Aphorism of the Day, April 30, 2019
Peter denied Jesus three times during the trial of Jesus. Jesus rehabilitated Peter by asking Peter if he loved him. He asked three times, to cover each denial. Balance and equity might mean that we need to rehabilitate the negative with at least equal positive, not to get God's forgiveness, but simply to re-train the human functions.
Aphorism of the Day, April 29, 2019
The period of the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus is presented as a liminal phase for the disciples; it is betwixt and between the physical presence of Jesus and the soon to be unseen Jesus who will become manifest by other psycho-spiritual events. The liminal phase is a transition presented as a period of forty days to clarify all of their previous misunderstanding about what the meaning of Jesus as a crucified Messiah. The liminal phase is presented as the time when the disciples were being weaned from seeing Jesus outside of them and accepting the reality of the Risen Christ seeing through them.
Aphorism of the Day, April 28, 2018
The New Testament became the collections of writings representing the institutionalization of the success of the Jesus Movement. Jesus died; he did not go away but continued to effect lives of many in myriads of ways tailored to each individual's circumstances. His words were spirit and life, the life of those who continued to follow him. Word is how people mix with each inside of us. When Christly words start to inwardly constitute one's being toward amendment and change of one's life, one has been "baptized" by the Holy Spirit words of Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, April 27, 2019
The writers of the New Testament projected upon God a meaning of divine stewardship. The Divine initiative, so localized in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, had to be decentralized and made diffuse if the message of Jesus were to go worldwide. Death, resurrection appearances and the presence of the Holy Spirit is how the message was delegated and passed from the omni-compentent but very local Jesus of Nazareth to the peoples of the entire known world who could know the Risen Christ as all and in all.
Aphorism of the Day, April 26, 2019
The Gospel of John presents the insightful but poignantly ironic word conditions. Using word in a circular argument, word is used to establish word as the "arche" or first principle of everything. "In the beginning (arche) was the Word." Since these words are written, words are being used to establish Word as the first principle (arche) of life as we can know. Another punchline in John's Gospel is the affirmation of his own written word as a valid way to come to belief (being persuaded about) Jesus as the Son of God. John's Gospel is honest about us being on the Merry-go-Round of the Word and words as the main feature of human identity.
Aphorism of the Day, April 25, 2019
"Jesus did many other signs which are not written." (in the Gospel of John). All that we can do with past event is have them re-presented in abbreviated traces. Since we are living in the continuous present (is happening), we can only bring a few time-lapsed abbreviated trace shots of the past into our continuous presence, since we can on be in one time and place. The Gospel of John was written with enough of those abbreviated traces of the life of Jesus to be evocative of the "signs" that we need to be persuaded (believe) about the continuity of the Risen Christ as Word of God in our lives. Christ was identified with Word so as to affirm our language-based identity as human beings and to let certain values that are transmitted through words become the persuasive values of love and justice.
Aphorism of the Day, April 24, 2019
The "Doubting Thomas" story is a teaching which shows that different people need different kinds of proof to believe what they believe, even the community values of one's friends.
Aphorism of the Day, April 23, 2019
The Doubting Thomas story was shared primarily to affirm the validity of the experiences of the Risen Christ which did not have empirical verification like those of the "eye-witnesses."
Aphorism of the Day, April 22, 2019
Presence can be experienced as absence if it is not "apparent." The "Doubting Thomas" stories explores how absences can be known as presence through the reading of words about Christ in the Johannine writings.
Aphorism of the Day, April 21, 2019
Imagine your afterlife as the ability to keep starting over and doing something new with the knowledge of what you did wrong in the same circumstance the last time you did it. Something like the theme of the movie, "Ground Hog Day." It would be repentance with purpose of preparing oneself by ridding oneself of proud egotistical acts that hindered one to be able to be fully in love with the one who is ordained. Imagine an afterlife of being able to come to love having had one's freedom totally educated by experience.
