Aphorism of the Day, March 31, 2018
Biblical mystical-ity has to do with how the inward identities of people are constituted by words. The inner world of words in someone is a mystery and to give it "substance" one makes reference to the "outside" world. Physicality in biblical writing is used as a metaphor for something being substantial=really real=actual; it does not necessarily mean that something has empirical verification. Confusing poetic mystical-ity with empirical verification accounts for the varieties of "fundamentalisms" that have trapped so many people in staying in the state of what Ricoeur called "primary naivete" where external things can become idols if one lingers too long there without moving on to mystical transformation.
Aphorism of the Day, March 30, 2018
The cross of Jesus is the ultimate case of revisionary history when Christians proclaimed that God meant it to happen. Providence is when history is seen specifically as a seeming direct action of God. This means that Providence is significant revisionary history. Providence is Revised history. It is history injected with the interpretive rose glasses of faith.
Aphorism of the Day, March 29, 2018
The early churches had to deal with competition in ministry and with betrayal within the leadership. The Johannine church used a last supper discourse to highlight the fact that betrayal was found in the beginning of the Movement and so was competition between disciples of Jesus necessitating the foot-washing example of service being the mark of genuine leadership. Service is the expression of someone who is comfortable enough with the esteem given by God so as to be able put others first and not feel diminished. The universal tendencies of human beings account for the Gospels being teaching tools in blending current community issues under the guise of a oracle of Jesus teaching about loyalty and service.
Aphorism of the Day, March 28, 2018
The story of Judas Iscariot a disciple of Jesus is quite tragic. He was close to Jesus and yet was conflicted by the popularity of Jesus and how that popularity was perceived as a threat to religious leaders who also influenced Judas enough to persuade him to betray Jesus. Judas is perhaps a paradigm of those who are conflicted about "having fallen in love with Jesus" and what that might do to one's former loyalties. The strength of one's former loyalties has the power to undo the love that changes one's life.
Aphorism of the Day, March 27, 2018
Dying or being crucified with Christ was a spiritual motif in the theology of Paul. When this theology came into the life of Jesus as a parable, the oracle of the words of Jesus in the early Gospel churches was, "take up my cross and follow me." This theme was most literally instantiated the life of Simon of Cyrene who in the Passion of Christ, bore the same cross that Jesus did. Simon was the teaching motif for "taking up the cross of Christ." This same theme is reiterated in the Pauline theology of the negative experiences being understood as "suffering with Christ," and "filling up what was lacking in the afflictions Christ." In this theology of vicarious suffering with Christ in all of the suffering of the world, one can see the acknowledgment of affirming true freedom in the world for some really bad things to happen and these bad things get unevenly distributed into the experiences of people in the world. People of faith do not get exempt from "bad things happening" in their uneven distribution, and people of faith accept their having been "incorporated" in humanity and further, in Christ, sharing in the general affliction that does and can come to all. Thus in Holy Week on our way to remembering the Cross of Jesus, we embrace the impoverished side of true freedom, namely, the freedom for a wide variety of things to happen to the full variety of humanity. The Cross of Jesus is a symbol for us to be "really" real about the conditions of freedom.
Aphorism of the Day, March 26, 2018
Holy Week is a remembrance week for the liminal phase of preparing to have the physical body of Jesus removed from sight and accessibility of people never to be again placed under such time space limitation. It is prelude to the universalization of Christ freed from the constraints of have only one location at a time.
Aphorism of the Day, March 25, 2018
King David was both a melek, a king with political authority and a meshiach, an anointed messiah chosen one of God. From Hebrew to Greek: melek=basileus, meshiach=Christos. Jesus was not regarded to be the Christos by his Jewish religious interrogators, however they presented Jesus as a pretending basileus to the Roman authorities who knew the Caesar to be a basileus and Herod to be a basileus. The early Christians believed that Jesus in his death and resurrection was the Christos derived from the suffering servant theme of the prophet Isaiah. They believed that the resurrection was proof of his also being a "basileus" whose political sway would be realized in the future coming. And when the Roman Empire became the Holy Roman Empire or Christendom, the trappings of Christ as basileus were seen as instantiated.
Aphorism of the Day, March 24, 2018
The ambiguous notion of "king" figures significantly in the Passion accounts. When the Sanhedrin brought Jesus to trial, they asked him if he was the "king," meaning Messiah. This was an insider term in the Jewish context. When Jesus was tried by Roman authorities he was asked if he was a "king" basileus. If Jesus were presented as a king like Caesar, he would be a threat particularly since Herod was the King of the Jews (certainly not a messiah) in the time of Jesus. People who believed that the Messiah was also a Political King with armies, like king David, represent the competing notion of the Messiah that in part divided the synagogue from the Jesus Movement. Jesus did not prove to be a "basileus" king like Caesar or David. His followers defined him as a "suffering servant" Messiah King.
