Your Grandchildren Carry the Weight of your Life Experiences

NOTE: Being an engineer and a deacon, I'm always attuned to the intersection of science, theology and spirituality. Usually when I encounter these I reflect on the event and move on, but since I have resolved to leave more permanent traces of myself for 2021, this year when ever I encounter these intersections I will write a post about them. So here is the first of what I hope will become a more regular event.

  Does God punish children for the sins of their parents (or Grandparents)? There are more than one bible passage that seems to say this. Here are a few examples:

Deuteronomy 5:9 - You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me

Exodus 34:7 -  Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.

Isaiah 14:31 - Prepare a place to slaughter his children for the sins of their ancestors; they are not to rise to inherit the land and cover the earth with their cities.

  How can a just and loving God behave like this? This is a very important theological question specially for people seeking to deepen their relationship with this divine being. There is a good answer to the justice behind this idea of children caring the guilt of their progenitors, which I intend to answer in an upcoming episode of my podcast.  However as I was researching this question I was shocked to find that the Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, also known by the non-scientific folk by the name Science, has published an article explaining the "how" of this process. You can read part of the article here. 

  The article I linked to (The epigenome—a family affair by John R. McCarrey, Department of Biology, University of Texas at San Antonio) is 5 years old and presents a state of the science up to that point. What is surprising to me, is that this branch of genetic science (epigenetics) presents a mechanism by which this biblical tenant is made true in the lives of human beings.  Since this article was published more research has being made offering  more proof  that the events in the life of parents and grand parents can have a direct effect on the genetic code of their off spring. 

  Once again science and theology are more interrelated than what many people would like to admit.

"Viva Cristo Rey!!" 

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The Bread of Life Discourse (17Th Sunday OT Cycle B)

    Today is a very special Sunday. If you are a liturgy geek like myself you will know that in the church we use a three year cycle for the Sunday readings. Meaning every 3 years we repeat the same Sunday readings; so today’s readings we have not heard since 2014 and we will not hear them again until the year 2021. Now the reason why today is special is because today’s Gospel reading is the beginning of what is known as the Bread of Life discourse, and I say the beginning because for the next 6 Sundays we will read the whole story.
   Now, if you are a bible geek like myself, you will know that the gospel reading for today comes from the 6th chapter of the Gospel of John.  And if you are a theology geek like myself you will also know that for Catholics this section of the new testament is one of the most important sections in the whole of the bible. Why? Because this is the point in Jesus ministry in which he begins teaching His disciples about the Eucharist, the source and summit of our faith. How important are these readings? Think about it, without faith in what Jesus tells us in these readings, that He is the bread of life who came down from heaven and that we need to eat His body and drink His blood in order to have eternal life, everything we do at mass, every single day and especially on Sundays, would have no meaning. In fact if Jesus were not present in the Eucharist, everything we do at mass could be considered idolatry.

     What Jesus begins teaching us today will culminate not 6 weeks from now but on the day of the Last Supper or Holy Thursday, the day in which for the first time, he gives himself to us in the forms of bread and wine, and gives His disciples to power to transform this bread and wine into His divine body and blood. He himself becomes the bread that comes down from heaven. 
  Now, when we look at today’s gospel again, we will notice that the Lord Jesus begins his catechesis on the Eucharist not with deep philosophical or theological ideas but with the one very common, very human act. The one act who gives life to the human race, eating and drinking. Of course the Lord could have used some other human act to remain with us. Before the first Jewish temple was destroyed by the Babylonians the Bible states that the presence of God resided in the temple as a form of permanent cloud in the Holy of Holies.
   Why would God select the form of bread and wine to remain with us “until the end of times”? Because he knows very well human hunger. physical hunger as well as spiritual hunger. The physical hunger can be taken care of by the substance of the bread and wine, but our spiritual hunger can not be satiated by material things. Some people try to do this by filling their lives with “stuff”. Some use money, some use sex, some use power, others use alcohol, or pills or illegal drugs, but what they are really doing is covering over the emptiness the carry in their spirit.
  But the only thing which can satiate this hunger is God himself, who created us with this hunger for him, a hunger which will not leave us until we fill our spirit with him. This is why we receive communion, to allow God to become part of who we are. To become part of our cells and our DNA and to allow him into our hearts to fill the emptiness we all carry inside..
  Like I said, today is just the first part of the Bread of Life discourse, in the next 5 weeks we will see how Jesus slowly moves from feeding 5 thousand people with 5 loaves of bread, to giving his body to be eaten and his blood to be drunk by the whole world.
  If you are a Catholic geek like myself, you will realize during this next few weeks that there is no life without partaking of the Eucharist, that we were created for this moment and that we will never be closer to the Lord than when we quietly kneel on our, pews after communion. GBYMBAS

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What really happened on the day the sun stood still?: Joshua 10 revisited.

