lives now.
Aphorism of the Day, March 15, 2019
Having offspring and a promised land is how objective immortality was present to Abraham. When oppression threatens both life and land, then objective immortality in heirs and land becomes spiritualized to a resurrection in order to judge the oppressor who took life and land as the very symbols of objective immortality. The situation during the time of Jesus was that land had been taken and so the offering of a new heavenly country and Jerusalem was promised. Further, Abraham attained immortality in having many heirs of faith; a spiritual posterity as an indication of his immortality in his covenant with God.
Aphorism of the Day, March 14, 2019
Before we "Christianize" Abraham in the Hebrew Scriptures, one should probably acknowledge that Abraham feared in not having an heir, since his future objective immortality resided in his actual offspring. He received the promise of many future people who would be proof of his objectivity immortality.
Aphorism of the Day, March 13, 2019
Ironic speak of Jesus: "It is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem." Could be reference to the fact that only in places where power elites dwell that prophets who stand against the order of power become particularly vulnerable to becoming punished to death for their public criticism of the power elites.
Aphorism of the Day, March 12, 2019
In a thesaurus of metaphors for Jesus, Good Shepherd and Mother Hen would be Gospel synonyms.
Aphorism of the Day, March 11, 2019
The fox and the hen. Jesus referred to Herod as that "fox" and uses the metaphor of a hen protecting her chicks under her wings to refer to how he wanted to be toward the city of Jerusalem. Apparently the "fox" won; Jesus as the hen was not able to protect himself or Jerusalem but it is also true that the little chickens fled and grew to memorialize Jesus as the "Great Hen" forever.
Aphorism of the Day, March 10, 2019
Fasting is a discipline in self-control whereby one is learning to take control of one's life by conscious practice of delayed gratification. Such delaying of gratification is a defining characteristic of mature adulthood as one controls the flows of one's life in order to practice maximally beneficial stewardship for one's life and the life of others.
Aphorism of the Day, March 9, 2019
In his baptism Jesus received a favored designation from a heavenly voice, "Beloved Son." In the Vision Quest temptation that followed, in the fasting state, Jesus had access to the diabolical voice which taunted his identity, "If you are the Son of God,....." In temptation, our being children of God is always challenged by being presented with options of disobeying God and image of God that is upon our lives through our birth and its further actualization in baptism.
Aphorism of the Day, March 8, 2019
Propitious and favorable, but unplanned time is called serendipity, and we can hope for the good luck of serendipity all of the time. The good favor of serendipity does not seem to be the general laws which govern statistical probability in what can happen to anyone in life. Actuarial wisdom means that from observance wisdom we try to time our behaviors for the best possible outcomes for the greatest number of people. The wisdom of good laws of justice follow the actuarial wisdom of anticipating probable outcome. Temptation is mainly about mistiming and being drawn to disobey the highest insights of one's life.
Aphorism of the Day, March 7, 2019
In the temptation of Jesus, Satan tries to get Jesus to treat poetry as science. Jesus passed the test. Sadly the people who are often called fundamentalists, don't pass this temptation.
Aphorism of the Day, March 6, 2019
Hypocrisy is trying to prove to the public that one is loving God with religious and churchy behaviors and ignoring the second commandment to love one's neighbor as oneself.
Aphorism of the Day, March 5, 2019
What was Jesus accused of in his lifetime? Being a glutton and winebibber. Being mad. Being in league with the devil. Hanging out with sinners. Interesting to note the corresponding temptation regarding food/bread, worshiping the devil, committing megalomania, and suicidal madness to throw himself from a high place to be caught by the angels. Ironically, the devil tempted Jesus to be the "Anti-Christ" or to be lying false presentation of who God's Christ was to be.