Aphorism of the Day, March 23, 2018
How can one explain the glorification of the death event of Jesus on the Cross? It is as though a spiritual vortex of Cosmic Karma is created when the holy and the innocent are unjustly persecuted, mistreated, tortured and killed. Why is it that the early followers of Jesus did not become a zealot holy war cult out to seek revenge in suicidal ways to make the people responsible for the death of Jesus pay? The Cosmic Karma of the resurrection appearances of the Risen Christ resulted in a forgiving kindness and the confession of the Roman Centurion at the Cross, "Truly this man was God's Son," became prophetic as the subtle but winsome Gospel of Christ converted the Roman Empire. The irony is that when Christians have come to have "absolute power," they too have been guilty of being corrupted by that power to themselves be in the role of persecutors. The Cross of Christ placed as an icon on shields and military planes and tanks, has falsely been used to promote corrupted power. We need to represent authentically the winsome power of vulnerable kindness of the Cross of Jesus.
Aphorism of the Day, March 22, 2018
Question to Jesus are you the King of the Jews? A very loaded question depending upon whether one was saying Christos or basileios. One was the God anointed "king" or chosen leader and the other was "secular" king. In the Passion narrative the suggestion that Jesus would be a "secular" king of the Jews like Herod being the King of the Jews was a political notion whose promotion would be a reason for crucifixion.
Aphorism of the Day, March 21, 2018
What is the good of death? Death can end some dreadful things like pain and suffering, but what good is untimely death? What good was the untimely death of a thirtysomething Jesus? The early Christians believed that the meaning of the horrible death of Jesus made memorable by the post-resurrection appearances was the power to interdict the sin of the world which was manifest in the unworthy and misguided direction of desire focused upon doing and thinking and saying the wrong things. In spiritual methodology of the early church, Christians used the mantra of the death of Jesus as internalized energy of identity to redirect the energy of desire away from idols and redirect the power of desire toward God who alone is worthy of the intensity of human.
Aphorism of the Day, March 20, 2018
While an anniversary might be seen as a return to an originating event, one cannot forget all that has happened since the originating event in the anniversary as an "imaginary" return to the event. While we use imagination to return to the Passion of Jesus on Passion Sunday, we cannot pretend that the resurrection appearances and the aftermath did not occur. In an anniversary, the originating event is tinged with all of the subsequent accrued meanings.
Aphorism of the Day, March 19, 2018
The Bible is a triumph of the fact that people are language users. Language use the ultimate unifying reality of all humanity. Even if we are divided by particular use of words, we are still unified by the fact that we all are language users or language "used." Word is God in the sense of language being co-extensive with knowing anything. Word attains particularity in biblical language; the particularities of the word traditions that bear the traces of the biblical writers contexts and their own synthesis of word creations. And biblical writers can use words to present contradiction and ambiguity in order create aesthetic and spiritual mood, as in: in Jesus, God is emptied of being divine in "achieving" death even death on the cross. Such poetry had meaning for the early Christians even as much language use always has evocative meanings beyond the way in which scientists use language in the mode of empirical verification/falsification.
Aphorism of the Day, March 18, 2018
One of the signs of the insecurity of people is the need for excessive recognition to somehow authenticate their sense of worth. Fame is the drug of the media culture and the spiritual counter part of fame is called "Glory." St. Paul wrote, "Christ in you the hope of glory." Christ is the Glory and that glory is shared with us in an inward event and to be known by Christ is the genuine fame of life.
Aphorism of the Day, March 17, 2018
Writing many years after the facts results in knowing what happened and so one can retell the story with the end results in mind and one cannot help but indicate how the future was guiding the past in the retelling of the past. The advantage of speaking last means that one's interpretation prevail until one's latest interpretation gets surpassed by someone else's interpretation. Such telling of the story make the heroes of the past seem very prophetic. The Gospels were written well after the Risen Christ effect within the early Christian communities was the glory of Christ that guided the Gospel narratives.
Aphorism of the Day, March 16, 2018
Glory is perhaps the religious word for "fame." Many people have become famous and many more are "infamous," meaning that they have become well-known for things that represent what most regard to be the worst of human behaviors, like continuous lying, or genocide. Glory is the kind of fame that is a sign of God's imputing action. The fame of the Risen Christ did not seem to be of human origin; the Risen Christ came to be known as an experience long after Jesus of Nazareth was no longer visible. How did this kind of fame occur, the fame of convincing so many people that "Christ was in them?" The New Testament writers attributed the kind of fame that the Risen Christ had attained to the fame called "glory" signified in one being overshadowed by the Holy Spirit and the life of Christ being "born" within oneself. And so St. Paul wrote, "Christ in you, the hope of glory." In-Christed people derive glory from Christ, not needing the rather shallow "15 minutes of fame."
