This is a reflection on the Mass readings of the day.
“For I, the LORD, your God, am a jealous God, inflicting punishment for their fathers’ wickedness on the children of those who hate me, down to the third and fourth generation.”
This quote from the first reading sounds so–well, so Old Testament. This notion of a jealous God has been superseded in the New Testament, has it not?
Or maybe it has merely been superseded by late-twentieth-century superficiality and wishful thinking.
The Gospel passage from today does not contradict the theme of the first reading, but reinforces it, just as Jesus has not come to abolish the Law, but fulfill it (cf. Mt. 5:17). In this passage, Jesus is the very Incarnation of the jealous God depicted in the first reading.
There is a great lesson to be learned here if we ask ourselves: What is it that God, that Jesus, is jealous of? What stirs up His wrath? What leads Him to fashion a whip and start using it?
He is jealous of the welfare and happiness of His people. In His zeal for His Father’s house, He is zealous for the role that house plays in uniting the people of God to His Father, and He will not suffer that house to be turned into a stumbling block for that divine-human nexus.
We can forget that the human race has not been created for fulfillment in technology, nature, human friendships alone, with God as the stern overseer with His arms folded above, making sure we all play by the rules. The entire story arc of the Bible, which climaxes in Jesus’ mission, is about insertion of the human person into the dynamic of the Trinity–self-giving of divine persons, acceptance of that gift, union. It is from insertion into this dynamic, and this alone, that the human person is destined to find fulfillment.
Such was His jealousy for the exalted destiny of the human person, that Jesus became human to bear suffering and death.
Today’s gospel tells us that Jesus “did not need anyone to testify about human nature.
He himself understood it well.” God, who created our nature, established its destiny. And He is jealous of the fulfillment of that destiny.
Ideas for conversation with the Lord: Thank Jesus for your friendship with Him. Thank Him for the price He paid to establish it. And ask Him to help you to fulfill your role, and all the powerful potential He has given you upon gifting you with freedom, to help others reach that friendship as well.
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