KERYGMA - WHAT
HERALDS PRONOUCE
The God Hermes is the patron of thieves and merchants and
travelers, as if they were all the same. Oracles, of which some
are known as Kledon - statements at the moment of which
their announcement seems trivial or irrelevant but which, after
time, have a secret or hidden meaning which only an elect
can understand. Hermes is cunning, and violent too : a trickster,
a robber. He is also the patron of interpreters; who hidden
ferret out these hidden meanings, even with cunning and with
violence - the rules of their art, and its philosophy, are called
'hermeneutics'. Secret senses. Subversions of the old metaphysics.
The true meaning of oracular intimations may be delayed for
generations - emerging much later in circumstances quite
unlike those in which the oracle spoke. This may necessitate
then a stealth or violence. They have the right to affirm, the
obligation to accept, the superiority of latent over manifest
sense. Hermes is the God of the go-between, of the third ear.
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When Jesus was asked to explain the purpose of his parables,
he described them as stories to to them without - meaning 'to
outsiders' - with the express meaning of concealing a mystery
that was to be understood only by insiders. He told his disciples,
'To you has been given the secret of the Kingdom of God, but
for those outside everything is in parables. They may indeed see
but not perceive, and indeed hear and not understand.'
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Astonishing, that is - Jesus saying, plainly, that only Insiders can
have access to the true sense of these stories. To divine the true,
the latent sense, you need to be of the elect, He is saying, of the
institution. Outsider must content themselves, then, with only
what they hear, grasping not the real, essential meanings. Only
those on the in, who know the 'mysteries', can discover what
the stories really mean. Everything means more than it says.
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