Aphorism of the Day, April 20, 2019
Why do we say the life cycle of an egg, or a larva, or a chrysalis? Because the butterfly is the climax of the life cycle and so the butterfly gets naming priority. So we say, the Butterfly Life Cycle. In the mystical cycle of the church year we could call it the Easter Life Cycle since Easter stands as what defines our lives of Christian hope.
Aphorism of the Day, April 19, 2019
The synchronicity of life means means that all of the events in the cycles of life are always already happening. In our limited focus on what is happening, we go into "linear" mode of thinking even while we are actually in a spiral mode of the cycles of life. The cross of Jesus cannot be separated from his birth or resurrection; with our liturgical observation we try to freeze frame an event in the cycle and pretend that the other events in the cycle did not happen, but we cannot do the impossible.
Aphorism of the Day, April 18, 2019
On Maundy Thursday, it is important to note that Eucharist and service are two values of the Christ Movement. They should not be limited to stylized events of bread and wine and a stylized washing of feet. The Eucharist is related to public eating whereby it is shown that all who are present have enough to eat. The foot-washing is related to the dying with Christ mysticism needed for the checking of the ego to be at the service of others in what is required in the situation for the common. To divorce the Maundy Thursday liturgy from these two values is to walk in hypocrisy.
Aphorism of the Day, April 17, 2019
We use external observances in Holy Week to remind ourselves of the continual inward transformation that is involved in our identity with Christ, the Risen Christ who is experienced within in us as Word with a perfect purpose.
Aphorism of the Day, April 16, 2019
Aphorism on the great fire at Notre-Dame de Paris: In architecture, it happens that Word can be made the "flesh" of stones and wood and materiel and preside as Notre-Dame de Paris and when fire threatens its full materiality, we are still inspired by its ideal, to which we look for its new future.
Aphorism of the Day, April 15, 2019
As much as Holy Week and Easter can be reduced to increasing religious behaviors on behalf of religious organization, the ritual process is about relating the big question faced in human life to a Plenitude which survives, comprehends and integrates any particular event in the life cycle. A Plenitude which includes death and the afterlife with love and justice is what we celebrate in Holy Week.
Aphorism of the Day, April 14, 2019
If one does not read the Passion Gospel from the perspective of Pauline mysticism of the cross, then one is left with various information reports without the mystical engagement that surely was implied by the early churches' mystagogy. Take the mystagogy out of the Passion Gospel and a dominant function is lost.
Aphorism of the Day, April 13, 2019
Pre-life, pre-birth life, life, death and afterlife. Of the cycle, life and death have the most empirically verifiable access. The human question of meaning is whether to define death as the last occasion of living or as the first occasion of afterlife. Or is it a threshold connecting both? The church has regarded the death of Jesus as a great Death, because the church has invited people to the coat tails of this great Death as an identity event and the church mystics have re-baptized the entropy of dying as a positive energy of leaving the state of living according to the "self" that will die and not according to the "spirit-self" which lives lives on.
Aphorism of the Day, April 12, 2019
To return the Passion Gospel to be the visualization cover for the mystical identity with the death of Christ confessed by Paul, rather than literalize all the Passion characters(which was used to justify anti-Semitic action by Christians in the history of the church), one needs to understand them as the enemies of the soul (in the spiritual and metaphorical sense) which would hinder the mystical goal of the "good death" to self which is known because the death of Jesus is a positive energy to end the egotistical tendencies of the soul.
Aphorism of the Day, April 11, 2019
How does one remove the "anti-Semitic" tinge of the Passion Gospels? The words of Jesus to love one's enemies seem a bit deconstructed if the Pharisees and Sadducees are "his enemies." The Passion happened because of context specific collision between various religious leaders and the Roman authorities in Jerusalem. It is inconsistent to claim the Cross was providentially necessary while at the same time decrying the motives of all of the actors and the agents of the events. Some would like to assign hierarchy of blame for the events, assigning a greater role to religious leaders than to the people who actually had the power to crucify. The freedom for anything to happen implicates everything that came before the event; the need to fine-tune specific causality might pertain to juridical discourse. It would seem that the glory in Cross of Jesus by Paul was not to be about assigning blame but assigning universal forgiveness. That Jews and Gentiles can be all to too human in some bad behaviors does not give license for anti-Semitic or anti-Gentile behaviors.