  June 21, the longest day of the year or summer solstice, is right around the corner. In order to mark this astronomically important event I decided to take a look the longest day ever recorded in history, which appears in the 10th chapter of the book of Joshua.

¹² On the day the Lord gave the Amorites over to Israel, Joshua said to the Lord in the presence of Israel:

“Sun, stand still over Gibeon,
    and you, moon, over the Valley of Aijalon.”
¹³ So the sun stood still,
    and the moon stopped,
    till the nation avenged itself on its enemies,

as it is written in the Book of Jashar.

The sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day. ¹⁴ There has never been a day like it before or since, a day when the Lord listened to a human being. Surely the Lord was fighting for Israel!

  Before we can move ahead with this passage some background information would be helpful. The book of Joshua records the conquest wars fought by the armies of Israel under the leadership of a man called  Joshua. These wars were fought in Canaan, what we call today Syria and the “holy land”. When these wars were started, the armies of Israel were nothing more that a rag tag group of warriors, but with the help of Yahweh, and Joshua’s leadership, this group of warriors were able defeat, time and time again, the armies of much bigger and older cultures. One of the cities in Canaan, Gibeon, made an alliance with Joshua. Five other surrounding cities were not happy with this arrangement and decided to join forces and attack Gibeon. When this lone friend of Israel's heard of the approaching armies, they called on Joshua to honor their alliance and help them defend their city. We take the story right at the moment in which Joshua is departing with his army to defend Gibeon.
  This story has been used to make an argument against the Bible as the word of God. It is an argument which goes like this: how can a book supposedly inspired by God, get the way the universe works so wrong? We are talking about how Joshua asked God to “stand still the sun”; you see in Joshua’s mind the Sun moved across the sky, East to West every day, although we know this is not the case. How can the book of Joshua make such a horrendous mistake about the way the universe works?  The problem with this question is that makes invalid assumptions about the book of Joshua; that is that the primary intention of the author was to present how the universe worked that day.
  This book of the Old Testament is just an historical account of how Joshua and his small band of warriors, time and time again defeated much larger armies, until they gained control of all the land of Canaan. It presents what Joshua did and how God helped him. This book is not a cosmology treaty. It tries to put into context events which were out of the ordinary and that were not understood by the writers. What we read in it is basically the authors' attempt at describing a miraculous event using their understanding of the way their universe behaved.
 So the question is then... what happened that day, which caused Joshua to ask for God to “stop the movement of the sun” and what happened that day to make Joshua and his men believe that God had answered their prayers. Lets take a closer look at the reading and see if we can find answers
to these questions.
  Now keep in mind that, there are a lot of things happening in this reading, there is a lot of movement and action, so I’ll try to briefly point the important details that might pass unnoticed. The first few verses tell us that after receiving the request for help from Giveon, the Lord assured Joshua that he will defeat his enemies. Now keep in mind, Joshua was confronting the armies of five whole cities, so most likely this army was much larger than Joshua’s little band of warriors; so Israel’s warriors marched all night. From a previous verse we know they started this march in Gilgal, so the distance Joshua and his men had to walk at night was about 18 miles, which in the mountainous terrain of their march, could be accomplished in about 8 hours. This means that there is a very strong possibility that the surprise attack to defend
Gibeon started under the darkness of the early morning. Joshua’s element of surprise threw his enemies in disarray and caused them to flee all the way down to Azeka and Mechadda, through the pass of
Beth Horon, a trip of about 20 miles. It was during this retreat, according to the story that “God sent great hailstones” which killed most of the enemies of Joshua, and reduced the number of his enemies to a more “manageable” size. The reading implies that Joshua engaged his enemies after the hailstorm
which means that Joshua's army had to march 20 miles after an 18 miles overnight trip. That is 38 miles! Which, by the way would place the final battle in the late afternoon. It is at this time which Joshua makes his prayer to God to stand the Sun still so he can finish what we would call in modern times a "mop up" operation. Now lets do an assessment of Joshua and his army here, they have walked all night, they attacked early in the morning and now after another 8-10 hours of marching they find themselves battling their enemies again. They were tired, hungry and most likely they were operating on pure adrenaline but more importantly...They wanted to finish the job started so many hours ago.
  It being the late afternoon, Joshua realized he was running out of daylight so in his mind, the Sun needed to be stopped in order to make this day longer and finish disposing of his enemies. Many years ago I worked with a brilliant mathematician, who told me that he had lost his faith because of this story, he reasoned that if God were to stop the earth rotation, everything that is not literary nailed to the ground would come out flying because of the change on rotational speed; not to mention the catastrophic effect in plate tectonics, and ocean tides. My friend's literal interpretation of this story he could not conceive of a God so powerful that he would take into consideration all the effects of stopping the earth rotation. At the end of the day, this interpretation could only be applied to a less than infinitely powerful being.
  Another mistake my friend made was that he limited himself to just ONE potential explanation, the most literal of all. But, the thing is... there are other explanations that could cause Joshua and his men to think that the day was longer than normal and that the Sun stood in the middle of the sky, these are the ones I would like to explore.
  Since Joshua was asking the wrong thing God acted in a way that might have looked as if that the Sun had stopped in the western sky.  Some people have speculated that, since the sun was in the West, perhaps there was some type of meteorological phenomena which reflected the light of the sun after it had set, something like Sun Dogs or a phenomenon know as “noctilucent” or “polar mesospheric” clouds. Which might be related to the strange “hailstone” storm which killed many that day. Others have speculated that perhaps a meteor appeared bright as the sun before it disintegrated in the atmosphere.
    To me some of the most interesting theories have to do with “time” itself. One of these goes like this: Since we know now (Thanks to Albert Einstein) that time is not constant, an all powerful God would have the power of locally “slowing down time” making it seem as if everything moving outside of this
bubble is moving slowly.* So the Sun would appear as if it was standing in the sky.
  Another theory I find interesting is based on “Time perception”. There is a well known psychological phenomenon in which a person in a high level of stress becomes so focused that it looks as if time has slowed down around them. With Joshua and his men having been for such a long time in a high level of stress, it is possible that they lost track of time itself (After all, in the times of Joshua there was not reliable way of measuring time) so after repeated cases of feeling time slowing down they might have thought the day was much longer and in their minds the only way this could be possible was by divine intervention.
   Now I would be remiss if I were not to mention another interpretation based on the type of language used by writers of this book. Looking at the text we can see that the story changes "styles" when quoting Joshua’s prayer, also after this quote, the reading mentions the Book of Jashar, which scholars believe was a book of poems and songs about great Jewish heroes of this time (a book now lost). Because of these some scholars believe that this event never really happened and it is just a poetic way of saying that on a long day of fighting a superior enemy, God was helping the armies of Joshua to such a degree that “The sun and the moon stopped” to bring Israel victory.
    Of course we can speculate more but the reality is that we will never know what happened that day, only that it felt as if "The sun stood in the sky" for a whole day.  Like I mentioned before, some people have used this story to point out that the Bible is not reliable because it makes an error in the assumption that the sun rotates around the earth;  but this story is not about celestial mechanics but about how God responded to Joshua’s prayer. Even when He was asking for the wrong thing God graciously responded to his prayer.This in it self should be a source if great consolation, for how many times we have found ourselves asking God for the wrong thing, without knowing or understanding what we were talking about? God's eternal mercy is manifested on these moments, we might not have any idea what is he doing but we can be sure that he is making the universe work in the most beneficial way for all of His children.
 

