Aphorism of the Day, April 30, 2018
Did Jesus have favorites? In John's Gospel, he graduates his disciples from "servants" to "friends" (philoi). But also in John's Gospel, it refers to a special friend of Jesus six times as the "disciple whom Jesus loved." In this reference, the higher love Greek verb form is used (agape). Programmatically, as a document inviting mystical union with Christ the various characterization of relationships with Christ might be the progress one experiences in one's relationship with the divinely human: child of God, disciple of Jesus, servant of Jesus, friend of Jesus, special beloved disciple of Jesus. In friendship love, one can find one exalted by the experience itself to a "favored" place and this is not a reason for arrogant pride, since such a "favored" place is offered to anyone who wishes to find it. Love and mystical experience makes the one who experiences the same feel beloved and favored.
Aphorism of the Day, April 29, 2018
In the I am the vine, you are the branches metaphor, the branches attain human volition which is what one gets if one is trying to mix human and plant "behaviors" in a metaphor. Branches do not have the choice about abiding in the vine; the Gospel writer assumed that disciple branches of the Vine Christ, had the choice of abiding in the Vine. Volitional branches are used to teach spiritual meaning; the Gospel of John presents Jesus as an uncanny presence of God in human life as the Sign of God accompanying humanity in the basic experiences of life.
Aphorism of the Day, April 28, 2018
I would like to note that only two thirds of the Trinity are referrer to in the "I am the vine" discourse of John's Gospel. Christ is the Vine, the Father is the Vinedresser but where is the Holy Spirit. Using this metaphor, the Holy Spirit would be the Holy Sap which flows between the branches and the vine which enable the branches to abide and continually live from the flow that derives from the vine.
Aphorism of the Day, April 27, 2018
"Abide in me as I in you." Linguistically our versions of each other are configurations of word lenses within ourselves, of how we see each other and regard each other. Mutual abiding in each other is how we live together. The abiding words of Jesus was an assumption that there was mutual love projection such that one's life would be changed by Christ and his life changed by ours, in the sense of being proof of his capacity for loving all.
Aphorism of the Day, April 26, 2018
I am the vine, you are the branches. How does one apply plant metaphors to human situations? Plants are consider non-sentient life even though some talk to their plants to make the grow better. Christ, being the vine, means that we derive from hybrid stock and should become representative hybrid branches. The vine/branch analogy breaks down because the author assumes that the "branches" have freedom to bear good fruit or not. Actual branches don't have volition that we know. The vine/branch metaphor begins by plant-itizing human experience but when volition is involved the branch gets anthropomorphized with the attribute of having the "freedom" to abide in the vine and having the freedom to bear or not bear fruit. To study the Gospel of John one must be able to make the twists and turns with the use of language. Don't take the Bible literally, take it literarily, that is, as artistic literature to make spiritually aesthetic meaningful insights which can be transformatively true.
Aphorism of the Day, April 25, 2018
Probably the greatest theistic definition and tautology is from the First Epistles of John: God is love. Love is hard to empirically verified in the sense that it has too many human experience facets to place into a scientific laboratory. Yet most people in human traditions seem to know or come into an experience that they can assign the word to. If love expresses the ultimate well-being of human living, then to use it as a tautological metaphor for God would certainly help to add fullness of definitional words for "that which none greater can be conceived." The writers of First John and the letter of James keep love very earth bound in that they specifically say one cannot divide a "pietistic" love of God who is not seen from active love as justice for the brothers and sisters whom we see. Human beings may not be perfect enough to qualify for the same lovability as a perfect God, but it is the love of God that always already provides the complementing perfectability for everyone and that is what provides the motive for forgiving tolerance which allow imperfect people to keep on keeping on in the relational community of fellowship.
Aphorism of the Day, April 24, 2018
The presumption of a text or writing is that it can preserve or fix a meaning in some final self-evidential way. This presumption is most egregiously stated in the voice of the Bible pounding preacher who declaims, "The Bible says!" This really means, "For the purposes of my sermon, to relate a homiletical meaning to my listeners, from my study of the Bible from within my particular hermeneutical circle created by the interpretive community which has influenced me, I want to deliver authority to the particular point that I am stressing to my listeners and so I assert, "The Bible says!" By so asserting, I assume that all biblical words are equally God's words and so I identify the entire force of almighty God behind my talking points." Methinks some humility is required. One can offer lots of true biblical meanings in terms of their anthropological soundness without becoming such a presumptuous asserter of being one who has special privileged meanings of what God really means.
Aphorism of the Day, April 23, 2018
John's Gospels has a two-fold metaphor when red-lettered Jesus says, "I am the vine; the are the branches." The "fruit" of the vine is branches; the fruit of the branches is "grapes." Branches are necessary for the "fruit" of grapes. In term of the afterlife of Christ in the world, the church became the branch for the continual reproduction of the Christ-reality in the lives of people in subsequent years.
