20 July 2017
Thursday of the Fifteenth Week in Ordinary Time
Who is the true god of the sun? Is it Ra, as the ancient Egyptians believed? Or is it Helios, as the ancient Greeks would say? Or is it Apollo, according to the ancient Romans? Did Ra truly reveal himself as the god of the sun? Or was it Helios or even Apollo?
My point is not that we should believe that any of these pagan deities revealed themselves as sun gods, but that we should consider how such a revelation would have occurred. “Who are you?” “I am Ra, the god of the sun.” The identities of such pagan gods was tied to some amazing phenomenon: the sun, the moon, the earth, the ocean, death, birth, etc.
When Moses heard the voice of the Lord in the burning bush commanding him to return to Egypt to free the Israelites, he asked which god he should say was sending him to them. At that point a very mysterious name was revealed to Moses, together with a key identifying feature: “tell them: The LORD, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, has appeared to me.”
Jews and Christians do not worship a “god of the sun” as such. We worship a God of our fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Jesus Christ was a descendent of those fathers according to the flesh, and all Christians are their descendants according to the Spirit. This is one reason why we read and even pray over the Old Testament: to know the God of our fathers.