Aphorism of the Day, April 10, 2019
One has to approach the Passion Gospel accounts in their functional layers of how they have been used by the readers throughout church history. They have functioned as a part of a liturgical calendar, an arbitrary calendar used as a method of presenting an annual curriculum of Christian teaching based on the life cycle of Christ. Probably at the core of the Passion is the mystical theology of Paul and others based upon their theology of the cross, a stumbling to Jews (who wanted a true Davidic Messiah), foolishness to the Greeks/Hellenistic Romans (how could a crucified person be a king?), but in the mystical theology of Paul and others, the cross was the power of God to die to what is unworthy in one's life. Sadly, the church's observance of the Passion has mainly lost the mystical theology of Paul regarding the cross. The church has resorted to the material meaning of the cross as an external historical event rather than how the cross was reprocessed through the mystical experience with the Risen Christ in the pyscho-spiritual identity method of transformation.
Aphorism of the Day, April 9, 2019
In the Lucan Passion account, the writer goes to some links to present Pilate as someone who really wanted to release Jesus but did not because he was prevailed upon by the Jewish religious accusers of Jesus. It is quite ironic that Herod and Pilate are very compliant in such a situation particularly when Herod had John the Baptist decapitated as trivial party favor.
Aphorism of the Day, April 8, 2019
The Passion account has been robbed from its setting in its typical promulgation by making it more about the events in the time of Jesus rather than as the visualization technique in the mysticism of the early church to reinforce and identity with the spirit of Christ in his life, death and Risen Life.
Aphorism of the Day, April 7, 2019
If everything is known in and through Language, including knowing that we know about language because of having language, what kind of continuous linguistic reflexivity are we living within language? We cannot escape language because when we use "escape language" we are using and being used by language.
Aphorism of the Day, April 6, 2019
A written text like the Gospel seems to fix the events of the past as though they are events which could only be read and interpreted in one way, one self-evidential way (because the text seems to concretize them). But interpretation in the now is always alive and new, and when one cannot dialogue and ask questions of people who are presented in Gospel events, those people and events become "fixed" types for teaching what the church had become and why it had become what it had become for the writers of the Gospel within their communities. The past is dead and gone, even as the current interpretation of the traces of the past are alive and active even as we are alive and active and questioning. While we think that we are assessing Mary of Bethany and Judas Iscariot, we really are assessing an archaeological history of the meaning of the types represented by Gospel figures in the church in the past and present. When have I been devoted as Mary? When have I been a cynical betrayer like Judas?
Aphorism of the Day, April 5, 2019
In trying to translate the events of one generation to the next, one looks for contemporary correspondences to over come the "distance" of time, and the distance is even more pronounced in the eras when there were less intimate and exact technologies of memory. The Gospels represent ironic interplay of correspondences in appearing to be "eyewitness" accounts, even though they were written 1-2 generations after the purported events and they were written in situations which included extra-Palestine locations of the reading "audiences" and persons who were "extra"-Jewish Christian Gentiles with no background in the various Hebraic traditions. So figures like Mary and Bethany and Judas Iscariot would be presented as types of persons in the early church who either were completely devoted and aromatic in their reverence of Christ, and those who got into the Movement for the wrong reasons and didn't really have the life converting event and so like Judas, they could coldly betray and demean the passionate devotions of those who had had their socks knocked off in an encounter with the Risen Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, April 4, 2019
Mary of Bethany in the privacy of a meal at home for Jesus and a few intimates perfumes the room and the feet of Jesus to the scorn of Judas. Such was an instance of
casting one's pearls before swine, in that Judas had no ability to empathize with the love devotion of Mary for Jesus. Judas found that he was in the "Movement" for all the wrong reasons. This story in John instantiates the experience of those in the church who were once enamored by the Movement but left it, even in betraying those who remained.