* Now this reminds me of an old Start Trek episode titled “Wink of an Eye” in which a group of aliens, existing in a high level of acceleration attempted to take over the Enterprise. While they were moving everyone else appear static.

"Viva Cristo Rey!!"
"Ya Rabbi Yassou!!"

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Helping Atheists Understand the Bible: An ntroduction.

My atheist Twitter friend, (Lets call him TA) liked the answer I gave to one of his previous tweets (Luke 12:47-48: Was Jesus in Favor of Slavery? )so much  that he gave me another "problematic" passage. Here is his tweet:

Here is the passage in which he finds reason to think that Jesus advocated the killing of children:

Matthew 15:1-20

That Which Defiles

 1 Then some Pharisees and teachers of the law came to Jesus from Jerusalem and asked, ² “Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? They don’t wash their hands before they eat!”

³ Jesus replied, “And why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition? ⁴ For God said, ‘Honor your father and mother’ and ‘Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death.’ ⁵ But you say that if anyone declares that what might have been used to help their father or mother is ‘devoted to God,’ ⁶ they are not to ‘honor their father or mother’ with it. Thus you nullify the word of God for the sake of your tradition. ⁷ You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you:

⁸ “‘These people honor me with their lips,
    but their hearts are far from me.
⁹ They worship me in vain;
    their teachings are merely human rules.’”

