Aphorism of the Day, March 2021

Aphorism of the Day, March 30, 2021

The New Testament writers presented their images of the afterlife of Jesus in the unseen realm, viz., seated at the right hand of the Father.  What is more "empirical" is the afterlife of Jesus in the visible realm.  People were able to have after the life of Jesus, interior experiences which initiated changes in their behavior and brought them into social fellowship clubs with others who had similar experiences.  These clubs were proto-institutions which grew into the larger institutions of churches as a necessary attempt to place order on the popularity of the "Christ-identity" which was happening on more widespread social level.  The many expressions of the "Christ-identity" which have occurred since Jesus was no longer seen, comprise the "afterlife" of Jesus in the visible realm.   This massive "Christ-identity" phenomenon within so many people in so many ways, is the objective immortality of Jesus Christ.

Aphorism of the Day, March 29, 2021

An old preacher once said that his favorite verse in the KJV, was "and it came to pass."  Holy Week is when we mark the events when things came to "pass."  The Last Supper, the arrest and trial, the bearing of the cross, the crucifixion, the burial, and the rising of Christ.  So much happened in one week in the cycle of the life of Jesus.  In a few days the extremes of agony and ecstasy are packed and for those in the Pauline churches, the death and resurrection were mystical identity events for personal transformation of one's life.  It is easy to get caught of in sentimental visualization in exteriorizing these events, and forget that their presentations in the Gospel were part of the church's mystagogy,  teaching of the mystery of Christ in us, the hope of glory.

 Aphorism of the Day, March 28, 2021

We call the public display of writing in prominent places "advertisement."  The transgressive display of "unwanted" or "unlicensed" public writing is called graffiti.  The writing on the cross of Jesus was presented as public scorn by the Romans.  But for the Gospel writers, the presentation was the hidden and inward message about Jesus being a king of hearts as a suffering servant.  The irony is only enhanced by the presentation of the centurion (whose status was symbolic of the makeup of the Jesus Movement by the time the Gospels were written) saying, "Truly this man was God's Son."  One needs to appropriate the irony of how the Gospels were crafted for the spiritual/inward teaching program of the early church.

Aphorism of the Day, March 27, 2021

Writing about the the "sign" on the cross.  This is writing about writing.  If the sign on the cross was an ironic reference to the status of Jesus in various community, this writing about writing was the identity purpose of the writings of the Gospel.  The purpose of the Gospels, in part, was to make the case that "Jesus was the king of the Jews." 

Aphorism of the Day, March 26, 2021

The cross of Jesus was a "billboard" for actual text.  The text is loaded with the irony regarding the title of Jesus.  "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews."  For Pilate and the soldiers this was mocking scorn:  "What is your majesty doing up on the cross?"  For the Jews who had different notions of the king known as Messiah, they wanted to correct the text by adding, "He said, that he was King of the Jews."  So, there is the irony of what are the telling features of this apocalyptic figure known as "Messiah."  But in the early Jesus Movement and churches, the sign was true in the messianic sense of Messiah as Suffering Servant who had Risen in Glory and was majestic in his Risen and Glorified State, known on earth in his increasing popularity among Jews and Gentiles.  The Gospel writers knew full well the irony of the "billboard" which is why the Gospel is "written spiritual artistic text."  Notice too how the billboard is writing within the writing.  It is Gospel writing which includes the account of the billboard writing on the cross.  One might say that this is a touch of the sublime in the written art.

Aphorism of the Day, March 25, 2021

The "cross identity" of Paul and others can seem to be downright macabre, as a sort of fixation upon death by capital punishment.  How many people are wearing jewelry of electric chair icons around their necks today?  The mysticism of Paul in his "cross identity," stated as "I have been crucified with Christ," and his glorification of the cross, shows up in the Gospel of John oracle words of Jesus referring to his being "lifted up" as proof of his eventual glorification.  Heroic and sacrificial deaths on behalf of others certainly are memorable within the communities for whom the sacrifice was made, but there has never been the glorification of a gruesome death more than the cross of Jesus Christ.

Aphorism of the Day, March 24, 2021

"My God, why have you forsaken me?"  A quote from the Psalm which then is heard from the mouth of Jesus.  Perhaps another cry should be alway, "People, why do we often forsake each other with the most awful, unloving, horrible behaviors toward each others."  Most situations of the sense of forsakenness is the inhumanity among people.

