Hebrew story telling (III): Let there be Contact

The Hebrew technique of story-telling allows vast amounts of information (perhaps indeed the whole universe) to be summarized by a relatively small amount of text. And, as endearingly portrayed by Carl Sagan in his novel Contact, once a reader understands the principle -- the basic structure from which all other structures are derived, see Ephesians 3:14-15 and compare to Genesis 12:3 -- plus the relationships between the iterations, the "primer", the entire universe can be constructed.



In the Bible that primary principle is called Dabar YHWH, or Word of God (a.k.a. Logos), which on the complexity scale obviously sits prior to its consequences. Hence John the Evangelist could write that in the beginning was the Word, which was with God and which was God, and that through the Word everything came into being (John 1:1-3). And Paul wrote that the Word is the image of the invisible God, and that He is before all things and that in Him all things hold together (Colossians 1:15-17).

Contrary to the creation myths of adjacent cultures, the Hebrew account proclaimed that creation hinged on language: God spoke and there was. The periodic table revealed that indeed the material world consist of a language, using a two-letter alphabet of protons and neutrons, from which all the "words" that comprise the world are constructed (Matthew 4:4).

The languages in which the universe is expressed

When DNA was discovered it too appeared to consist of language, using the four-letter alphabet of the nucleotides, and like the Hebrew Torah scrolls, it too appeared as a double helix, in a nucleus, in the heart of a living cell, which is obviously (and deliberately?) similarly to the Ark in the tabernacle in the heart of Israel. Note how the Ten Commandments that defined Israel were organized: on two corresponding tablets, one containing rules pertaining to the father (God) and the other pertaining to the mother (humanity).



The story of Jesus -- His stirring message, His three-day death, His resurrection and His transformation into a human collective "in the world but not of the world" -- precisely follows the story of a conceiving human female: her hormonal (im)balance, her ovulation, which expels and thus kills the ovum (which, like Jesus, only has maternal genes), and her conception, which revives the ovum and brings it back into the maternal economy, but not as just another cell but rather as a mini-human, in every way like herself; in her but not of her.



The event generally referred to as the "Second Coming" corresponds with the birth of this new form of humanity, which will then exist separate from the maternal society and can finally be recognized by her as something wholly new and wonderful (Revelation 21:24).

All these stories were never meant to make people religious. These stories don't tell us how to behave in church (or temple or mosque); they convey the natural processes by which the world operates. They certainly don't predict the superiority or victory of any particular world view, but placidly review natural events which are inevitable by sheer merit of natural law.

The Body of Christ prior to the so-called Second Coming lives within the world the way an unborn baby lives within her mother.