Aphorism of the Day, March 4, 2019
The temptation of Jesus presented to Gospel reader the interior struggle of Jesus of Nazareth. The constitution of the inner self is a constitution of the words as spirit of our interior lives. We have in how we take on language an inner symbolic network of meanings and some of these meanings become more made flesh than others in how and when they are actualized in body language acts and deeds of our lives. The temptation scenario presents to us the reality of freedom within each persons interior life. With interior words each of us hopes to be constituted as a semi-free agent who can control the timing of our lives regarding our bodily habits, our public recognition and our practical submission to our limitations in our bodily lives, i.e., we believe in gravity so we don't throw our bodies off buildings in hopes that angels will catch us.
Aphorism of the Day, March 3, 2019
The transfiguration event was written about after the post-resurrection appearances of Christ and the many experiences of the Risen Christ of who was much better known than Jesus of Nazareth during his lifetime. How were the seeds of the post-resurrection Christ to be found in retelling the life of Jesus of Nazareth. In the transfiguration event, the spiritual essence of Jesus lit up his physical body to make his face shine, indicating that he had a resurrection aspect of himself before it happened.
Aphorism of the Day, March 2, 2019
Jesus did not appear in a "cultural vacuum" as an alien; he appeared within the inherited story traditions of the people with whom he resided. When the story of Jesus was told it had to be told within the story of the heroes of Jewish culture, namely Moses and Elijah. G.O.A.T. has become the acronym for Greatest of All Time. Greatness is based upon comparison and the transfiguration event presents two great ones in their own time conferring a surpassing greatness upon Jesus. Their presence in the visionary event was to agree with the heavenly voice which declared Jesus as God's chosen one.
Aphorism of the Day, March 1, 2019
In the interaction of language about language we use words to name interior geography or what some might call "inscape" and in naming the inside places we use words that come from the language naming experience of the exterior or landscape. The features of landscape such as light, clouds, elevation, mountain and valley are used as metaphor for how values are generated and formed. The transfiguration is presented as a landscape event but in the spiritual symbology of the Bible it is chock full of the language of landscape having corresponding inscape events to celebrate the coming to value of what has come to have value, and in the event of the transfiguration, the coming to supreme value of Jesus.
The Parable of the Prodigal Son highlights that growth in perfection is always relative to the life situation of the person. Whether we seem to be normal, upstanding law-abiding people or rebellious, addicted, law-breakers, the issue of repentance is always about getting better from our current situation and not judging another harshly for needing different repentance strategies than we need for ourselves.
Aphorism of the Day, March 30, 2019
Ask yourself how the parable of the Prodigal Son was implied in the post-Pauline churches which were generating the Gospels as a way of illustrating practices that has come to pertain in the Pauline churches. The parables of Jesus in his own time, probably highlighted his ministry to "lapsed Jews=ritually non-observant," whereas in the post-Pauline churches his ministry was implied to be to all the Gentiles as well.
Aphorism of the Day, March 29, 2019
About Jesus it was said, "This man eats with sinners." This meant that he who was supposed to be a ritually observant Jew interacted with those who were defiled because they were not ritually observant Jews, and it was impossible for a Gentile to be acceptable company for someone who was ritually observant. If by being ritually observant was the only way that one could be a "proper child of God," then lots of people were living in alienation from being children of God. The parable of the "Prodigal Son," was told to indicate that God with a loving heart welcomes even the "obvious" rebellious child to reclaim one's status as a child of God. God hosts a party for those who recognize that they were made in the image of God and return to their original blessing.
Aphorism of the Day, March 28, 2019
If the parable of the Prodigal Son is written down and read in the time of the ascendancy of the Gentile church it may have been applied as a part of a polemic in the separation of the Jesus Movement from the church. Jesus as a Jew, is presented as being the one who was inclusive of Gentiles when in his own time, he probably had less exposure to Gentiles.
Aphorism of the Day, March 27, 2019
One can easily make the parable of the Prodigal Son, better named as Parable of the Forgiving Father, about personal piety and personal forgiveness. It is more aptly summarized as the inclusivity of God. The entire context concerned who Jesus included in his company and why he was criticized for it and how he did it.
Aphorism of the Day, March 26, 2019
The context for the parable of the Prodigal Son is that Jesus was hanging out with non-religious people, people who needed what he had to say. Religious establishments have become more about their own maintenance of their membership and who is in or out, rather than the work of appealing to people who really want a message of hope.