Aphorism of the Day, April 3, 2019
By the time that the Gospel of John was written, the characters presented in the Gospel had become more highly stylized examples of discipleship events and behaviors/misbehaviors. Mary of Bethany presented fragrance to Jesus signifying the fragrance that was also written about the winsome inner essence of a person who had been changed by an encounter with the Risen Christ. St. Paul wrote about those who had experienced the blessing of the mystery of Christ and then were tempted away by fear and money or other diversion. Judas, who rebuked Mary of Bethany instantiated the one who had been received into the inner crowd but rejected the value of the mystery. The early church like all Movements had to deal with those who "betrayed" the Movement.
Aphorism of the Day, April 2, 2019
When feet of Jesus were anointed with "costly" perfume, Judas who eventually took a bribe to betray Jesus, complained about such a diversion of resources from giving to the poor. Jesus replied, " You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me." Sound a bit harsh? Perhaps Jesus was addressing the condition of the heart of Judas who was embarrassed by such a display of devotion. Due to the conditions of freedom in the world, rich and the great number of poor people prevail. Rich people have the freedom to equal out the conditions but they don't; the reality of rich and poor cannot detract from devotion to God who might change hearts to really deal with the conditions of disparity in wealth.
Aphorism of the Day, April 1, 2019
Ponder the aroma therapy found in the Bible. One therapeutic use of aroma is to overcome the stench of what is putrid and dying. Time means the co-existing of coming to life and coming to death. Aroma is the cosmetic celebration of that which is coming to life even while it is dying. Women anointed Jesus with perfume and he said it was the anointing for his death. We need aroma therapy as a way of diversion from the stench of all that is passing away, since even at the grave we still have to acknowledge that which continues to come to life and that which is going to go on living.
Peter denied Jesus three times during the trial of Jesus. Jesus rehabilitated Peter by asking Peter if he loved him. He asked three times, to cover each denial. Balance and equity might mean that we need to rehabilitate the negative with at least equal positive, not to get God's forgiveness, but simply to re-train the human functions.
Aphorism of the Day, April 29, 2019
The period of the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus is presented as a liminal phase for the disciples; it is betwixt and between the physical presence of Jesus and the soon to be unseen Jesus who will become manifest by other psycho-spiritual events. The liminal phase is a transition presented as a period of forty days to clarify all of their previous misunderstanding about what the meaning of Jesus as a crucified Messiah. The liminal phase is presented as the time when the disciples were being weaned from seeing Jesus outside of them and accepting the reality of the Risen Christ seeing through them.
Aphorism of the Day, April 28, 2018
The New Testament became the collections of writings representing the institutionalization of the success of the Jesus Movement. Jesus died; he did not go away but continued to effect lives of many in myriads of ways tailored to each individual's circumstances. His words were spirit and life, the life of those who continued to follow him. Word is how people mix with each inside of us. When Christly words start to inwardly constitute one's being toward amendment and change of one's life, one has been "baptized" by the Holy Spirit words of Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, April 27, 2019
The writers of the New Testament projected upon God a meaning of divine stewardship. The Divine initiative, so localized in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, had to be decentralized and made diffuse if the message of Jesus were to go worldwide. Death, resurrection appearances and the presence of the Holy Spirit is how the message was delegated and passed from the omni-compentent but very local Jesus of Nazareth to the peoples of the entire known world who could know the Risen Christ as all and in all.
Aphorism of the Day, April 26, 2019
The Gospel of John presents the insightful but poignantly ironic word conditions. Using word in a circular argument, word is used to establish word as the "arche" or first principle of everything. "In the beginning (arche) was the Word." Since these words are written, words are being used to establish Word as the first principle (arche) of life as we can know. Another punchline in John's Gospel is the affirmation of his own written word as a valid way to come to belief (being persuaded about) Jesus as the Son of God. John's Gospel is honest about us being on the Merry-go-Round of the Word and words as the main feature of human identity.