Aphorism of the Day, April 22, 2018
In our day of rising kleptocracies, people with money, knowledge and power use the same to gain more control of the same without any sense of distributive justice. When the poor, weak and the ignorant are those who are exploited, then the message of the Good Shepherd has lost. A bad shepherd can think that anyone has the freedom to have the power to exploit, so it might as well be me. It is almost as though the model of the bad shepherd who has the power, knowledge and wealth to exploit has become the preferred model of the "free market" economy.
Aphorism of the Day, April 21, 2018
One could view utopia as the conditions when vulnerability is overcome and each individual is "omni-self-efficient" but knowing the conditions of time which includes "babies," such utopia is really like what it means, "no such place." Given the manifold conditions of vulnerability which are unavoidable in life one looks for the matching the good shepherds of ministry with the vulnerable sheep of need. Our world has too many sheep in need and not enough good shepherds who do the obvious requirement of justice, viz., sharing wealth, knowledge and power to bring the vulnerable into an invulnerable and safe state of well-being. Too many people with wealth, knowledge and power actually use the same to exploit the vulnerable so that they can increase their wealth, knowledge and power. Jesus as the Good Shepherd is a witness to acknowledging that wealth, knowledge and power are gifts of God and we are under judgment if we deploy them in exploitive ways.
Aphorism of the Day, April 20, 2018
Sheep and shepherd metaphors seem more appropriate for the times of paternalism when leaders mediated matters of ideology, volition and material dispersements to a highly dependent mass of people without the power of their participation in determining the direction of a society. What the post-modern era has come to be is that the "corporation" driven by those who make decisions in the matter of money and power has become the public equivalent person of the shepherd, but they are driven mainly by profit motive. The societies which require voluntary participation of membership like democracies and parish churches have themselves become the dependent sheep without shepherding participation of membership. 58 % of eligible voters voted in the last election; a far less percentage of "eligible" members of churches participate with regular attendance and ministry. The parish church has become the new sheep without inspired ministers to tend to its well-being. In democratic institutions, everyone has to step up to the a shepherd of ministry for the common good.
Aphorism of the Day, April 19, 2019
In the world of New Testament metaphors, the art of the metaphor allows for contradiction since Jesus could be both Lamb of God and Good Shepherd. In turning to Hebrew Scripture for metaphors for Jesus, the Paschal lamb and the shepherd of the twenty-third Psalm provide the subject matter to generate the metaphor of meanings for how the poetic Christians were bringing their Christ-piety to language. That Jesus existed has empirical status; how he existed for those who knew him in myriads of ways in the empiricism of piety generated the art of poetry and so it is not limited by the physical laws of cause and effect. Poetry is true is an different way than science.
Aphorism of the Day, April 18, 2018
From the confession of a cosmic Risen Christ of St. Paul one moves in a seeming backward way to Jesus of Nazareth who is the incarnate "launching" personality for the eventual cosmic Christ. John's Gospel traces the origin of Jesus to the Cosmic Word of God who is God and the Cosmic Omni-Textual Word of God becomes editorially limited in the person of the historical Jesus of Nazareth only to become once again Omni-textual and omnipresent as the Risen Christ who is All and in All. The glaring contradiction is that even discourse of totalities become particular linguistic events. We can't avoid totalities even as we can't avoid stating the reality of totality in the linguistic event of articulate in speaking or writing, "Totality." When one says that one "feels" that one belongs with and in Everything one still commits linguistic reductionism.
Aphorism of the Day, April 17, 2018
In the Pauline confession, "Christ is all and in all." How does that poetic "Omni-presence" get presented in a Gospel? John's Gospel is the confessional effort to show how Christ is all and in all. Christ is Word and God from the beginning. Expressed another way is when Jesus is quoted as saying, "before Abraham was, I am." What kind of empirical sense do these phrases make at all unless the confession of the essence of messiahship (Christliness) is the co-extensivity of language with God, as in The Word was God? When Word is God, then metaphoricity reigns as definitive of both anthropocentrism and theism.
Aphorism of the Day, April 16, 2018
The Gospel of John is a quintessential book of metaphors, using often the tautological equation formula "ego eimi" /I am followed by term of equivalency, as is I am the Good Shepherd. The Gospel of John, more than any other biblical reading teaches us that it is not a "literal" book but a "literary" book with many true meaningful phrases for the poetry of the soul. In occupation, Jesus was not a shepherd nor are people sheep. However the shepherd/sheep metaphor can be understood as a true analysis and recommendation for people who have power, wealth and knowledge in relationship to those who do not have enough of the three for sufficient health/salvation of their lives.