Aphorism of the Day, March 15, 2018
Jeremiah understood the future of the law as interior event rather than an external suppressive force in the hands of the strongest. He wrote that "the law would be written" on the heart. The law was always in the form of word or language guiding the action or behaviors of people. The law being seen in the Sinai event as being written on the stone tablets and venerated as an outside force was not effective if the leaders with the power did not follow the law themselves. Jeremiah saw something of the democratization of the Torah; every one would have the interior Torah as a personalized rabbi. This Omni-presence of the law was an accessibility of the law that was necessary given that people with power were not modelling lawful living.
Aphorism of the Day, March 14, 2018
The notion of the glorification of Christ probably derives from the totally shocked group of Christians who had to deal with the fact that Christ did not cease to be relevant and present in telling ways after his death on the cross. The only way that the Christians could rhetorically deal with the staying power of Christ after his death and the ability of the experience of the Holy Spirit was to proclaim the glorification of Christ and return to the Cross of Jesus as the "rocket launcher" to his glory. In story form, Greeks came to a feast in Jerusalem asking to see Jesus and a booming voice from heaven said, "I have glorified and will glorify Jesus...." This is the booming voice of the post-resurrection success of Jesus in history saying Christ did not go away because God glorified Him and made his fame evident in the hearts of many.
Aphorism of the Day, March 13, 2018
Impressionists were artists who seemed to be rebels of realism; they saw differently and presented a different version of the real. One could call the Christian mystics of the New Testament, Impressionist artists because what they saw often contradicted the "realism" of the situation. Realism: the cross of Jesus was a spectacle of cruel torture to end an insurrectionist movement. Christian Impressionists: the cross of Jesus was a launching pad of glory which "lifted up" Christ and totally contradicted the real purpose of execution on a cross. We can be both Christian realists and Christian Impressionists in living in both the kingdom of humanity and the kingdom of God.
Aphorism of the Day, March 12, 2018
Bible translators have the choice of translating words or translating corresponding meanings. If they translate words without translating meaning they can perpetuate ambiguity. For example, when Jesus said that one has to hate one's life to save it or to lose one's life to save it what does "life" mean? It refers to "psueche" life, life of the soul or life of the mind, emotional and will. Education means the continual renewal of the mind, emotional or will where former states are died and pass away and are "hated" in favor of the soul which surpasses itself in a future state. To translate without imparting the meanings results in literal absurdities. Reading the Bible means accepting the fact that precise meaning and context for much of it remains a mystery. Much guessing at relevant correspondences for our time ensues, as in the unsolvable "koan" of Jesus cursing a tree for not bearing fruit out of season.
Aphorism of the Day, March 11, 2018
The discursive Jesus in John's Gospel speaks continually about himself in the third person as Son of Man and Son of God. Such an oracle Voice of Jesus in the Johannine churches indicate the belief in the humanity and divinity of Jesus as expressing their Christology, or the proclamation of the meaning of Christ for them.
Aphorism of the Day, March 10, 2018
"As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness even so must the Son of Man be lifted up." This simile has some similarity of contexts but also many dissimilarities. Jesus dying on the cross and a bronze poisonous snake on a pole. Simile check: Jesus is not poisonous snake; is death more like the poisonous snake? The cross is not a pole, though both may be made of wood and create elevation for visibility or spectacle. The sinful Israelites who were punished with snake bites received a cure by merely gazing with faith at the bronze snake on the pole. Christo-mysticism: The cross of Jesus being raised as a symbol of transformation in the consciousness of those who in faith use the power of the death of Jesus to die to what is unworthy and the effects of the unworthy. Talk among yourselves about the effective communicative value of this simile for you.
Aphorism of the Day, March 9, 2018
What frustrated preachers often don't tell is that they are caught in the debates of scholars about what things mean in the Bible. If the scholars who have studied history and the original languages all of their academic lives don't agree, what is the poor preacher supposed to do as he or she clumsily prefaces a sermon, "In the name of God....?" One such notion of disagreement is whether Son of Man and Son of God are interchangeable in referring to Jesus and do we capitalize them because they have the definite article "the" in front of them indicating singularity? Does the use of "son of man" represent the Aramaic modesty of Jesus saying something like "yours truly" lifted up? Does Son of Man vs. Son of God represent the theologies of the editors and redactors regarding Jesus as God from the beginning or as an adopted divinized person receiving the anointing as God's Messiah? Do Son of Man and Son of God use in the Gospels presage the debate of Arius and Athanasius at Nicaea? Like many things of the ancient past, we often have to confess agnosticism humbly saying, "Perhaps I would know, if I had been there."
