God Is Really Jealous?

Saturday of the 23rd Week in Course

Often when Catholics encounter this passage from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian church, we focus our attention exclusively on the testimony that the cup and the bread of consecration are participations in the blood and body of Christ. And that is true. Taking communion is not an automatic blessing to us if we approach the Lord’s supper with serious sin in our hearts. St. Paul tells us it’s more of a curse, a dissonance between our reality and the Lord’s reality. But we must not ignore the last line of Paul’s exhortation: “Shall we provoke the Lord to jealousy? Are we stronger than he?” The word “jealousy” automatically refers us to the words of Exodus when God is forbidding the worship of false gods, the gods of pagan Canaan. But we must remember that God doesn’t need our worship, or anything else from us. We are the needy ones. The Lord forbids bowing down and offering our worship to any god but Him because doing such things is bad for us. It harms us in every possible way. Worshiping the true God makes us better, happier. So if God is jealous, it’s for our own good, not His. As the psalm says, we owe Him everything, and the sooner we realize it, the sooner will our behavior turn around and we’ll begin to experience joy.

That’s a true foundation for a happy, fulfilling life. We’ve all probably seen videos of great floods that have torn nearby houses from their foundations and swept them downstream, eventually turning them into piles of debris. By coming to church on Sunday and saying “Lord, Lord” and taking communion, telling God He is the number one goal in life, and then going out on Monday and putting money or career or pleasure or even family ahead of God, we are weakening the foundation of our spiritual castle just as surely as we would by building on a sand bank. At the first sign of trouble, we’ll cut and run, or be caught up in some spiritual or financial scandal. Instead of drawing our friends closer to Christ and His Church, we’ll make ourselves and our religious commitments into bywords. People say, “well, see what all his vaunted piety has gotten him; I’m glad I didn’t follow his example.” That would be the opposite of our evangelical call to restore all things in Christ.