Aphorism of the Day, April 15, 2018
Readers of the Gospel of John often miss one of the not so subtle interpretive cues. Jesus consistently chastises the "literal" interpreters. The message behind this interpretative cue is that readers should read the Gospel in non-literal ways for the spiritual meanings therein. And fundamentalists"ruin" the Gospel for making it into a piece of modern historical writing with exact empirical accounts of Jesus of Nazareth. Reading a piece of literature as the wrong genre results in confusion and misrepresentation.
Aphorism of the Day, April 14, 2018
A trademark phrase of Jesus in his post-resurrection appearance was "Peace be with you." In Semitic languages the same is standard greeting equivalent to the English, "Hello, how are you." The "Peace be with you" phrase is at center of the Eucharistic liturgy as a greeting of love and reconciliation among people who gather on the first day of the week to realize the presence of Christ in the particular modes of the Eucharistic event. One cannot separate the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharistic elements from the Real Presence of Christ known in the reconciling passing of the Peace among the people who have gathered in the name of Christ.
Aphorim of the Day, April 13, 2018
The post-resurrection appearances of the Risen Christ are presented as the serendipitous ways in which Christ came to be known to the few who were called to be witnesses to the fact that it seemed to be God's personal response to their grief. Appearance and disappearance of Christ in one's life is the tale of the apparent and non-apparent awareness of Christ as eternal word and Christ as particular manifestation of telling apparent presence of one's life being God-touched. Particular word events in one's life can seem to be "erased" or "deconstructed" as one's particular word events in time retreat or are lost in the great hum of the universe of every possible word being articulated at once, and so individual recognition is, as it were, lost in the hum. Word is always animating life even when we don't acknowledge the particular awareness of the same because we are always already manifesting the redundancies of Word. I/we have come to know that we exist because we use language and are used by it. The worded existence is the Omni-presence given equality with God (John 1:1).
Aphorism of the Day, April 12, 2018
The phenomena the post-resurrection appearances of Christ are described in various ways. Some disciples saw, talked with, touched the Risen Christ. Some ate with him and he ate to prove that he had a corporality like the biblical angels who could appear and disappear. To Paul the Risen Christ was a bright blinding light and a voice. To others the Risen Christ was the profound inner impression of a Presence attributed to the work of the alter-personality of God as Holy Spirit.
Aphorism of the Day, April 11, 2018
One of the chief insights which come from the presentation of the post-resurrection appearances of the Risen Christ, is that the Risen Christ wanted to be made known to his profoundly grieving friends. The disciples were shown in poignant ways that Jesus still had personal continuing identity after he was crucified and the continuing identity was revealed to them in his incorruptible Risen spiritual body, which was the witness of the proto-body for all who had hope in their continuing future personal identity.
Aphorism of the Day, April 10, 2018
One of the results of the Enlightenment and the rise of modern science as the gold standard of "truth," was the resulting inferiority complex of many expositors of faith. What can one do after theology, the queen of the sciences is dethroned and replaced by reason enthroned in the Cartesian transcendental subject who existed because "he thought" "cogito ergo sum?" What the proponents of older theology and the newer scientific reason failed to realize appropriately is that they are both unified by being language products and as such there are different truth facets to the language of empirical observation and aesthetic, moral and spiritual values. When truth facets are confused in how they are assigned to discursive practices much symbolic confusion has resulted and people have ended up defending the Bible and faith language in the wrong way and for the wrong reasons. Everyone one needs to remember that in the end, having language unifies everyone. The work of peace involves the perpetual translation among uses of discursive practice toward living together in the values of love and justice.
Aphorism of the Day, April 9, 2018
The Risen Christ appeared to the disciples and others. The Gospel writers want to emphasize that this is "really real." St. Paul stated that continuing personal identity after death would be in an "incorruptible spiritual body." One would assume that the Risen Christ appeared in an incorruptible spiritual body in a way that included being able to verify actuality to the disciples. Seeing and touching and eating a meal were the physical metaphors used to relate the interaction of the disciples and the incorruptible spiritual body of Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, April 8, 2018
We have inherited the word "spirit" to speak about the invisible yet effectively and essential presence of God or of a person. Yet, the words for spirit in various language essentially mean "wind" or "breath." Wind can seems to be an invisible breath that gives indication that creation is alive and so one can see how the experiences of invisible but obvious breath and wind became a fitting words to speak about invisible yet actual realities. John's Gospel perhaps adds a further insight when Jesus is quoted as saying, "My words are spirit and they are life." When one thinks about words and language, they represent an invisible but actual essence of what it is to be human. We are invisibly constituted by the words within us as the script which guides what we do, say and write. So spirit as the constituting words of our lives is a perhaps more insightful way to think of spirit than the notions of breath or wind.