Aphorism of the Day, March 8, 2018
Ponder the theology of English capitalization of words translated from the Greek New Testament. Son of Man/son of man, Son of God/son of god. Some translator used English language habits of emphasis to relate the uniqueness of Jesus. We don't speak in "capitalizations" even though we speak with intonation to impart nuance and emphasis. Technically, Jesus was Son of Woman (Mary) since Jesus did not have the genetics of Joseph. However, the Greek for Son of Man refers to "Anthropos" or humanity, meaning that a woman, Mary, truly represents humanity in a unique way in Christian mystical theology.
Aphorism of the Day, March 7, 2018
The older events are the more legendary language is used to recount them. The pre-historic lore of most cultures have God and gods acting directly the world and speaking directly to people. The pre-historic lore as we know it was at some time edited and re-presented as "origin" and "identity" discourse for why we came to do and believe the things that we do and in the way that we do it. Modern Science problematized lore by requiring that it be judged by the known conditions of empirical verification. In the face of modern science defenders of pre-historic lore had the option of defending it as "science with the supernatural breaking the laws of science" or defending it as a special artistic discourse pertaining to quest of people attaining metaphorical meanings in their lives in negotiating the inward world and the outward world. The latter view can reconcile science and the truth of discourses which pertain to inner realities and outer living. The fact that every person is a Word user means that Word is big enough and most True, as to be able to encompass all sorts of discursive practices.
Aphorism of the Day, March 6, 2018
Understanding the New Testament writings means understanding how the writers appropriated the metaphors from stories in the Hebrew Scriptures. For example, the rather imprecise metaphorical use of the bronze serpent which Moses put on a pole so that his people could look at the bronze serpent and be spared from death from the poisonous snakes in the camp. The writer of John relates in one of the long discourses of Jesus that as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted so that those who looked at the Son of Man lifted up on the cross, could be saved/healed from the poisonous condition of sin and death. Literally, only a few people saw the actual Cross of Jesus. The Johannine writer through the discourse of Jesus was referring to the cross as a metaphorical symbol of inward spiritual transformation, attaining salvation=spiritual health by having faith in the power of the death of Christ to end what is unworthy. Pity the poor literalists who don't appreciate spiritual poetry and metaphors.
Aphorism of the Day, March 5, 2018
The writings which have made it to the canonical New Testament represent those that maintain a connection with the Hebrew Scriptures, albeit, not of the sort that was retained in the synagogue tradition. Ponder the disadvantage of Gentile Christians. They never had the opportunity to be "Jews as a pre-Christian Jews," and for them to catch up on the background of the Hebrew Scripture tradition must have been an impossible tasks. They had to rely upon what the founders of the Jesus Movement from the Judaic tradition presented to them as what the new "telos" of the Hebrew Scriptures had become for Christians.
Aphorism of the Day, March 4, 2018
God as the Playwright of the Great Play of Life, might be a metaphor for our lives since the Genesis account relates that God "spoke" all things into existence and since the Gospel of John relates that the Word was God. The script for humanity might be the borders of human possibility and so the script allows for ad libbing. Human freedom is the important ad libbing that we do as we try to perform God's script for living as sublime as we can.
Aphorism of the Day, March 3, 2018
Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols. One might do the semiotics of the Cross of Jesus. Roman crucifixion meant the end of a person who was viewed as the chief instigator or leader of social unrest or insurrection. That is what it meant for the Roman bureaucracy. For St. Paul, the Cross of Jesus symbolized the power of interior interdiction to "die to one's self" in order that the Christ nature might be realized in oneself. Death has the power to end life. Death is non-discriminating; it will kill cancer in a person but it also ends all of the good constitution of a person as well. St. Paul saw the Cross of Jesus as something like the targeting procedures of radioactive treatment of cancer; using the power of the death of Jesus to "smart bomb" the unworthy controlling interior impulses to allow the goodness of the Christ nature to thrive and assert controlling influence within a person.
Aphorism of the Day, March 2, 2018
Languages evolve and change as well as the meanings of words as the contexts for the use of words change. Words place value on what they refer to. Consider the cross when the event of the crucifixion was actually happening and then consider the meaning of the cross for what it had become in St. Paul's mystical theology of personal transformation. They seem to be the "same" cross but they are quite different. The Cross has had quite a linguistic makeover and cultural and social one since we memorialize it in gold and silver jewelry. The power of later interpretation in a different setting totally revalues the meaning of previous events.