Aphorism of the Day, April 25, 2019
"Jesus did many other signs which are not written." (in the Gospel of John). All that we can do with past event is have them re-presented in abbreviated traces. Since we are living in the continuous present (is happening), we can only bring a few time-lapsed abbreviated trace shots of the past into our continuous presence, since we can on be in one time and place. The Gospel of John was written with enough of those abbreviated traces of the life of Jesus to be evocative of the "signs" that we need to be persuaded (believe) about the continuity of the Risen Christ as Word of God in our lives. Christ was identified with Word so as to affirm our language-based identity as human beings and to let certain values that are transmitted through words become the persuasive values of love and justice.
Aphorism of the Day, April 24, 2019
The "Doubting Thomas" story is a teaching which shows that different people need different kinds of proof to believe what they believe, even the community values of one's friends.
Aphorism of the Day, April 23, 2019
The Doubting Thomas story was shared primarily to affirm the validity of the experiences of the Risen Christ which did not have empirical verification like those of the "eye-witnesses."
Aphorism of the Day, April 22, 2019
Presence can be experienced as absence if it is not "apparent." The "Doubting Thomas" stories explores how absences can be known as presence through the reading of words about Christ in the Johannine writings.
Aphorism of the Day, April 21, 2019
Imagine your afterlife as the ability to keep starting over and doing something new with the knowledge of what you did wrong in the same circumstance the last time you did it. Something like the theme of the movie, "Ground Hog Day." It would be repentance with purpose of preparing oneself by ridding oneself of proud egotistical acts that hindered one to be able to be fully in love with the one who is ordained. Imagine an afterlife of being able to come to love having had one's freedom totally educated by experience.
Aphorism of the Day, April 20, 2019
Why do we say the life cycle of an egg, or a larva, or a chrysalis? Because the butterfly is the climax of the life cycle and so the butterfly gets naming priority. So we say, the Butterfly Life Cycle. In the mystical cycle of the church year we could call it the Easter Life Cycle since Easter stands as what defines our lives of Christian hope.
Aphorism of the Day, April 19, 2019
The synchronicity of life means means that all of the events in the cycles of life are always already happening. In our limited focus on what is happening, we go into "linear" mode of thinking even while we are actually in a spiral mode of the cycles of life. The cross of Jesus cannot be separated from his birth or resurrection; with our liturgical observation we try to freeze frame an event in the cycle and pretend that the other events in the cycle did not happen, but we cannot do the impossible.
Aphorism of the Day, April 18, 2019
On Maundy Thursday, it is important to note that Eucharist and service are two values of the Christ Movement. They should not be limited to stylized events of bread and wine and a stylized washing of feet. The Eucharist is related to public eating whereby it is shown that all who are present have enough to eat. The foot-washing is related to the dying with Christ mysticism needed for the checking of the ego to be at the service of others in what is required in the situation for the common. To divorce the Maundy Thursday liturgy from these two values is to walk in hypocrisy.
Aphorism of the Day, April 17, 2019
We use external observances in Holy Week to remind ourselves of the continual inward transformation that is involved in our identity with Christ, the Risen Christ who is experienced within in us as Word with a perfect purpose.
Aphorism of the Day, April 16, 2019
Aphorism on the great fire at Notre-Dame de Paris: In architecture, it happens that Word can be made the "flesh" of stones and wood and materiel and preside as Notre-Dame de Paris and when fire threatens its full materiality, we are still inspired by its ideal, to which we look for its new future.
Aphorism of the Day, April 15, 2019
As much as Holy Week and Easter can be reduced to increasing religious behaviors on behalf of religious organization, the ritual process is about relating the big question faced in human life to a Plenitude which survives, comprehends and integrates any particular event in the life cycle. A Plenitude which includes death and the afterlife with love and justice is what we celebrate in Holy Week.