Aphorism of the Day, April 7, 2018
Legislation making is often called "sausage making;" an unsightly tedious process. Practice and rehearsal sessions for performance are often stop and start and sessions of frustration trying to get ready for performance, and it is good that they are mostly out of the sight of the public. The public gets the final product in the artistic occasion and might thrill about how easy the performers make it seem, when such is truly not the case. Reading the Bible can be like the performance occasion; one gets the end product of the biblical writers and one can have devotional interaction with the literal meaning of the words (literal to the reader) and swoon with the sublime. The Bible scholar digs into the "sausage making" elements regarding the author, context or provenance of the writing, contrasting original language with other similar language documents of the time and often scholars end up with stark disagreement on many elements that go into a biblical text. The presentation of "such sausage making" can seem to diminish the devotional reading based upon presuming that God wrote the text directly through a willing writer without needing any historical context at all. In naiveté, one can assume the words have self-evidential meanings from the Holy Spirit. Such limited naïve reading has led to conclusion that one cannot read the Bible seriously as a Christian and still be a scientist and a person who acknowledges the methods of modern history.
Aphorism of the Day, April 6, 2018
Once something has come to writing, the writing is itself a trace method of memory, about how past events have been or were interpreted by those who experienced them directly or had the hearsay from those who were there. The trace of writing cannot be a reconstruction of everything that happened and so it is layered with selection of recounted events. Selection is made with a purpose, namely the purpose of the writer who selects to present his or her system of values regarding what is important to present for the particular writing purpose. This is such an encumbered way to view biblical writings; it is much more pleasurable to discount the writing baggage and enjoy the "as if" experience of actually being there. In the joy of the "as if" of being there, one can forget the art of the writer who has successfully transported the reader into thinking that one is really there. One can have both the sublime artistic effect of a text while at the same time processing all of the artistic devices which went into the construction of the text. Lots of Bible readers only want the sublime artistic effect of the sense of "being there" which suspends the rational mind's doubt that it really is so. One of sad outcomes of what is called "fundamentalism" is that people read the Bible as though it were a scientific document and not a sublime artistic experience. By elevating scientific discourse as setting the criteria for the highest experience of truth, they diminish the aesthetic experiences as being "impoverished" truth. In actual experience the aesthetic truths are actually more "moving" and inspirational in impelling human transformation. One could wish that Bible readers would be truer to a privileged place for the sublime artistic reading of Holy Scripture.
Aphorism of the Day, April 5, 2018
John's Gospel purports the unity of people across space, time and history because all equally are constituted by the Word. Word constitution of human experience is layered and with word we explicate the kinds of layering of word experience. We use the interpretive lenses of word to designate a "face to face" encounter, even as we use words to describe "hearsay" as in "I saw Jesus face to face, do you believe me?" We use word to preserve word in a certain way through writing, as in "these things are written so that you may believe." Empirical experience, oral account of experience and written account of experience are all equal Word experiences in that each can be a vehicle of a different layering of Word experience which is designated as the "Sublime." All who dwell in the realm of the Word, have the potential of knowing the "Sublime" which can come within certain interpretive communities to be known as encounters with the "Risen Christ."
Aphorism of the Day, April 4, 2018
The passing of the "Peace" in the Eucharistic liturgy derives in part from the "doubting" Thomas story. Jesus appears to his frightened disciples and imparts the greeting of peace. This signified to Peter that he, and the disciples who fled Jesus during his trial were forgiven and reconciled with him. It is included with the injunction not to retain sins but forgive them. In the Eucharistic liturgy, the passing of the peace is not just a quaint friendly gesture; it is the opportunity for persons to be reconciled to one another before they approach the altar. The passing of the peace hides within it the active confession and forgiveness of sins so needed for the maintenance of community.
Aphorism of the Day, April 3, 2018
A way to read the Gospel of John is to see it as a study in words. The Word is God from the beginning. The spoken words of Jesus are Spirit and Life. The Gospel of John is written words and by reading them one can come to believe in the identity of Jesus.
Aphorism of the Day, April 2, 2018
The "low" Sunday Gospel of the Doubting Thomas periscope, encodes in a brilliant way the affirmation of the validity of the many ways that the Risen Christ can be present to people. The Risen Christ is differently but equally present to all and the equality is known through the experience of peace, not fear, the presence of the Holy Spirit and the forgiveness of sins, not the retaining of each other's sins.
Aphorism of the Day, April 1, 2018
The resurrection of Christ and our future resurrection tells us what we believe about God. It tells us that God loves us enough to cherish our unique personal identity enough to preserve it in a recognizable way into the future forever. And if you're like I am, I don't feel all that worthy to be preserved forever, but I think it is wonderful to believe that God believes that I am worth preserving in some way for ever.
