Aphorism of the Day, March 31, 2023
St. Paul made the death of Jesus into a mystical event of identity with the death of Jesus in becoming an ironic power to die to one's selfish self.
Aphorism of the Day, March 30, 2023
St. Paul seems more hopeful about Judaism being united by the acceptance of Christ. He wrote that the Gentiles received grace to make the Jews jealous. By the later times when the Gospels were written, it seems as though the divisions within Judaism had become more deeply set
Aphorism of the Day, March 29, 2023
The presence of the Passion accounts in the Gospel is proof of the antipathy that had developed between parties of Judaism. It involves a rather ironic message. Those who were complicit in the lead up to the crucifixion were those who did not know they were setting up the climax, namely, the resurrection appearances. So if one's sins are overcome by some subsequent and necessary good it leads to the guilty by ignorance plea and the absolution, "Father, forgiven them for they do not know what they do." Was the Passion written in part to present the insight: "You can't plea ignorance anymore?"
Aphorism of the Day, March 28, 2023
Palm Sunday and The Sunday of the Passion includes insights about the break down between parties within Judaism, the followers of Jesus and the parties who held positions with the Sanhedrin or the leadership group which negotiated with the Roman authorities. The implication is that the Sanhedrin were complicit with the Romans in trying to crush Jesus and his followers. The political truth is that the Roman authorities acted in their own interest.
Aphorism of the Day, March 27, 2023
Jesus is perhaps the greatest "post-life savant" of all time. Which other person of history can have so many people claim having with them a personal relationship? Yes, many Buddhists will speak about realizing the Buddha nature within themselves, but does that characterization have the same "personal" overtones as those who claim relationship with Jesus?
Aphorism of the Day, March 26, 2023
When one writes about the past, one is super-imposing the present on the past, presenting a present version of the past. The Gospels super-impose what was happening decades after Jesus upon a narrative Jesus. The sub-text involves the dynamics of the communities which were responsible for the writing.
Aphorism of the Day, March 25, 2023
Might be good to link image of the divine upon life with resurrection life. The image of the divine is what propels the eternal return of the same or traces with surpassing differences. Resurrection life should be seen as something impossible, namely static life.
Aphorism of the Day, March 24, 2023
Life and death are continuously juxtaposed in the mysticism of St. Paul. They become metaphors for identifying with the life, death, and "re-life" of Jesus as the path of spiritual transformation. The Lazarus story is a way to proclaim an identity with Christ while "dead in sins." Lazarus is symbolic of the two resurrections, namely, the experience of resurrection life before we finally die, and the resurrection to come in our "re-life."
Aphorism of the Day, March 23, 2023
Lazarus the resurrected one, came back to life, only to die again. Or is Lazarus a figurative one in a parable of Jesus told by the early Jesus Movement of the continuity of resurrection life that is present in all through God's omnipresence and made manifest with the Risen Christ known to be present in the lives of people who will die even while having resurrection life.
Aphorism of the Day, March 22, 2023
The Lazarus story emphasizes the resurrection is not a last day event but the experience of a new quality of life while we live.
Aphorism of the Day, March 21, 2023
The disciples and interlocutors of Jesus in John's Gospel are often presented as literalists who don't understand the use of figurative language. From the first word of John's Gospel, the writer is writing about Word and coming to nuanced use of language in perceiving "inner" meanings is one of John's writing goals.
Aphorism of the Day, March 20, 2023
The Lazarus story encodes the teaching that while people are dead in sin, they can received the resurrected life of the Holy Spirit through the words of Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, March 19, 2023
The Gospels were written years after the first writing of St. Paul. One can read them as manual wherein the reader puts oneself in identity with the disciples who are initially trapped in literal/plain understanding and being gradually trained in the "inner meaning" of things such as the meanings which Paul had from his mystical experiences.
Aphorism of the Day, March 18, 2023
We see what we see and are "blind" to what we don't yet see and such seeing and blindness differences among people most often accounts for the conflicts between them. Seeing and blindness are relative to ego construction based upon one's contexts and this involves education, cultural conditioning, and one's age and exposure to informational sources. We can project a perfect outside arbiter for "correct or enlightened" seeing but whoever delivers such a perfect message colors the message by being an imperfect seer.
Aphorism of the Day, March 17, 2023
Why do people who live in the same religious milieu disagree, and sometimes profoundly? People belong to different paradigms or reside in different hermeneutic circles. This means people can use the same words and yet do not share the same meanings of those words. How does one move from on paradigm to the next? Conversion. One is blind to the insights of another paradigm until one has a seeing conversion experience. The Jesus Movement was another hermeneutical circles in first century Judaism. Not ever member of the Jewish society could embrace the features which came to define the Jesus Movement.