Aphorism of the Day, April 14, 2019
If one does not read the Passion Gospel from the perspective of Pauline mysticism of the cross, then one is left with various information reports without the mystical engagement that surely was implied by the early churches' mystagogy. Take the mystagogy out of the Passion Gospel and a dominant function is lost.
Aphorism of the Day, April 13, 2019
Pre-life, pre-birth life, life, death and afterlife. Of the cycle, life and death have the most empirically verifiable access. The human question of meaning is whether to define death as the last occasion of living or as the first occasion of afterlife. Or is it a threshold connecting both? The church has regarded the death of Jesus as a great Death, because the church has invited people to the coat tails of this great Death as an identity event and the church mystics have re-baptized the entropy of dying as a positive energy of leaving the state of living according to the "self" that will die and not according to the "spirit-self" which lives lives on.
Aphorism of the Day, April 12, 2019
To return the Passion Gospel to be the visualization cover for the mystical identity with the death of Christ confessed by Paul, rather than literalize all the Passion characters(which was used to justify anti-Semitic action by Christians in the history of the church), one needs to understand them as the enemies of the soul (in the spiritual and metaphorical sense) which would hinder the mystical goal of the "good death" to self which is known because the death of Jesus is a positive energy to end the egotistical tendencies of the soul.
Aphorism of the Day, April 11, 2019
How does one remove the "anti-Semitic" tinge of the Passion Gospels? The words of Jesus to love one's enemies seem a bit deconstructed if the Pharisees and Sadducees are "his enemies." The Passion happened because of context specific collision between various religious leaders and the Roman authorities in Jerusalem. It is inconsistent to claim the Cross was providentially necessary while at the same time decrying the motives of all of the actors and the agents of the events. Some would like to assign hierarchy of blame for the events, assigning a greater role to religious leaders than to the people who actually had the power to crucify. The freedom for anything to happen implicates everything that came before the event; the need to fine-tune specific causality might pertain to juridical discourse. It would seem that the glory in Cross of Jesus by Paul was not to be about assigning blame but assigning universal forgiveness. That Jews and Gentiles can be all to too human in some bad behaviors does not give license for anti-Semitic or anti-Gentile behaviors.
Aphorism of the Day, April 10, 2019
One has to approach the Passion Gospel accounts in their functional layers of how they have been used by the readers throughout church history. They have functioned as a part of a liturgical calendar, an arbitrary calendar used as a method of presenting an annual curriculum of Christian teaching based on the life cycle of Christ. Probably at the core of the Passion is the mystical theology of Paul and others based upon their theology of the cross, a stumbling to Jews (who wanted a true Davidic Messiah), foolishness to the Greeks/Hellenistic Romans (how could a crucified person be a king?), but in the mystical theology of Paul and others, the cross was the power of God to die to what is unworthy in one's life. Sadly, the church's observance of the Passion has mainly lost the mystical theology of Paul regarding the cross. The church has resorted to the material meaning of the cross as an external historical event rather than how the cross was reprocessed through the mystical experience with the Risen Christ in the pyscho-spiritual identity method of transformation.
Aphorism of the Day, April 9, 2019
In the Lucan Passion account, the writer goes to some links to present Pilate as someone who really wanted to release Jesus but did not because he was prevailed upon by the Jewish religious accusers of Jesus. It is quite ironic that Herod and Pilate are very compliant in such a situation particularly when Herod had John the Baptist decapitated as trivial party favor.
Aphorism of the Day, April 8, 2019
The Passion account has been robbed from its setting in its typical promulgation by making it more about the events in the time of Jesus rather than as the visualization technique in the mysticism of the early church to reinforce and identity with the spirit of Christ in his life, death and Risen Life.