Did Jesus have favorites? In John's Gospel, he graduates his disciples from "servants" to "friends" (philoi). But also in John's Gospel, it refers to a special friend of Jesus six times as the "disciple whom Jesus loved." In this reference, the higher love Greek verb form is used (agape). Programmatically, as a document inviting mystical union with Christ the various characterization of relationships with Christ might be the progress one experiences in one's relationship with the divinely human: child of God, disciple of Jesus, servant of Jesus, friend of Jesus, special beloved disciple of Jesus. In friendship love, one can find one exalted by the experience itself to a "favored" place and this is not a reason for arrogant pride, since such a "favored" place is offered to anyone who wishes to find it. Love and mystical experience makes the one who experiences the same feel beloved and favored.
Aphorism of the Day, April 29, 2018
In the I am the vine, you are the branches metaphor, the branches attain human volition which is what one gets if one is trying to mix human and plant "behaviors" in a metaphor. Branches do not have the choice about abiding in the vine; the Gospel writer assumed that disciple branches of the Vine Christ, had the choice of abiding in the Vine. Volitional branches are used to teach spiritual meaning; the Gospel of John presents Jesus as an uncanny presence of God in human life as the Sign of God accompanying humanity in the basic experiences of life.
Aphorism of the Day, April 28, 2018
I would like to note that only two thirds of the Trinity are referrer to in the "I am the vine" discourse of John's Gospel. Christ is the Vine, the Father is the Vinedresser but where is the Holy Spirit. Using this metaphor, the Holy Spirit would be the Holy Sap which flows between the branches and the vine which enable the branches to abide and continually live from the flow that derives from the vine.
Aphorism of the Day, April 27, 2018
"Abide in me as I in you." Linguistically our versions of each other are configurations of word lenses within ourselves, of how we see each other and regard each other. Mutual abiding in each other is how we live together. The abiding words of Jesus was an assumption that there was mutual love projection such that one's life would be changed by Christ and his life changed by ours, in the sense of being proof of his capacity for loving all.
Aphorism of the Day, April 26, 2018
I am the vine, you are the branches. How does one apply plant metaphors to human situations? Plants are consider non-sentient life even though some talk to their plants to make the grow better. Christ, being the vine, means that we derive from hybrid stock and should become representative hybrid branches. The vine/branch analogy breaks down because the author assumes that the "branches" have freedom to bear good fruit or not. Actual branches don't have volition that we know. The vine/branch metaphor begins by plant-itizing human experience but when volition is involved the branch gets anthropomorphized with the attribute of having the "freedom" to abide in the vine and having the freedom to bear or not bear fruit. To study the Gospel of John one must be able to make the twists and turns with the use of language. Don't take the Bible literally, take it literarily, that is, as artistic literature to make spiritually aesthetic meaningful insights which can be transformatively true.
Aphorism of the Day, April 25, 2018
Probably the greatest theistic definition and tautology is from the First Epistles of John: God is love. Love is hard to empirically verified in the sense that it has too many human experience facets to place into a scientific laboratory. Yet most people in human traditions seem to know or come into an experience that they can assign the word to. If love expresses the ultimate well-being of human living, then to use it as a tautological metaphor for God would certainly help to add fullness of definitional words for "that which none greater can be conceived." The writers of First John and the letter of James keep love very earth bound in that they specifically say one cannot divide a "pietistic" love of God who is not seen from active love as justice for the brothers and sisters whom we see. Human beings may not be perfect enough to qualify for the same lovability as a perfect God, but it is the love of God that always already provides the complementing perfectability for everyone and that is what provides the motive for forgiving tolerance which allow imperfect people to keep on keeping on in the relational community of fellowship.
Aphorism of the Day, April 24, 2018
The presumption of a text or writing is that it can preserve or fix a meaning in some final self-evidential way. This presumption is most egregiously stated in the voice of the Bible pounding preacher who declaims, "The Bible says!" This really means, "For the purposes of my sermon, to relate a homiletical meaning to my listeners, from my study of the Bible from within my particular hermeneutical circle created by the interpretive community which has influenced me, I want to deliver authority to the particular point that I am stressing to my listeners and so I assert, "The Bible says!" By so asserting, I assume that all biblical words are equally God's words and so I identify the entire force of almighty God behind my talking points." Methinks some humility is required. One can offer lots of true biblical meanings in terms of their anthropological soundness without becoming such a presumptuous asserter of being one who has special privileged meanings of what God really means.
Aphorism of the Day, April 23, 2018
John's Gospels has a two-fold metaphor when red-lettered Jesus says, "I am the vine; the are the branches." The "fruit" of the vine is branches; the fruit of the branches is "grapes." Branches are necessary for the "fruit" of grapes. In term of the afterlife of Christ in the world, the church became the branch for the continual reproduction of the Christ-reality in the lives of people in subsequent years.