Aphorism of the Day, March 1, 2018
Biblical mystical-ity has to do with how the inward identities of people are constituted by words. The inner world of words in someone is a mystery and to give it "substance" one makes reference to the "outside" world. Physicality in biblical writing is used as a metaphor for something being substantial=really real=actual; it does not necessarily mean that something has empirical verification. Confusing poetic mystical-ity with empirical verification accounts for the varieties of "fundamentalisms" that have trapped so many people in staying in the state of what Ricoeur called "primary naivete" where external things can become idols if one lingers too long there without moving on to mystical transformation.
Aphorism of the Day, March 30, 2018
The cross of Jesus is the ultimate case of revisionary history when Christians proclaimed that God meant it to happen. Providence is when history is seen specifically as a seeming direct action of God. This means that Providence is significant revisionary history. Providence is Revised history. It is history injected with the interpretive rose glasses of faith.
Aphorism of the Day, March 29, 2018
The early churches had to deal with competition in ministry and with betrayal within the leadership. The Johannine church used a last supper discourse to highlight the fact that betrayal was found in the beginning of the Movement and so was competition between disciples of Jesus necessitating the foot-washing example of service being the mark of genuine leadership. Service is the expression of someone who is comfortable enough with the esteem given by God so as to be able put others first and not feel diminished. The universal tendencies of human beings account for the Gospels being teaching tools in blending current community issues under the guise of a oracle of Jesus teaching about loyalty and service.
Aphorism of the Day, March 28, 2018
The story of Judas Iscariot a disciple of Jesus is quite tragic. He was close to Jesus and yet was conflicted by the popularity of Jesus and how that popularity was perceived as a threat to religious leaders who also influenced Judas enough to persuade him to betray Jesus. Judas is perhaps a paradigm of those who are conflicted about "having fallen in love with Jesus" and what that might do to one's former loyalties. The strength of one's former loyalties has the power to undo the love that changes one's life.
Aphorism of the Day, March 27, 2018
Dying or being crucified with Christ was a spiritual motif in the theology of Paul. When this theology came into the life of Jesus as a parable, the oracle of the words of Jesus in the early Gospel churches was, "take up my cross and follow me." This theme was most literally instantiated the life of Simon of Cyrene who in the Passion of Christ, bore the same cross that Jesus did. Simon was the teaching motif for "taking up the cross of Christ." This same theme is reiterated in the Pauline theology of the negative experiences being understood as "suffering with Christ," and "filling up what was lacking in the afflictions Christ." In this theology of vicarious suffering with Christ in all of the suffering of the world, one can see the acknowledgment of affirming true freedom in the world for some really bad things to happen and these bad things get unevenly distributed into the experiences of people in the world. People of faith do not get exempt from "bad things happening" in their uneven distribution, and people of faith accept their having been "incorporated" in humanity and further, in Christ, sharing in the general affliction that does and can come to all. Thus in Holy Week on our way to remembering the Cross of Jesus, we embrace the impoverished side of true freedom, namely, the freedom for a wide variety of things to happen to the full variety of humanity. The Cross of Jesus is a symbol for us to be "really" real about the conditions of freedom.
Aphorism of the Day, March 26, 2018
Holy Week is a remembrance week for the liminal phase of preparing to have the physical body of Jesus removed from sight and accessibility of people never to be again placed under such time space limitation. It is prelude to the universalization of Christ freed from the constraints of have only one location at a time.
Aphorism of the Day, March 25, 2018
King David was both a melek, a king with political authority and a meshiach, an anointed messiah chosen one of God. From Hebrew to Greek: melek=basileus, meshiach=Christos. Jesus was not regarded to be the Christos by his Jewish religious interrogators, however they presented Jesus as a pretending basileus to the Roman authorities who knew the Caesar to be a basileus and Herod to be a basileus. The early Christians believed that Jesus in his death and resurrection was the Christos derived from the suffering servant theme of the prophet Isaiah. They believed that the resurrection was proof of his also being a "basileus" whose political sway would be realized in the future coming. And when the Roman Empire became the Holy Roman Empire or Christendom, the trappings of Christ as basileus were seen as instantiated.
Aphorism of the Day, March 24, 2018
The ambiguous notion of "king" figures significantly in the Passion accounts. When the Sanhedrin brought Jesus to trial, they asked him if he was the "king," meaning Messiah. This was an insider term in the Jewish context. When Jesus was tried by Roman authorities he was asked if he was a "king" basileus. If Jesus were presented as a king like Caesar, he would be a threat particularly since Herod was the King of the Jews (certainly not a messiah) in the time of Jesus. People who believed that the Messiah was also a Political King with armies, like king David, represent the competing notion of the Messiah that in part divided the synagogue from the Jesus Movement. Jesus did not prove to be a "basileus" king like Caesar or David. His followers defined him as a "suffering servant" Messiah King.