Aphorism of the Day, March 25, 2019
We might be tempted to interpret the parables of Jesus as being applicable to the apparent conflict between Jesus and religious figures of his time. In so doing we may miss the archetypical features of the parables as models of life. Prodigal Son, unforgiving brother and generous forgiving father: these are models of behaviors which everyone can participate in even as we assume the loving father bespeaks the definition of God is love.
Aphorism of the Day, March 24, 2019
God as always already future can be note in the divine name of "I am that I am," since "to be" does not have a present tense in Hebrew, it might be better translated as "I will be who I will be." God as omni-becoming or pure creativity who shares a degree of creative freedom with all that is not God but contained in God, means future total surpassability in occasions of everything and thus would honor the genuine freedom to account to weal and woe and also never assume to knowing the possible as actual.
Aphorism of the Day, March 23, 2019
Burning bush theophanies and speaking to a Rock for it to be a source of water? Modern people of faith with schizoidal discursive practice entertain themselves with D.C. Comic superheroes because entertainment the place where imagination can allow one's life not to be ruled by empirical verification. Do these things happen in real life? No, and we know how to separate the art forms from actuarial behaviors governed by following the rather uniformity of natural causes. Somehow we will not let the Bible stories be the art of ancient people who did not have so many forms of divided discursive practices as we have in our modern world. Give them a break, a charitable break. More identity is formed in our cultural myths than from our "real" histories.
Aphorism of the Day, March 22, 2019
The life of Moses is presented in three trimesters, each lasting forty years. At the end of his second trimester, he was confronted by the divine presence and voice. He was convinced that his own adequacy would not make him successful in leadership; rather it was the all-sufficiency of the One who was the Plenitude to fill in all human lack.
Aphorism of the Day, March 21, 2019
Moses encounter with God at the burning bush might be called "Of tetragrammatonology," a pun on the Algerian born Jewish French philosopher Jacque Derrida who wrote a revolutionary book entitled in English, "Of Grammatology." As I see the account of the presentation of the tetragrammaton, it is a written name of God to represent the phonetic event of Moses hearing the name of God. After the purported hearing of the name of God, it became represented by four letters and yet those four letters are not to be pronounced because they only represent a great Mystery which cannot be represented in vocal form. Derrida is famous for generating the notion of "deconstruction," a further development of Heidegger's notion of "destruction." The tetragrammaton may represent the abnegation of omni-textuality in that deconstruction is the erasure of every linguistic "idol" which becomes such by appearing and seeming to last too long in duration. The idol can only disappear or be deconstructed when the the foreground and background of text merge to one flat plain where nothing is distinguished so everything disappears and is deconstructed until further articulation events creates the separation of foreground from background in the entire discursive universe.
Aphorism of the Day, March 20, 2019
Moses' life in the number forty. Leaves Egypt alone in disgrace at 40. At 80 returns to Egypt to lead the people out of Egypt. Spent 40 years leading the people of Israel to the Promised into which he was not permitted to go. 40 days and nights on Mt. Sinai/Horeb to receive the law. And at the end of his second forty years he had the revelation of The Name, Adoni=The Lord, The Holy One, Blessed is He or in the Greek, the four letters, the tetragrammaton, the unpronounceable יהוה which English translators dared to translate and pronounce as Jehovah or Yahweh. It may seem as though the unpronounceable name of God due to its holiness is what theologian call the apophatic or the via negativa, the negative way as the starting place with God. God is so different that whatever one says about God, God is not that, or God cannot be contained by any human utterance on which human understanding is understood. However when it comes to the default position of humanity, namely, having language, one is saying something positive in and with language when one says that God's name is unpronounceable or God as God is unknowable by human being. Thinking that we can escape language by positing something outside of language is falsified by saying with language, "something outside of language."