Aphorism of the Day, April 22, 2018
In our day of rising kleptocracies, people with money, knowledge and power use the same to gain more control of the same without any sense of distributive justice. When the poor, weak and the ignorant are those who are exploited, then the message of the Good Shepherd has lost. A bad shepherd can think that anyone has the freedom to have the power to exploit, so it might as well be me. It is almost as though the model of the bad shepherd who has the power, knowledge and wealth to exploit has become the preferred model of the "free market" economy.
Aphorism of the Day, April 21, 2018
One could view utopia as the conditions when vulnerability is overcome and each individual is "omni-self-efficient" but knowing the conditions of time which includes "babies," such utopia is really like what it means, "no such place." Given the manifold conditions of vulnerability which are unavoidable in life one looks for the matching the good shepherds of ministry with the vulnerable sheep of need. Our world has too many sheep in need and not enough good shepherds who do the obvious requirement of justice, viz., sharing wealth, knowledge and power to bring the vulnerable into an invulnerable and safe state of well-being. Too many people with wealth, knowledge and power actually use the same to exploit the vulnerable so that they can increase their wealth, knowledge and power. Jesus as the Good Shepherd is a witness to acknowledging that wealth, knowledge and power are gifts of God and we are under judgment if we deploy them in exploitive ways.
Aphorism of the Day, April 20, 2018
Sheep and shepherd metaphors seem more appropriate for the times of paternalism when leaders mediated matters of ideology, volition and material dispersements to a highly dependent mass of people without the power of their participation in determining the direction of a society. What the post-modern era has come to be is that the "corporation" driven by those who make decisions in the matter of money and power has become the public equivalent person of the shepherd, but they are driven mainly by profit motive. The societies which require voluntary participation of membership like democracies and parish churches have themselves become the dependent sheep without shepherding participation of membership. 58 % of eligible voters voted in the last election; a far less percentage of "eligible" members of churches participate with regular attendance and ministry. The parish church has become the new sheep without inspired ministers to tend to its well-being. In democratic institutions, everyone has to step up to the a shepherd of ministry for the common good.
Aphorism of the Day, April 19, 2019
In the world of New Testament metaphors, the art of the metaphor allows for contradiction since Jesus could be both Lamb of God and Good Shepherd. In turning to Hebrew Scripture for metaphors for Jesus, the Paschal lamb and the shepherd of the twenty-third Psalm provide the subject matter to generate the metaphor of meanings for how the poetic Christians were bringing their Christ-piety to language. That Jesus existed has empirical status; how he existed for those who knew him in myriads of ways in the empiricism of piety generated the art of poetry and so it is not limited by the physical laws of cause and effect. Poetry is true is an different way than science.
Aphorism of the Day, April 18, 2018
From the confession of a cosmic Risen Christ of St. Paul one moves in a seeming backward way to Jesus of Nazareth who is the incarnate "launching" personality for the eventual cosmic Christ. John's Gospel traces the origin of Jesus to the Cosmic Word of God who is God and the Cosmic Omni-Textual Word of God becomes editorially limited in the person of the historical Jesus of Nazareth only to become once again Omni-textual and omnipresent as the Risen Christ who is All and in All. The glaring contradiction is that even discourse of totalities become particular linguistic events. We can't avoid totalities even as we can't avoid stating the reality of totality in the linguistic event of articulate in speaking or writing, "Totality." When one says that one "feels" that one belongs with and in Everything one still commits linguistic reductionism.
Aphorism of the Day, April 17, 2018
In the Pauline confession, "Christ is all and in all." How does that poetic "Omni-presence" get presented in a Gospel? John's Gospel is the confessional effort to show how Christ is all and in all. Christ is Word and God from the beginning. Expressed another way is when Jesus is quoted as saying, "before Abraham was, I am." What kind of empirical sense do these phrases make at all unless the confession of the essence of messiahship (Christliness) is the co-extensivity of language with God, as in The Word was God? When Word is God, then metaphoricity reigns as definitive of both anthropocentrism and theism.
Aphorism of the Day, April 16, 2018
The Gospel of John is a quintessential book of metaphors, using often the tautological equation formula "ego eimi" /I am followed by term of equivalency, as is I am the Good Shepherd. The Gospel of John, more than any other biblical reading teaches us that it is not a "literal" book but a "literary" book with many true meaningful phrases for the poetry of the soul. In occupation, Jesus was not a shepherd nor are people sheep. However the shepherd/sheep metaphor can be understood as a true analysis and recommendation for people who have power, wealth and knowledge in relationship to those who do not have enough of the three for sufficient health/salvation of their lives.