Aphorism of the Day, March 23, 2018
How can one explain the glorification of the death event of Jesus on the Cross? It is as though a spiritual vortex of Cosmic Karma is created when the holy and the innocent are unjustly persecuted, mistreated, tortured and killed. Why is it that the early followers of Jesus did not become a zealot holy war cult out to seek revenge in suicidal ways to make the people responsible for the death of Jesus pay? The Cosmic Karma of the resurrection appearances of the Risen Christ resulted in a forgiving kindness and the confession of the Roman Centurion at the Cross, "Truly this man was God's Son," became prophetic as the subtle but winsome Gospel of Christ converted the Roman Empire. The irony is that when Christians have come to have "absolute power," they too have been guilty of being corrupted by that power to themselves be in the role of persecutors. The Cross of Christ placed as an icon on shields and military planes and tanks, has falsely been used to promote corrupted power. We need to represent authentically the winsome power of vulnerable kindness of the Cross of Jesus.
Aphorism of the Day, March 22, 2018
Question to Jesus are you the King of the Jews? A very loaded question depending upon whether one was saying Christos or basileios. One was the God anointed "king" or chosen leader and the other was "secular" king. In the Passion narrative the suggestion that Jesus would be a "secular" king of the Jews like Herod being the King of the Jews was a political notion whose promotion would be a reason for crucifixion.
Aphorism of the Day, March 21, 2018
What is the good of death? Death can end some dreadful things like pain and suffering, but what good is untimely death? What good was the untimely death of a thirtysomething Jesus? The early Christians believed that the meaning of the horrible death of Jesus made memorable by the post-resurrection appearances was the power to interdict the sin of the world which was manifest in the unworthy and misguided direction of desire focused upon doing and thinking and saying the wrong things. In spiritual methodology of the early church, Christians used the mantra of the death of Jesus as internalized energy of identity to redirect the energy of desire away from idols and redirect the power of desire toward God who alone is worthy of the intensity of human.
Aphorism of the Day, March 20, 2018
While an anniversary might be seen as a return to an originating event, one cannot forget all that has happened since the originating event in the anniversary as an "imaginary" return to the event. While we use imagination to return to the Passion of Jesus on Passion Sunday, we cannot pretend that the resurrection appearances and the aftermath did not occur. In an anniversary, the originating event is tinged with all of the subsequent accrued meanings.
Aphorism of the Day, March 19, 2018
The Bible is a triumph of the fact that people are language users. Language use the ultimate unifying reality of all humanity. Even if we are divided by particular use of words, we are still unified by the fact that we all are language users or language "used." Word is God in the sense of language being co-extensive with knowing anything. Word attains particularity in biblical language; the particularities of the word traditions that bear the traces of the biblical writers contexts and their own synthesis of word creations. And biblical writers can use words to present contradiction and ambiguity in order create aesthetic and spiritual mood, as in: in Jesus, God is emptied of being divine in "achieving" death even death on the cross. Such poetry had meaning for the early Christians even as much language use always has evocative meanings beyond the way in which scientists use language in the mode of empirical verification/falsification.
Aphorism of the Day, March 18, 2018
One of the signs of the insecurity of people is the need for excessive recognition to somehow authenticate their sense of worth. Fame is the drug of the media culture and the spiritual counter part of fame is called "Glory." St. Paul wrote, "Christ in you the hope of glory." Christ is the Glory and that glory is shared with us in an inward event and to be known by Christ is the genuine fame of life.
Aphorism of the Day, March 17, 2018
Writing many years after the facts results in knowing what happened and so one can retell the story with the end results in mind and one cannot help but indicate how the future was guiding the past in the retelling of the past. The advantage of speaking last means that one's interpretation prevail until one's latest interpretation gets surpassed by someone else's interpretation. Such telling of the story make the heroes of the past seem very prophetic. The Gospels were written well after the Risen Christ effect within the early Christian communities was the glory of Christ that guided the Gospel narratives.
Aphorism of the Day, March 16, 2018
Glory is perhaps the religious word for "fame." Many people have become famous and many more are "infamous," meaning that they have become well-known for things that represent what most regard to be the worst of human behaviors, like continuous lying, or genocide. Glory is the kind of fame that is a sign of God's imputing action. The fame of the Risen Christ did not seem to be of human origin; the Risen Christ came to be known as an experience long after Jesus of Nazareth was no longer visible. How did this kind of fame occur, the fame of convincing so many people that "Christ was in them?" The New Testament writers attributed the kind of fame that the Risen Christ had attained to the fame called "glory" signified in one being overshadowed by the Holy Spirit and the life of Christ being "born" within oneself. And so St. Paul wrote, "Christ in you, the hope of glory." In-Christed people derive glory from Christ, not needing the rather shallow "15 minutes of fame."
