How Would You Write the Story?

A lot has been made about how the Son of God was born in a crude feeding trough in a cave being used as a stable, and all that entails. But that level of divine humiliation is just one in a series of truly counterintuitive and exceedingly inconvenient points of the story.

Let’s start with the annunciation. Gabriel doesn’t appear to Mary in the town square in front of the entire village. No, he apparently appears to her alone, in private, with no witnesses. So, this very young woman, likely a young teenage girl comes to her family to lay the most improbable story on them, in a culture where women have no legal voice, no credibility.

If My People, Part 2: Now What?

“if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”

II Chronicles 7:14

Yesterday, I explained the primary reason why it is problematic for Christians to claim the above verse, namely that it is a promise explicitly given to the nation of Israel after the dedication of Solomon’s temple, and the context of the verse strongly implies a physical nation with real estate, something that the Church simply does not have (with the possible exception of Vatican City).

But, as Christians (literally, ‘those like Christ’), don’t we have more reason to claim that we are called by His Name than Israel (literally ‘strives with God’)? Yes, but we are not a nation, nor a “kingdom of this world.” Furthermore, as Christians, we are literally under a new covenant with God, and the Chronicles verse is made to those under the old. As St. Paul indicates (in Galatians, I think), why would we seek promises from the old covenant when the new is so much better?

Where does that leave us? Do we have any recourse when faced with natural disasters, war, political crises and the like?