Aphorism of the Day, April 15, 2018
Readers of the Gospel of John often miss one of the not so subtle interpretive cues. Jesus consistently chastises the "literal" interpreters. The message behind this interpretative cue is that readers should read the Gospel in non-literal ways for the spiritual meanings therein. And fundamentalists"ruin" the Gospel for making it into a piece of modern historical writing with exact empirical accounts of Jesus of Nazareth. Reading a piece of literature as the wrong genre results in confusion and misrepresentation.
Aphorism of the Day, April 14, 2018
A trademark phrase of Jesus in his post-resurrection appearance was "Peace be with you." In Semitic languages the same is standard greeting equivalent to the English, "Hello, how are you." The "Peace be with you" phrase is at center of the Eucharistic liturgy as a greeting of love and reconciliation among people who gather on the first day of the week to realize the presence of Christ in the particular modes of the Eucharistic event. One cannot separate the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharistic elements from the Real Presence of Christ known in the reconciling passing of the Peace among the people who have gathered in the name of Christ.
Aphorim of the Day, April 13, 2018
The post-resurrection appearances of the Risen Christ are presented as the serendipitous ways in which Christ came to be known to the few who were called to be witnesses to the fact that it seemed to be God's personal response to their grief. Appearance and disappearance of Christ in one's life is the tale of the apparent and non-apparent awareness of Christ as eternal word and Christ as particular manifestation of telling apparent presence of one's life being God-touched. Particular word events in one's life can seem to be "erased" or "deconstructed" as one's particular word events in time retreat or are lost in the great hum of the universe of every possible word being articulated at once, and so individual recognition is, as it were, lost in the hum. Word is always animating life even when we don't acknowledge the particular awareness of the same because we are always already manifesting the redundancies of Word. I/we have come to know that we exist because we use language and are used by it. The worded existence is the Omni-presence given equality with God (John 1:1).
Aphorism of the Day, April 12, 2018
The phenomena the post-resurrection appearances of Christ are described in various ways. Some disciples saw, talked with, touched the Risen Christ. Some ate with him and he ate to prove that he had a corporality like the biblical angels who could appear and disappear. To Paul the Risen Christ was a bright blinding light and a voice. To others the Risen Christ was the profound inner impression of a Presence attributed to the work of the alter-personality of God as Holy Spirit.
Aphorism of the Day, April 11, 2018
One of the chief insights which come from the presentation of the post-resurrection appearances of the Risen Christ, is that the Risen Christ wanted to be made known to his profoundly grieving friends. The disciples were shown in poignant ways that Jesus still had personal continuing identity after he was crucified and the continuing identity was revealed to them in his incorruptible Risen spiritual body, which was the witness of the proto-body for all who had hope in their continuing future personal identity.
Aphorism of the Day, April 10, 2018
One of the results of the Enlightenment and the rise of modern science as the gold standard of "truth," was the resulting inferiority complex of many expositors of faith. What can one do after theology, the queen of the sciences is dethroned and replaced by reason enthroned in the Cartesian transcendental subject who existed because "he thought" "cogito ergo sum?" What the proponents of older theology and the newer scientific reason failed to realize appropriately is that they are both unified by being language products and as such there are different truth facets to the language of empirical observation and aesthetic, moral and spiritual values. When truth facets are confused in how they are assigned to discursive practices much symbolic confusion has resulted and people have ended up defending the Bible and faith language in the wrong way and for the wrong reasons. Everyone one needs to remember that in the end, having language unifies everyone. The work of peace involves the perpetual translation among uses of discursive practice toward living together in the values of love and justice.
Aphorism of the Day, April 9, 2018
The Risen Christ appeared to the disciples and others. The Gospel writers want to emphasize that this is "really real." St. Paul stated that continuing personal identity after death would be in an "incorruptible spiritual body." One would assume that the Risen Christ appeared in an incorruptible spiritual body in a way that included being able to verify actuality to the disciples. Seeing and touching and eating a meal were the physical metaphors used to relate the interaction of the disciples and the incorruptible spiritual body of Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, April 8, 2018
We have inherited the word "spirit" to speak about the invisible yet effectively and essential presence of God or of a person. Yet, the words for spirit in various language essentially mean "wind" or "breath." Wind can seems to be an invisible breath that gives indication that creation is alive and so one can see how the experiences of invisible but obvious breath and wind became a fitting words to speak about invisible yet actual realities. John's Gospel perhaps adds a further insight when Jesus is quoted as saying, "My words are spirit and they are life." When one thinks about words and language, they represent an invisible but actual essence of what it is to be human. We are invisibly constituted by the words within us as the script which guides what we do, say and write. So spirit as the constituting words of our lives is a perhaps more insightful way to think of spirit than the notions of breath or wind.