Aphorism of the Day, March 15, 2018
Jeremiah understood the future of the law as interior event rather than an external suppressive force in the hands of the strongest. He wrote that "the law would be written" on the heart. The law was always in the form of word or language guiding the action or behaviors of people. The law being seen in the Sinai event as being written on the stone tablets and venerated as an outside force was not effective if the leaders with the power did not follow the law themselves. Jeremiah saw something of the democratization of the Torah; every one would have the interior Torah as a personalized rabbi. This Omni-presence of the law was an accessibility of the law that was necessary given that people with power were not modelling lawful living.
Aphorism of the Day, March 14, 2018
The notion of the glorification of Christ probably derives from the totally shocked group of Christians who had to deal with the fact that Christ did not cease to be relevant and present in telling ways after his death on the cross. The only way that the Christians could rhetorically deal with the staying power of Christ after his death and the ability of the experience of the Holy Spirit was to proclaim the glorification of Christ and return to the Cross of Jesus as the "rocket launcher" to his glory. In story form, Greeks came to a feast in Jerusalem asking to see Jesus and a booming voice from heaven said, "I have glorified and will glorify Jesus...." This is the booming voice of the post-resurrection success of Jesus in history saying Christ did not go away because God glorified Him and made his fame evident in the hearts of many.
Aphorism of the Day, March 13, 2018
Impressionists were artists who seemed to be rebels of realism; they saw differently and presented a different version of the real. One could call the Christian mystics of the New Testament, Impressionist artists because what they saw often contradicted the "realism" of the situation. Realism: the cross of Jesus was a spectacle of cruel torture to end an insurrectionist movement. Christian Impressionists: the cross of Jesus was a launching pad of glory which "lifted up" Christ and totally contradicted the real purpose of execution on a cross. We can be both Christian realists and Christian Impressionists in living in both the kingdom of humanity and the kingdom of God.
Aphorism of the Day, March 12, 2018
Bible translators have the choice of translating words or translating corresponding meanings. If they translate words without translating meaning they can perpetuate ambiguity. For example, when Jesus said that one has to hate one's life to save it or to lose one's life to save it what does "life" mean? It refers to "psueche" life, life of the soul or life of the mind, emotional and will. Education means the continual renewal of the mind, emotional or will where former states are died and pass away and are "hated" in favor of the soul which surpasses itself in a future state. To translate without imparting the meanings results in literal absurdities. Reading the Bible means accepting the fact that precise meaning and context for much of it remains a mystery. Much guessing at relevant correspondences for our time ensues, as in the unsolvable "koan" of Jesus cursing a tree for not bearing fruit out of season.
Aphorism of the Day, March 11, 2018
The discursive Jesus in John's Gospel speaks continually about himself in the third person as Son of Man and Son of God. Such an oracle Voice of Jesus in the Johannine churches indicate the belief in the humanity and divinity of Jesus as expressing their Christology, or the proclamation of the meaning of Christ for them.
Aphorism of the Day, March 10, 2018
"As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness even so must the Son of Man be lifted up." This simile has some similarity of contexts but also many dissimilarities. Jesus dying on the cross and a bronze poisonous snake on a pole. Simile check: Jesus is not poisonous snake; is death more like the poisonous snake? The cross is not a pole, though both may be made of wood and create elevation for visibility or spectacle. The sinful Israelites who were punished with snake bites received a cure by merely gazing with faith at the bronze snake on the pole. Christo-mysticism: The cross of Jesus being raised as a symbol of transformation in the consciousness of those who in faith use the power of the death of Jesus to die to what is unworthy and the effects of the unworthy. Talk among yourselves about the effective communicative value of this simile for you.
Aphorism of the Day, March 9, 2018
What frustrated preachers often don't tell is that they are caught in the debates of scholars about what things mean in the Bible. If the scholars who have studied history and the original languages all of their academic lives don't agree, what is the poor preacher supposed to do as he or she clumsily prefaces a sermon, "In the name of God....?" One such notion of disagreement is whether Son of Man and Son of God are interchangeable in referring to Jesus and do we capitalize them because they have the definite article "the" in front of them indicating singularity? Does the use of "son of man" represent the Aramaic modesty of Jesus saying something like "yours truly" lifted up? Does Son of Man vs. Son of God represent the theologies of the editors and redactors regarding Jesus as God from the beginning or as an adopted divinized person receiving the anointing as God's Messiah? Do Son of Man and Son of God use in the Gospels presage the debate of Arius and Athanasius at Nicaea? Like many things of the ancient past, we often have to confess agnosticism humbly saying, "Perhaps I would know, if I had been there."