Aphorism of the Day, March 23, 2021

As much as like to hold onto the notion of an absolute triumphal God who micromanages every situation such that all is indeed God's will, it is more realistic to hold for a God who is "weakened" by the very essence of the divine nature, which is freedom.  God who is freedom is weakened by sharing that freedom with every other being and entity.  That is why God permits so much conflict between competing agents and systems and we as human know that agents are truly valuable by having freedom.  The event of the cross of Jesus exemplifies the "weakness" of God's supreme agent in being caught within the freedom of the Empire to put down anything which seemed to be trouble for the Emperor in any place in the Empire.

Aphorism of the Day, March 22, 2021

Palm Sunday/Passion Sunday juxtaposes the two events.  A boisterous, probable crowd in Jerusalem on "Spring Break," for Passover decide to break public gathering rules and set a "pretender" king on a donkey and parade him into Jerusalem.  And the Jerusalem crowd are thinking, "Oh no, the Roman authorities are going to come down on us and we will lose their sponsorship for all of the public works projects which provide employment for our city." One can understand the political reason for negotiations between Roman authorities and the local council negotiating for Jewish rights in the occupation by the Romans.  Do we go along with the rebellion and be totally crushed by the Roman armies or do we allow the declared king pretender Jesus to die, and save the lives of the citizens of Jerusalem and Israel?  One can understand the words of the High Priest Caiaphas: "One must die instead of all."  The death of Jesus was seen as political expediency.

Aphorism of the Day, March 21, 2021

The lectionary are the assigned readings from Holy Scripture for the Eucharist and Offices.  Sometimes the appointed themes of the various assigned reading indicate an obvious "united" theme; at other times a frustrated preacher moans, "the lectionary maker," had a bad day and was thinking, "Let's assign readings with disparate and even contradictory themes and see if the preacher can contort language to its limit."

Aphorism of the Day, March 20, 2021

The cycles in nature like seed, plant, blossom and more seeds, are instructive about the reality of time, but the experience of the sameness in time in the eternal recurrence of "like states or events."  A seed will eventually produce more seeds which are "different seeds," but same by the fact that they are seeds with a similar functional identity.  The oracle of Jesus in John's Gospel, used the planted seed metaphor for his death and in the spiritual cycle the seeds of the life of Christ in the members of the future community of his followers are different from the seed of Jesus,  even though they include the same DNA of the Holy Spirit.

Aphorism of the Day, March 19, 2021

Garden time is burial time, for a seed and the seed in the ground will die to its "seedy" state and become roots and stems, leaves, blossom and fruit.  A seed is both a baby and an ancient, ancient because it derives from a long change of an indeterminate past and it will be a link in an indeterminate future.  Jesus spoke of his body as a seed to be buried in the ground in death but the future glory of the Risen Christ blossomed and flourished in a magnificent indeterminate future.

Aphorism of the Day, March 18, 2021

New Testament writers sought ways to speak about Christ.  They resorted to the themes, the types, the roles found in Hebrew Scriptures.  When a particular Psalm does not seem to have actual contextual empirical verifiability; rather than seeing it as poetic license to extol an actual "High Priest," it becomes a "messianic" Psalm pointing to some future figure.  So, God is saying to the writer's Lord, "You are a priest after the order of Melchizedek."  Melchizedek is a figure in the "mist" of prehistory and as a "superior" of Abraham, he must have been Godlike.  And so Jesus the Christ, who was not an earthly priest, becomes presented as a High Priest because the essence of his life is to present "human life" as an offering to God.  And if Jesus was not a "Levite," he must have had a higher priestly lineage, ergo, Melchizedek.  One can appreciate how writers promulgated the identity of Christ using the available models from their traditions and Hebrew Scriptures.  In modern correspondence "theory" we might require higher literal correspondence, like in baseball, Hank Aaron was a homerun hitter after the order of Babe Ruth.

