Sunday, March 4, 2018

Jesus is zealous for us – John 2:13-25

3rd Sunday of Lent, Year B; Holy Infant parish.


“Zeal for your house will consume me.”  The disciples remembered those words from scripture, we’re told.  Well, they remembered wrong.  The psalm they were thinking of doesn’t say that.  It says: “zeal for your house has consumed me;” not ‘will.’  Their very memory has started to be transformed by their encounter with Christ.  They let themselves be so transfixed by this encounter with zeal incarnate that their memory of scripture, a psalm they must have sung hundreds of times, gets transformed. They remember the psalm as speaking in the future tense, because they are sure that it’s in this man, this Jesus of Nazareth, that zeal is powerfully present, so the psalm becomes future in their minds, because surely when they sang it in the past they were really singing about this moment.


“Zeal for your house will consume me.”  It seems like a poetic way of saying, “I will be very zealous for your house.” ‘Consume’ is vibrant vivid word that fits perfectly for describing what zeal can do for and to us.  Bl. Basil Moreau, the founder of my religious family, the Congregation of Holy Cross, defined zeal as “that flame of burning desire which one feels to make God known, loved and served, and thus save souls.”  Zeal is a fire.  It burns.  It burned in the heart of Jesus, the fiery furnace of charity.  This fire in his heart made present the zeal of God for for the people of God: “For I the Lord, your God, am a zealous God” we could have rendered our first reading, just as well as ‘jealous.’  And he longs to set our hearts aflame with that same fire.

“Zeal for your house will consume me.”  As powerful as that is, it’s more than just a poetic way of saying, “I will be very zealous.”  Zeal will consume Jesus.  There’s a straight line from this moment to Good Friday when Jesus breathed his last, gave up his Spirit and was consumed by death.  There’s a straight line from coming into Jerusalem’s holiest place on the holiest feast and disrupting it with a strange new holiness, from that to having your body destroyed.  Because that’s what can happen to zeal in this world.  What’s cold, what’s comfortable, what’s doing too thoroughly OK to want to be led out slavery, that threatens fire, threatens dreams and zeal.  We know as Christians that the brightness of zeal cannot be overcome by the darkness. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness cannot overcome it. But that doesn’t make those cold dampeners any less of a test, a trial.  Zeal is the fire that gives us the strength to reach out and dare to dream and act to usher in a strange new holiness, confident that that’s what God is doing in our hearts.  But it’s not cheap, it’s not safe.

This week marked the three year anniversary of the death of Fr. Ted Hesburgh. For those who didn’t know him, he was, like me, a Holy Cross priest.  He’d been a University president, a member of Johnson’s civil rights commission, had done diplomatic work at the UN, but at his core, he was priest, my brother in Holy Cross, a friend of Jesus.  He was a man of zeal, living out what Bl. Basil Moreau called all his sons to.  The most famous photo of him is probably one of him arm in arm with Martin Luther King, Jr. singing. There’s now actually a statue of that in South Bend, commissioned after he died.  It was a photo that I’d always liked, I guess, that gave me some family pride, maybe, but, I wasn’t around in 1964, so there was a lot I didn’t understand about it, and was grateful to learn as we memorialized and prayed for Ted.  For instance, when King finally got through to Fr. Ted to invite him to this rally, which was in Soldier Field, it was only after he’d already been turned down by the Chicago mayor’s office and the Archdiocese of Chicago, who were both totally supportive of the cause in theory, but decided that their light (the genuine light, of not actually being on the side of racism, segregation and oppression), that their light needed a bushel basket to hide it.  That’s a faint at best zeal, that God is acting to fan; a limited holiness that God has dreams of radically renewing.


I learnt that when King invited him, Ted only had one question: “what time should I show up?”  And I was reminded why people who were in theory supportive were reluctant to be seen at a rally.  I learnt how much hate mail Ted got for linking arms with a fellow human, how many death threats he received because of it.  And it cost the university a pretty penny in alumni support, but the death threats, thank God, were never acted on.  King, of course, would not be so lucky in that regard.

Ted was willing to let zeal consume him.  That was his priesthood, expressed in that arm link as powerfully as in his daily Mass.  The zeal that Ted made present in that arm link was the zeal that Christ is, that zeal that makes God known, loved and served, and thus saves souls.  It’s the zeal that dares to sing “We shall overcome” because Christ already has.

And Christ continues to act with zeal. On that Passover day, Christ cleansed the Temple. Here in this place we celebrate our new Passover, Our Lord’s Last Supper. At this altar, we are with Christ in that Upper Room as he celebrated his last Passover, knowing he was about to become the lamb that was slain, all to lead us into freedom. Here, Christ offers His very self, body, blood, soul and divinity, again for us. He offers us zeal. Consume.

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