The Jealousy of God and the Eucharist

Jealousy is not the same as envy. Envy desires what another possesses, while jealousy seeks to guard what one has so that no one else may possess it. It’s an important distinction for understanding the Bible.

God calls himself jealous towards his people Israel, wanting to keep them for himself so that they do not follow after the customs of surrounding nations and their strange gods. In Exodus 34, after charging Israel to tear down altars and pillars, God says, “for you shall worship no other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God” (Exodus 34:14).

God made an exclusive covenant with his people, taking them to himself as a husband does a wife, warning them not to “make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, and when they play the harlot after their gods and sacrifice to their gods and one invites you, you eat of his sacrifice, and you take of their daughters for your sons, and their daughters play the harlot after their gods and make your sons play the harlot after their gods” (Exodus 34:15-16).

This shows us that fidelity to God as both Father and our ultimate spouse extends to chastity, for what we worship will draw our hearts after it, creating a communion that unites our lives to it as our ultimate goal. Fidelity to God leads to fruitfulness and life, and the adultery of sin leads to barrenness and death.

The jealousy of God, which seeks to guard us as his own possession, reaches another level of intensity when Jesus bestows his own body upon us to keep and treasure. God does not simply demand faithfulness from us as a remote judge who simply waits for us to turn away from him to punish us. Rather, he seeks us out and offers his life to us in order to create a fruitful communion. Because Jesus says, “take eat, this is my body given for you,” we become one flesh with him, creating an exclusive bond akin to marriage. We see this reality described in Ephesians 5:

Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. Even so husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no man ever hates his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body (Ephesians 5:25-30).

As Paul draws parallels between Christ’s love for the Church and Christian marriage, he teaches us that God has prepared each one of us to be his bride, cleansing and nourishing us with his own life, so that we can be one with him. If we are members of his Body, then our lives are not our own. We belong to him, but also, he belongs to us, for he has bestowed all that he has upon us in marital fashion: his body, blood, soul, and divinity, breathing his own Spirit into us and giving us his own relation to the Father.

In 1 Corinthians 6, Paul teaches us what to do with our body, which belongs to the Lord because we are espoused to him.

The body is not meant for immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. … Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I therefore take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never! Do you not know that he who joins himself to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it is written, “The two shall become one.” But he who is united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. Shun immorality. Every other sin which a man commits is outside the body; but the immoral man sins against his own body. Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God? You are not your own; you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body. (1 Corinthians 6:13, 15-20).

Think about this passage in light of the Eucharist! Jesus has made us one body with him, but when we sin, falling into a kind of adultery against our true spouse, we seek a different communion. Our body, because it’s joined to the Lord, should be offered to him at every moment to give him the glory we owe him.

The prostitution Paul speaks of should not be confined to that one particular sin. Pornography, in particular, in a similar fashion, creates a false communion, one that could never be fruitful spiritually or even bodily. It is a sin directly contrary to the union of the Eucharist, because becoming one flesh with the Lord is an exclusive bond, one that the Lord guards jealously. He wants to keep us from wounding our union with him and also to protect the dignity of the other, for whom he is also jealous.

How could we sin against our union with him and still come to the altar expecting intimacy with Christ? Paul’s warning applies just as much to us today if we extend his logic to a new kind of prostitution that plagues our society.

The sacrament of Matrimony, on the other hand, strengthens rather than takes away from our communion with God. As we saw in Ephesians 5, God has drawn marriage into his plan of salvation and enabled it to participate in his own fruitful and covenantal love of his people. Any other sexual act apart from Holy Matrimony wounds our communion with God, but, properly embraced, marital love contributes toward our sanctification.

This is why Ven. Fulton Sheen used the phrase “three to get married” because becoming one flesh in Christian marriage is compatible with and complementary to being one flesh with Christ.

As we approach the Eucharist, we should remember that God is jealous of our lives. Just as he related to the Israelites, he wants us to turn away from the way of the nations and their gods. Even if we do not worship idols, we can still become bound by modern idols of luxury, distraction, and new forms of impurity. His jealousy should help us to realize that we are “loved like a pearl of great price, and … are the property of God who also claims … exclusive use” (Father Marie-Dominique Molinié, O.P., Courage to be Afraid, 57).

This is the love, an intense and jealous love, that God offers us in the Eucharist, which we are called to reciprocate.

Read original article