Aphorism of the Day, March 8, 2018
Ponder the theology of English capitalization of words translated from the Greek New Testament. Son of Man/son of man, Son of God/son of god. Some translator used English language habits of emphasis to relate the uniqueness of Jesus. We don't speak in "capitalizations" even though we speak with intonation to impart nuance and emphasis. Technically, Jesus was Son of Woman (Mary) since Jesus did not have the genetics of Joseph. However, the Greek for Son of Man refers to "Anthropos" or humanity, meaning that a woman, Mary, truly represents humanity in a unique way in Christian mystical theology.
Aphorism of the Day, March 7, 2018
The older events are the more legendary language is used to recount them. The pre-historic lore of most cultures have God and gods acting directly the world and speaking directly to people. The pre-historic lore as we know it was at some time edited and re-presented as "origin" and "identity" discourse for why we came to do and believe the things that we do and in the way that we do it. Modern Science problematized lore by requiring that it be judged by the known conditions of empirical verification. In the face of modern science defenders of pre-historic lore had the option of defending it as "science with the supernatural breaking the laws of science" or defending it as a special artistic discourse pertaining to quest of people attaining metaphorical meanings in their lives in negotiating the inward world and the outward world. The latter view can reconcile science and the truth of discourses which pertain to inner realities and outer living. The fact that every person is a Word user means that Word is big enough and most True, as to be able to encompass all sorts of discursive practices.
Aphorism of the Day, March 6, 2018
Understanding the New Testament writings means understanding how the writers appropriated the metaphors from stories in the Hebrew Scriptures. For example, the rather imprecise metaphorical use of the bronze serpent which Moses put on a pole so that his people could look at the bronze serpent and be spared from death from the poisonous snakes in the camp. The writer of John relates in one of the long discourses of Jesus that as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted so that those who looked at the Son of Man lifted up on the cross, could be saved/healed from the poisonous condition of sin and death. Literally, only a few people saw the actual Cross of Jesus. The Johannine writer through the discourse of Jesus was referring to the cross as a metaphorical symbol of inward spiritual transformation, attaining salvation=spiritual health by having faith in the power of the death of Christ to end what is unworthy. Pity the poor literalists who don't appreciate spiritual poetry and metaphors.
Aphorism of the Day, March 5, 2018
The writings which have made it to the canonical New Testament represent those that maintain a connection with the Hebrew Scriptures, albeit, not of the sort that was retained in the synagogue tradition. Ponder the disadvantage of Gentile Christians. They never had the opportunity to be "Jews as a pre-Christian Jews," and for them to catch up on the background of the Hebrew Scripture tradition must have been an impossible tasks. They had to rely upon what the founders of the Jesus Movement from the Judaic tradition presented to them as what the new "telos" of the Hebrew Scriptures had become for Christians.
Aphorism of the Day, March 4, 2018
God as the Playwright of the Great Play of Life, might be a metaphor for our lives since the Genesis account relates that God "spoke" all things into existence and since the Gospel of John relates that the Word was God. The script for humanity might be the borders of human possibility and so the script allows for ad libbing. Human freedom is the important ad libbing that we do as we try to perform God's script for living as sublime as we can.
Aphorism of the Day, March 3, 2018
Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols. One might do the semiotics of the Cross of Jesus. Roman crucifixion meant the end of a person who was viewed as the chief instigator or leader of social unrest or insurrection. That is what it meant for the Roman bureaucracy. For St. Paul, the Cross of Jesus symbolized the power of interior interdiction to "die to one's self" in order that the Christ nature might be realized in oneself. Death has the power to end life. Death is non-discriminating; it will kill cancer in a person but it also ends all of the good constitution of a person as well. St. Paul saw the Cross of Jesus as something like the targeting procedures of radioactive treatment of cancer; using the power of the death of Jesus to "smart bomb" the unworthy controlling interior impulses to allow the goodness of the Christ nature to thrive and assert controlling influence within a person.
Aphorism of the Day, March 2, 2018
Languages evolve and change as well as the meanings of words as the contexts for the use of words change. Words place value on what they refer to. Consider the cross when the event of the crucifixion was actually happening and then consider the meaning of the cross for what it had become in St. Paul's mystical theology of personal transformation. They seem to be the "same" cross but they are quite different. The Cross has had quite a linguistic makeover and cultural and social one since we memorialize it in gold and silver jewelry. The power of later interpretation in a different setting totally revalues the meaning of previous events.
Aphorism of the Day, March 1, 2018
One of the issues of sign in the New Testament was this: How could the Cross of Jesus signify something that was triumphant? It would not seem to follow that the death of Jesus would mean the success of the Jesus Movement; it would seem to signify its end. Such seeming non sequitur is why St. Paul said the Greek mind regarded the cross to be "foolish." One must note that the Cross of Jesus was revalued because of the presence of the Risen Christ in the life of the members of the early church. For those who did not know the Risen Christ, the Cross was indeed foolish.