Aphorism of the March 16, 2023
The future fruition may be the answer to past causation questions, like, why are there seeds? So that they can become trees. Why are people unenlightened or blind? So that they can come to see and be enlightened.
Aphorism of the Day, March 15, 2023
Blindness and sight are the metaphors used by the writer of John channelling the mind of Christ, to describe why persons in a former paradigm cannot "see" the wisdom of the new paradigm. Nicodemus was a Pharisee of a former paradigm who was coming to "see" the wisdom of the Christ paradigm.
Aphorism of the Day, March 14, 2023
Biblically, looking only on "outward" appearances is called in the words of Jesus, "blindness," while looking and seeing inwardness virtues of gentleness, kindness, and pure motives is what the words of Jesus calls "seeing." Literalism is blindness regarding the Scriptures and it assumes that writers did not know the difference between common sense naive realism and artistic presentations with langauge.
Aphorism of the Day, March 13, 2023
The inner languaged person can be multiverses with access to one's conscious life in actual time. Such a realm of possibilisms can be a legion which is both a resource for creativity and the instincts for acting out wrongly. The conscious life as being an ego orchestrator of one's multiverses calls each of us to enlightened insightful wise agency. Such wisdom would include kindly acting with other people.
Aphorism of the Day, March 12, 2023
In the beginning was the Word. John's Gospel tells us that human life distinctively is known because we are worded beings. Without words, nothing that is known could have been known.
Aphorism of the Day, March 11, 2023
In John's Gospel the physical or plain meaning is often the set up for the words of Jesus to relate the inward meaning. The literal water of Jacob's well set up the living water phrases. The disciples' reference to food to eat is the set up for Jesus to say, "I have food to eat that you do not know about."
Aphorism of the Day, March 10, 2023
One of the subtexts of the Gospel of John is this: Don't read it literally, because the physical is but a metaphor for the spiritual.
Aphorism of the Day, March 9, 2023
How is it that one might understand biblical words different at the age of 70 than one did at 16? Could it be that learning and insights involve continuous conversion to new interpretative paradigms? But aren't the words the same? Or does time reduce words to but traces that have new meanings in time?
Aphorism of the Day, March 8, 2023
Should we worry about the Mystery of all that is negligible in causing the events of our life? What we don't and can't know isn't relevant? Or should we remain humble about what we don't yet know?
Aphorism of the Day, March 7, 2023
The Samaritan woman at the well spoke about a messiah to Jesus. Since the Samaritans only had their version of the Torah, which is pre-Davidic, who is the messiah of the Torah? Is it the prophet who would be raised up? In the development of ideas one wonders how the notion of messiah was wedded with the notion of a future prophet in Torah.
Aphorism of the Day, March 6, 2023
One of the reading cues of John's Gospel is the cryptic presentation of non-literal reading as indicative of being spiritual or born from above. Non-literal understanding of life does not eschew the empirical verification of science, it is but a complementing truth of how to be related to the fullness of reality.
Aphorism of the Day, March 5, 2023
The writer of the Gospel of John unifies the faith or works debates by citing words of Jesus saying, "this is work, that you believe, i.e. have faith. If having faith in the right object, i.e., the redeeming work of Christ, is the Christ appointed work, then faith and work are united. A rather interesting twist on the issue since Paul is seen as making such a stark distinction between the two.
Aphorism of the Day, March 4, 2023
From the words of Jesus, Bible readers have come to stereotypically shame the Pharisees as being those who act religious on the outside but when the cameras are turned off, behave differently. This, of course, could be any of us. However, the only three Pharisees who are named in the New Testament, actually get good reviews: Nicodemus, Gamaliel, and Paul.
Aphorism of the Day, March 3, 2023
One of the collateral military effects of reading the Bible is the model of people who heard God telling them that they have been given land that they did not previously possess. "I'm taking your land because God told me too."
Aphorism of the Day, March 2, 2023
The writer of John's Gospel presents the contrast between earthly things and heavenly things. The heavenly things in a practical sense referred to seeing from having been converted to a new paradigm of thinking. The new thinking was thinking which surpassed the thinking of how previously the faith life was to be interpreted.
Aphorism of the Day, March 1, 2023
An important way to read the Gospel of John is to note the scorning words of Jesus about literalism, eg. how can I an old man get back into my mother's womb, and Lazarus' sleep good, or that he is dead. The Gospel of John does not invite us to the language of empirical verification but the artistic language of poetic and moving spirituality.