¹⁰ Jesus called the crowd to him and said, “Listen and understand. ¹¹ What goes into someone’s mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth, that is what defiles them.”

¹² Then the disciples came to him and asked, “Do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this?”
¹³ He replied, “Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be pulled up by the roots. ¹⁴ Leave them; they are blind guides. If the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit.”
¹⁵ Peter said, “Explain the parable to us.”
¹⁶ “Are you still so dull?” Jesus asked them. ¹⁷ “Don’t you see that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and then out of the body? ¹⁸ But the things that come out of a person’s mouth come from the heart, and these defile them. ¹⁹ For out of the heart come evil thoughts—murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. ²⁰ These are what defile a person; but eating with unwashed hands does not defile them.”

It is obvious TA heeded the advice from my previous post: "when quoting the Bible: a text without a context is a pretext". As you can see this time he gave a whole chapter as "context"! However, I feel that perhaps he over reached a bit. Looking to his passage, it is clear (to me) the only relevant parts are the ones I underlined in the text, so I will limit my comments to these. I was going to include my response in this post but it was getting to long so I will address my answer in a future post.

However before delving into this text, I feel some preliminary statements about the reading the Bible (Or any ancient work for that matter) are in order. Many atheists (and many Christians too!) make two fundamental mistakes when reading the Bible. First, they approach it as if the Bible was composed in the same manner as any other modern work of literature. Why shouldn't they follow this approach? Simply put, the Bible is not a book. The Bible is a collection of documents, composed by many peoples at different times and influenced by many different societies and cultures. The history of the Bible spans from about 1600 B.C to 120 A.D. During this time many were the hands, minds and voices who contributed to this work, with their own styles and levels of inspiration. When reading this work, consideration must be given to all these people, times, and cultures, especially when trying to find the universal principles this work presents.

The second mistake some people make when reading the Bible is what in hermeneutics is known as  "Presentism" or "the uncritical tendency to interpret past events in terms of modern values and concepts".  We saw an example of this when TA claimed Jesus advocated slavery because he used the first century, Judaic concept of slavery as examples in his preaching. In TA's presentist mind Jesus' cavalier attitude towards slavery  meant  tacit assent to this institution. TA ignores the fact that 2000 years ago slavery was part of the social and cultural fabric of the time, and that Jesus is just using what his audience knew about this institution to convey an idea. Absent in TA's interpretation of the text is the consideration that this institution was vastly different to what we understand as slavery, like the fact that people could sell themselves into slavery to pay debts, or to have a master to take care of them. It is needless to say that biblical scholars and serious scripture students are always avoiding, presentism. A quick advice to my atheist readers: If the experts don't interpret this way, perhaps it is best for you not to do it either.


So the question is then: How should we read the Bible? For the serious student, it is of the utmost importance to realize that the Bible can not be read like a regular book.When teaching about Holy Scripture this is the very first principle I give my students. In the Bible you encounter all sorts of literary styles; some of which are not in use anymore. Among these you encounter: historical works, song collections, poetry, law codes, genealogies, liturgical texts, apocalyptic literature, and many others. If you do not know how to read these, or the differences among them, perhaps you might be better reading a book ABOUT the Bible, before you actually read the Bible.  To me the best approach to follow when reading Scripture is this: read it as you read the newspaper.

When one reads the newspaper, one never reads the editorial in the same way the sports section is read; or the cartoons, the gardening section, or the obituaries. And most people do not start with page 1A and end on page 20E. People tend to read the sections that interest them the most first, and then finish the less important sections later or even completely ignore some. Like the Bible, each newspaper section has their own style which, if not respected, could lead to a lot of errors and mis-interpretations. Imagine what would happen if people were to read the Obituaries in the same way they read the Cartoons section!. This is why when atheists make outrageous claims about the Bible, some Christians with scriptural knowledge find these statements embarrassingly laughable. Quick advice to my atheist readers: When reading the Bible, or any ancient work for that matter, one must respect the "voice" of the document, while seeking the universal truths this voice is trying to convey.

I would like to make one last point. Just because the documents collected in the Bible are the product of different ancient cultures. This is not to say that the inspired ideas these people received do not apply to us, on the contrary it is very easy to show that these principles are in fact universal and that they are as much relevant to us as they were to them.

By now you might be thinking: What does all this biblical interpretation stuff have to do with the original post? Well, these preliminary considerations will be of great help when I answer TA's tweet, which I will do in a future post.

"Viva Cristo Rey!!"

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