Aphorism of the Day, April 7, 2019
If everything is known in and through Language, including knowing that we know about language because of having language, what kind of continuous linguistic reflexivity are we living within language? We cannot escape language because when we use "escape language" we are using and being used by language.
Aphorism of the Day, April 6, 2019
A written text like the Gospel seems to fix the events of the past as though they are events which could only be read and interpreted in one way, one self-evidential way (because the text seems to concretize them). But interpretation in the now is always alive and new, and when one cannot dialogue and ask questions of people who are presented in Gospel events, those people and events become "fixed" types for teaching what the church had become and why it had become what it had become for the writers of the Gospel within their communities. The past is dead and gone, even as the current interpretation of the traces of the past are alive and active even as we are alive and active and questioning. While we think that we are assessing Mary of Bethany and Judas Iscariot, we really are assessing an archaeological history of the meaning of the types represented by Gospel figures in the church in the past and present. When have I been devoted as Mary? When have I been a cynical betrayer like Judas?
Aphorism of the Day, April 5, 2019
In trying to translate the events of one generation to the next, one looks for contemporary correspondences to over come the "distance" of time, and the distance is even more pronounced in the eras when there were less intimate and exact technologies of memory. The Gospels represent ironic interplay of correspondences in appearing to be "eyewitness" accounts, even though they were written 1-2 generations after the purported events and they were written in situations which included extra-Palestine locations of the reading "audiences" and persons who were "extra"-Jewish Christian Gentiles with no background in the various Hebraic traditions. So figures like Mary and Bethany and Judas Iscariot would be presented as types of persons in the early church who either were completely devoted and aromatic in their reverence of Christ, and those who got into the Movement for the wrong reasons and didn't really have the life converting event and so like Judas, they could coldly betray and demean the passionate devotions of those who had had their socks knocked off in an encounter with the Risen Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, April 4, 2019
Mary of Bethany in the privacy of a meal at home for Jesus and a few intimates perfumes the room and the feet of Jesus to the scorn of Judas. Such was an instance of
casting one's pearls before swine, in that Judas had no ability to empathize with the love devotion of Mary for Jesus. Judas found that he was in the "Movement" for all the wrong reasons. This story in John instantiates the experience of those in the church who were once enamored by the Movement but left it, even in betraying those who remained.
Aphorism of the Day, April 3, 2019
By the time that the Gospel of John was written, the characters presented in the Gospel had become more highly stylized examples of discipleship events and behaviors/misbehaviors. Mary of Bethany presented fragrance to Jesus signifying the fragrance that was also written about the winsome inner essence of a person who had been changed by an encounter with the Risen Christ. St. Paul wrote about those who had experienced the blessing of the mystery of Christ and then were tempted away by fear and money or other diversion. Judas, who rebuked Mary of Bethany instantiated the one who had been received into the inner crowd but rejected the value of the mystery. The early church like all Movements had to deal with those who "betrayed" the Movement.
Aphorism of the Day, April 2, 2019
When feet of Jesus were anointed with "costly" perfume, Judas who eventually took a bribe to betray Jesus, complained about such a diversion of resources from giving to the poor. Jesus replied, " You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me." Sound a bit harsh? Perhaps Jesus was addressing the condition of the heart of Judas who was embarrassed by such a display of devotion. Due to the conditions of freedom in the world, rich and the great number of poor people prevail. Rich people have the freedom to equal out the conditions but they don't; the reality of rich and poor cannot detract from devotion to God who might change hearts to really deal with the conditions of disparity in wealth.
Aphorism of the Day, April 1, 2019
Ponder the aroma therapy found in the Bible. One therapeutic use of aroma is to overcome the stench of what is putrid and dying. Time means the co-existing of coming to life and coming to death. Aroma is the cosmetic celebration of that which is coming to life even while it is dying. Women anointed Jesus with perfume and he said it was the anointing for his death. We need aroma therapy as a way of diversion from the stench of all that is passing away, since even at the grave we still have to acknowledge that which continues to come to life and that which is going to go on living.
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