 Aphorism of the Day, March 17, 2021

The prophets wrote about the day when God would write the laws upon the hearts of people.  Does this refer to the work of the Holy Spirit?  Does this refer to what might be called enlightened consciences?  Or does this represent the lack of knowing that everything inside and outside of a person is already a "text," in that in that any law, i.e., structuration of a person's life is known only because we have language in the first place which allows us to name things inside of us and outside of us?   Our lives inside and out are totally codified by having language.  Word would become to be called with God and God from the beginning.  And Word is the beginning of human life as it can be known.  Knowing always presumes the existence of Word/language before any "knowing" event.  Indeed the "heart" is written on in not just being a named physical organ of the body, but a centralized interior location of "language space" which structures and organizes all of human life.  Disclaimer: Everything written here happened because I have language and it has me.

Aphorism of the Day, March 16, 2021

A Gospel metaphor from the mouth of Jesus juxtaposes life and death.  The seed falls into the ground and dies, because if it doesn't die, then there is no future plant life.  So planting seed is a burial, a death to the seed in its "seedy" state.  Everything in life is in "phase" transition; time and change means no state is stable, but only in flux.  The Requiem preface reflects this: death does not mean the end of life but only the phase of life on the way to another manifestation of life.

Aphorism of the Day, March 15, 2021

Jesus of Nazareth made such an impression that an entire system of poetic metaphor was used for him.  If Christ is "All and in all," then he can assume everything in the equation, Jesus the Christ is                     (fill in the blank).   Jesus was not from a priestly family and not a Levite, but Christ was regarded to be a High Priest.  How does one establish priestly lineage if one is not a Levite?  Well, there was this Priest before priests, King of Salem, Melchizedek whom Abraham the pre-Israelite paid tithe to.  So, the High Priesthood of Jesus must have come from this figure who dwelt  in the cloudy mist of prehistory.  And the writer of the letter of Hebrews made Melchizedek better known than he might have been if he had not been the model for a "cosmic" priesthood.

Aphorism of the Day, March 14, 2021

St. Paul was the prominent architect of a program of Christian identity.  In his words, he had been crucified with Christ and had been raised with him, even riding the glory of Christ to be seated with him in heavenly places.  In this identity, he said that he had the "mind of Christ."  How could Paul "be" this Christ and be himself?  This is the "duck/rabbit" switch in apparency in life.  One can either live from Christ motive or ego motive through the same body.  The Christ-identity theology of Paul becomes in the Gospel narratives, "believing in the Name of Christ," and "speaking in the Name" of Christ.

Aphorism of the Day, March 13, 2021

Bible reading is like doing archaeology in language.  And there are many artifacts in the Bible which are cultural practices that might be put in a "museum of things that people once did but shouldn't do anymore," like slavery and the subjugation of women.  Old "language" captures old human practices which have correspondences in the contemporary language of today.  Old language reveal "function within contexts," and language still reveals "function within our contexts today."  We should be doing comparative functional analysis of linguistic shards in the Bible with full-blown cultural functional practice today.

Aphorism of the Day, March 12, 2021

Probably the way to understand biblical language, is as a language of identity for the formation of community.  The nature and needs of the communities which comprise the "writing situations" of the Bible are wide and diverse and represent differentiation consciousness based upon the "understanding" of the particular writing contexts.  The universal in the Bible is the fact that it is language; language is the human universal and embedded in language are translatable correspondences of human experience.  These correspondences are not equality of details, since the passing of time, evolution, change alter details of human culture; but the principles which are embedded in Language as the human universal, are translatable.  Any biblical interpreter is after this translation of principles embedded in biblical language for the formation and re-formation of community identity.  Unfortunately, many biblical readers are like a crew of Civil War re-enacters pretending that the re-enactment is the real thing.

Aphorism of the Day, March 11, 2021

The more "prehistoric" events of the Bible portray God as directly speaking and acting in human affairs.  As people move more toward "empirical verification" as a chief discursive criteria for appraising various biblical discourse, interpreters have to come to understand discourse which functions for "community identity" something like a mythical totemic figure in a village, or they resort to claim that all "prehistoric" biblical discourse complied with standards of empirical verification based upon uniformity of natural causes evident in any era.

Aphorism of the Day, March 10, 2021

"Saved already," or "condemned already," can be used to limit salvation to the Christian "club," or they can be moment by moment judgment of how a person is living out the conditions of freedom.  By one one does, one instantiate that which is condemnable or salutary.  The judgment of reward or punishment is inherent in our act.  That we get to do good is immediate reward for being in the state of doing good.  That we do bad means that we are manifesting a "condemned" state.  Judgment is always now, even though we cannot help but focus on the results of what has been done.

