The True God Is Loving, Compassionate--And Jealous

Saturday of the Fifth Week in Course 2024

Today we hear about the apostasy of the first king of the North of Israel, Jeroboam. Apostasy is the turning aside from true religion to the worship of a different god. The true God, as we know it from Christian revelation, is immaterial, eternal, immeasurable or immense, all-powerful, and far above all creation in His essence. Unlike the two golden calf-gods of Jeroboam, the true God is not a thing at all. His reality is entirely different from realities we can sense.

Jeroboam’s action was actually political, not religious. His kingdom was set up as a result of a revolution. Actually, the kingdom Rehoboam inherited from his father, Solomon, and his grandfather, David, had been cobbled together under Saul. The critical component, the city of Jerusalem, wasn’t even conquered until David did so over a half-century earlier. That was where David brought the Ark of the Covenant; that was where Solomon built his costly Temple. Before Jerusalem was Israelite, the people of Israel worshiped pretty much wherever they wanted. David centered true worship in his capitol city. In a sense, Jeroboam’s rebellion was an attempt to bring the political and religious situation in Israel back to where it was under Saul and Samuel. But the golden calves at Dan and Bethel were so far different from the true God of Abraham that the people treated them just like Baal and Astarte and all the other pagan gods. That was bound to end in disaster, and after a couple of centuries, it did. God will not be mocked. That’s what it means when we say God is a “jealous” God. He won’t let us change religion to suit our own passions and political desires. He loves us too much to permit that.

Back in the true Temple, in true worship, the Levite musicians who composed and sang psalms to the true God remembered much better than the politicians what the true history of Israel was, and they immortalized that history in lines like “They made a calf in Horeb and worshiped a molten image. They exchanged the glory of God for the image of an ox that eats grass. They forgot God, their Savior, who had done great things in Egypt, wondrous works in the land of Ham, and terrible things by the Red Sea.” So what was happening in the rebel kingdom to the north was simply a repeat of the sin recalled from the desert wanderings. There are no new sins, just the same old boring ones repeated by a new generation.

Jesus, Son of God, had compassion on the huge crowd that had come to him for instruction. He knew they were hungry; probably Jesus was as well. The verb translated “heart is moved with pity” is the same one used right at the beginning of Mark’s Gospel when the leper came to Him in faith and pleaded, “Lord, if you will, you can make me clean.” It means Jesus felt a kind of quiver in His gut, in what we Texans would call His “innards.” Hopefully, each of us has felt that feeling when we’ve encountered people in great need of help. We feel bad for them, but it’s more like we feel with them the same feeling of hunger or desperation. I mean, three days without food. They had exhausted anything they brought with them.

So Jesus takes seven loaves and a few small fish, fed four thousand people, and still had as many baskets of food left over for the poor as the apostles had loaves in the beginning. There are so many levels of meaning here it would take forever to look at all of them. But consider this. In the desert, Moses had compassion on his hungry flock of Egyptian escapees, and God fed them with manna. In the desert, Jesus had compassion on over four thousand people (after all, the apostles were bound to be hungry, too) and fed them with bread and fish in abundance. In our time which is so like exile in the desert, badly led by politicians and praying for relief, God gives us the Eucharist, a symbol of divine compassion and the sign of Christ’s eternal presence. In the age to come, for which we yearn, we can imagine the great eternal banquet in the kingdom of God. We call it the Lamb’s high feast, a celebration beyond any party we have ever attended. Admission is free by faith, and the joy of that feast will never end.