Aphorism of the Day, April 7, 2018
Legislation making is often called "sausage making;" an unsightly tedious process. Practice and rehearsal sessions for performance are often stop and start and sessions of frustration trying to get ready for performance, and it is good that they are mostly out of the sight of the public. The public gets the final product in the artistic occasion and might thrill about how easy the performers make it seem, when such is truly not the case. Reading the Bible can be like the performance occasion; one gets the end product of the biblical writers and one can have devotional interaction with the literal meaning of the words (literal to the reader) and swoon with the sublime. The Bible scholar digs into the "sausage making" elements regarding the author, context or provenance of the writing, contrasting original language with other similar language documents of the time and often scholars end up with stark disagreement on many elements that go into a biblical text. The presentation of "such sausage making" can seem to diminish the devotional reading based upon presuming that God wrote the text directly through a willing writer without needing any historical context at all. In naiveté, one can assume the words have self-evidential meanings from the Holy Spirit. Such limited naïve reading has led to conclusion that one cannot read the Bible seriously as a Christian and still be a scientist and a person who acknowledges the methods of modern history.
Aphorism of the Day, April 6, 2018
Once something has come to writing, the writing is itself a trace method of memory, about how past events have been or were interpreted by those who experienced them directly or had the hearsay from those who were there. The trace of writing cannot be a reconstruction of everything that happened and so it is layered with selection of recounted events. Selection is made with a purpose, namely the purpose of the writer who selects to present his or her system of values regarding what is important to present for the particular writing purpose. This is such an encumbered way to view biblical writings; it is much more pleasurable to discount the writing baggage and enjoy the "as if" experience of actually being there. In the joy of the "as if" of being there, one can forget the art of the writer who has successfully transported the reader into thinking that one is really there. One can have both the sublime artistic effect of a text while at the same time processing all of the artistic devices which went into the construction of the text. Lots of Bible readers only want the sublime artistic effect of the sense of "being there" which suspends the rational mind's doubt that it really is so. One of sad outcomes of what is called "fundamentalism" is that people read the Bible as though it were a scientific document and not a sublime artistic experience. By elevating scientific discourse as setting the criteria for the highest experience of truth, they diminish the aesthetic experiences as being "impoverished" truth. In actual experience the aesthetic truths are actually more "moving" and inspirational in impelling human transformation. One could wish that Bible readers would be truer to a privileged place for the sublime artistic reading of Holy Scripture.
Aphorism of the Day, April 5, 2018
John's Gospel purports the unity of people across space, time and history because all equally are constituted by the Word. Word constitution of human experience is layered and with word we explicate the kinds of layering of word experience. We use the interpretive lenses of word to designate a "face to face" encounter, even as we use words to describe "hearsay" as in "I saw Jesus face to face, do you believe me?" We use word to preserve word in a certain way through writing, as in "these things are written so that you may believe." Empirical experience, oral account of experience and written account of experience are all equal Word experiences in that each can be a vehicle of a different layering of Word experience which is designated as the "Sublime." All who dwell in the realm of the Word, have the potential of knowing the "Sublime" which can come within certain interpretive communities to be known as encounters with the "Risen Christ."
Aphorism of the Day, April 4, 2018
The passing of the "Peace" in the Eucharistic liturgy derives in part from the "doubting" Thomas story. Jesus appears to his frightened disciples and imparts the greeting of peace. This signified to Peter that he, and the disciples who fled Jesus during his trial were forgiven and reconciled with him. It is included with the injunction not to retain sins but forgive them. In the Eucharistic liturgy, the passing of the peace is not just a quaint friendly gesture; it is the opportunity for persons to be reconciled to one another before they approach the altar. The passing of the peace hides within it the active confession and forgiveness of sins so needed for the maintenance of community.
Aphorism of the Day, April 3, 2018
A way to read the Gospel of John is to see it as a study in words. The Word is God from the beginning. The spoken words of Jesus are Spirit and Life. The Gospel of John is written words and by reading them one can come to believe in the identity of Jesus.
Aphorism of the Day, April 2, 2018
The "low" Sunday Gospel of the Doubting Thomas periscope, encodes in a brilliant way the affirmation of the validity of the many ways that the Risen Christ can be present to people. The Risen Christ is differently but equally present to all and the equality is known through the experience of peace, not fear, the presence of the Holy Spirit and the forgiveness of sins, not the retaining of each other's sins.
Aphorism of the Day, April 1, 2018
The resurrection of Christ and our future resurrection tells us what we believe about God. It tells us that God loves us enough to cherish our unique personal identity enough to preserve it in a recognizable way into the future forever. And if you're like I am, I don't feel all that worthy to be preserved forever, but I think it is wonderful to believe that God believes that I am worth preserving in some way for ever.