Aphorism of the Day, March 9, 2021

The most famous verse displayed at sporting contest is John 3:16 with words that Jesus says to Nicodemus.  The presentation of Jesus speaking in the third person is a marker for oracular words of early church channelers of the Spirit of Christ in speaking in his name.  Why didn't Jesus say to Nicodemus: For my God who is my Father, loved the world such that he gave me, his beloved son, so that whoever believes in me, might live forever?  Why does third person speak need to be put in the mouth of Jesus?

Aphorism of the Day, March 8, 2021

It is interesting to note the ways in which New Testament writings appropriate the writings of Hebrew Scripture.  "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,(because the Israelites complained about inadequate food and water, deserving a God-sent plague of poisonous snakes to inflict them with death, until Moses provided the "faith cure" of looking upon a bronze serpent on a pole) so must the Son of Man be lifted up (on the cross)".  Serpent on the pole=Savior on the Cross is the appropriated metaphor and certainly in inexact ways of correspondence.  The main point is that the "glance" of faith at God's provision of health/salvation, is the saving glance.

Aphorism of the Day, March 7, 2021

One needs to read the Bible as one appreciates the layering of metaphors in the conveyance of meanings.  Jesus is presented at the Temple as saying, "Destroy this temple and I will raise it up in three days."  And we are told that "this Temple" refers to the body of Jesus in his resurrection.  And this narrative presentation is being used to teach what had come to be the theology and practice of the early Christian community which had developed its own symbolic order.  To use language is to be lost in metaphorical structuration.

Aphorism of the Day, March 6, 2021

Why is the cross a stumbling block and foolishness?  It is that for those who did not experience the subsequent effects of the lingering presence of Jesus as the unseen but inwardly known Risen Christ.  The meaning of the cross is incomplete for those who did not know the effects of the post-resurrection appearances of Christ.

Aphorism of the Day, March 5, 2021

Paul used "spiritual" meaning to speak of the value of the cross of Christ.  The outer meaning of the cross involve the defeat and the destruction of the person placed on the cross.  So, to revel in the cross was foolishness to the logical "Greek" mind.  As much as Paul gloried in the cross of Christ, he did not do it as an isolated event in the life of Jesus.  The subsequent post-death appearances of Christ to his disciples and to Paul became the completion of the death-resurrection identity cycle of Pauline mysticism.

Aphorism of the Day, March 4, 2021

What is the most basic biblical assumption about God?  God is a language user.

Aphorism of the Day, March 3, 2021

Why was the cross a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks?  It was a stumbling block because any self-respecting Messiah would not get crucified.  Would someone like King David return and be put on the cross?  No.  The Greeks had quite fanciful god and goddess myths but they came to be known for the fruits of Plato and Aristotle, philosophy which means the love of wisdom.  How could the event of someone dying a death of capital punishment on the cross be philosophically wise?  How could it be logically someone who would be worthy of worship?  Paul believed that the cross and resurrection represented the power of changing his life and for him the proof of transformation of his life from the inside was more telling than the "apparent" failure of Jesus on the cross and the appearance of the illogic of weakness in a "hero."

Aphorism of the Day, March 2, 2021

One of the themes in the words of Jesus in the Gospel of John is to eschew the "literal" meanings, like when his listeners thought that rebuilding the destroyed temple referred to the building, and we are told that it was the body of Jesus which was the "temple" to be restored/rebuilt in three days.  Any student of language use and discursive practice cannot help but note the metaphor, temple=body of Jesus.  It is difficult for some Bible readers who prefer what is called "plain reading meanings" to understand how even the presentation of seeming "plain reading events, purporting to be able to have been empirically verifiable," are themselves metaphors of physicality to reinforce the substantiality of the "spiritual" meaning of narrative.

Aphorism of the Day, March 1, 2021

The importance of the Bible as writing is the importance of human beings as language users who through writing, textuality, celebrated that we and all things as they can be known (an attribute that is known because we have language), are caught in the reflexivity of language/word which we can't escape because we have to use "words" to make the false claim, "I am escaping words."