Aphorism of the Day, March 19, 2019
"I am that I am," is the translation of the unspeakable name of God, and one can see how theologians could adopt through Heidegger the notion of God as HOLY BEING. In deconstructive post-modernism one might want to say that such Being co-inheres with the Word which signifies it since lingualocentricism is the default position of humanity. To even refer to what is not human, one uses words to do so.
Aphorism of the Day, March 18, 2019
People confronted Jesus with the horrific deaths of persons whose blood after they died was desecrated by Pilate. Also, some opined about the people who died when a tower fell upon them. In the free conditions of the world, people have power to injure and kill, but also gravitation can cause heavy items to fall on people who are in the wrong place at the wrong time. And when death happens people speculate about why they happened to specific people as if there might be some comfort in knowing why the free condition result in sudden death of some people and not others. And if people are going to speculate about why we die when we do, what state of being does Jesus recommend for us? The state of repentance. We should go to our deaths in the state of repentance, which is essentially, holy education of the continual renewing of our minds in getting better. Freedom is the energy of continuous creativity but in that freedom there can be the actions of getting worse or getting better. Repentance means that we complement the state of creative freedom best by always getting better.
Aphorism of the Day, March 17, 2019
For empiricists who are troubled by visions of the afterlife, they should note that hope itself is an empirical experience even though it is so protean that it cannot consistently conform or be replicated in "test tube" experiments. Hope creates visions of afterlife and para-life. We always already life in hope's creation of a para-life, the day dream life which accompanies whatever is going on in our "external" world. The para-life of hope is both escape from what life is not yet for us now to an alternative and if it is only escape, it might cause atrophy of action. But if it is the presentation of an abstract difference of what is, it can inspire alternate creative and new response.
Aphorism of the Day, March 16, 2019
Hope is the powerful proclivity of always having a future even though the empirical verification bookend of human mortality contradicts this. The Bible is a book inspired by hope and the promise of what a future might be. One of the results of having closed canons of Scripture is the assumption that only Bible stories of hope have the final authority and so we can be tempted to "worship" events of the past without embracing the freedom to endlessly hope and tell our new stories of hope in our time and in new ways. The Bible as a paradigm of the fact that stories of hope must be told should be seen as a permissive literature for us to embrace telling stories of hope in our lives now.
Aphorism of the Day, March 15, 2019
Having offspring and a promised land is how objective immortality was present to Abraham. When oppression threatens both life and land, then objective immortality in heirs and land becomes spiritualized to a resurrection in order to judge the oppressor who took life and land as the very symbols of objective immortality. The situation during the time of Jesus was that land had been taken and so the offering of a new heavenly country and Jerusalem was promised. Further, Abraham attained immortality in having many heirs of faith; a spiritual posterity as an indication of his immortality in his covenant with God.
Aphorism of the Day, March 14, 2019
Before we "Christianize" Abraham in the Hebrew Scriptures, one should probably acknowledge that Abraham feared in not having an heir, since his future objective immortality resided in his actual offspring. He received the promise of many future people who would be proof of his objectivity immortality.
Aphorism of the Day, March 13, 2019
Ironic speak of Jesus: "It is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem." Could be reference to the fact that only in places where power elites dwell that prophets who stand against the order of power become particularly vulnerable to becoming punished to death for their public criticism of the power elites.
Aphorism of the Day, March 12, 2019
In a thesaurus of metaphors for Jesus, Good Shepherd and Mother Hen would be Gospel synonyms.
Aphorism of the Day, March 11, 2019
The fox and the hen. Jesus referred to Herod as that "fox" and uses the metaphor of a hen protecting her chicks under her wings to refer to how he wanted to be toward the city of Jerusalem. Apparently the "fox" won; Jesus as the hen was not able to protect himself or Jerusalem but it is also true that the little chickens fled and grew to memorialize Jesus as the "Great Hen" forever.
Aphorism of the Day, March 10, 2019
Fasting is a discipline in self-control whereby one is learning to take control of one's life by conscious practice of delayed gratification. Such delaying of gratification is a defining characteristic of mature adulthood as one controls the flows of one's life in order to practice maximally beneficial stewardship for one's life and the life of others.
Aphorism of the Day, March 9, 2019
In his baptism Jesus received a favored designation from a heavenly voice, "Beloved Son." In the Vision Quest temptation that followed, in the fasting state, Jesus had access to the diabolical voice which taunted his identity, "If you are the Son of God,....." In temptation, our being children of God is always challenged by being presented with options of disobeying God and image of God that is upon our lives through our birth and its further actualization in baptism.
Aphorism of the Day, March 8, 2019
Propitious and favorable, but unplanned time is called serendipity, and we can hope for the good luck of serendipity all of the time. The good favor of serendipity does not seem to be the general laws which govern statistical probability in what can happen to anyone in life. Actuarial wisdom means that from observance wisdom we try to time our behaviors for the best possible outcomes for the greatest number of people. The wisdom of good laws of justice follow the actuarial wisdom of anticipating probable outcome. Temptation is mainly about mistiming and being drawn to disobey the highest insights of one's life.
Aphorism of the Day, March 7, 2019
In the temptation of Jesus, Satan tries to get Jesus to treat poetry as science. Jesus passed the test. Sadly the people who are often called fundamentalists, don't pass this temptation.
Aphorism of the Day, March 6, 2019
Hypocrisy is trying to prove to the public that one is loving God with religious and churchy behaviors and ignoring the second commandment to love one's neighbor as oneself.
Aphorism of the Day, March 5, 2019
What was Jesus accused of in his lifetime? Being a glutton and winebibber. Being mad. Being in league with the devil. Hanging out with sinners. Interesting to note the corresponding temptation regarding food/bread, worshiping the devil, committing megalomania, and suicidal madness to throw himself from a high place to be caught by the angels. Ironically, the devil tempted Jesus to be the "Anti-Christ" or to be lying false presentation of who God's Christ was to be.
Aphorism of the Day, March 4, 2019
The temptation of Jesus presented to Gospel reader the interior struggle of Jesus of Nazareth. The constitution of the inner self is a constitution of the words as spirit of our interior lives. We have in how we take on language an inner symbolic network of meanings and some of these meanings become more made flesh than others in how and when they are actualized in body language acts and deeds of our lives. The temptation scenario presents to us the reality of freedom within each persons interior life. With interior words each of us hopes to be constituted as a semi-free agent who can control the timing of our lives regarding our bodily habits, our public recognition and our practical submission to our limitations in our bodily lives, i.e., we believe in gravity so we don't throw our bodies off buildings in hopes that angels will catch us.
Aphorism of the Day, March 3, 2019
The transfiguration event was written about after the post-resurrection appearances of Christ and the many experiences of the Risen Christ of who was much better known than Jesus of Nazareth during his lifetime. How were the seeds of the post-resurrection Christ to be found in retelling the life of Jesus of Nazareth. In the transfiguration event, the spiritual essence of Jesus lit up his physical body to make his face shine, indicating that he had a resurrection aspect of himself before it happened.
Aphorism of the Day, March 2, 2019
Jesus did not appear in a "cultural vacuum" as an alien; he appeared within the inherited story traditions of the people with whom he resided. When the story of Jesus was told it had to be told within the story of the heroes of Jewish culture, namely Moses and Elijah. G.O.A.T. has become the acronym for Greatest of All Time. Greatness is based upon comparison and the transfiguration event presents two great ones in their own time conferring a surpassing greatness upon Jesus. Their presence in the visionary event was to agree with the heavenly voice which declared Jesus as God's chosen one.
Aphorism of the Day, March 1, 2019
In the interaction of language about language we use words to name interior geography or what some might call "inscape" and in naming the inside places we use words that come from the language naming experience of the exterior or landscape. The features of landscape such as light, clouds, elevation, mountain and valley are used as metaphor for how values are generated and formed. The transfiguration is presented as a landscape event but in the spiritual symbology of the Bible it is chock full of the language of landscape having corresponding inscape events to celebrate the coming to value of what has come to have value, and in the event of the transfiguration, the coming to supreme value of Jesus.
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