2024/03/03 SCRIPTURE REFLECTION

Third Sunday of Lent

- Patrick Sinozich, Assistant Director of Music

Zeal.

It’s a word that’s fun to say, but it’s not one I use every day.

‘Zeal’ is related to ‘intensity’ and ‘passion’. One can have zeal for art or music. One can be a zealous football fan (although I don’t understand why). Zeal’s desirability is directly related to what one has zeal for. I have zeal for artfully arranging little black and white dots along a band of 5 straight lines. It doesn’t necessarily look like much until the dots enter my eyes, rush to my fingers and land on a keyboard, filling the air around me with sparkles of sound and noble tones. My zeal has a useful outlet. My zeal creates.

But there’s also something about zeal that scares me a bit. Or a lot. Like when the valve on our radiator broke and clouds of hot, pressurized steam shot out, threatening to burn anyone nearby. That was one zealous radiator.

And zeal can get messy, for example, zeal for change, any kind of change. If I’m passionate about change so much that I want to wipe out the old to bring in the new, my zeal becomes destructive and before you know it I’m in a rowdy crowd breaking windows in Washington and screaming “hang Mike Pence!”

Turn up the heat under a little zeal and pretty soon you have a LOT of zeal.

From the Greek zêlos, the word zeal means ‘to boil’, to boil with heat or excitement, or to become very red. To burn with zeal. Metaphorically the word indicates excitement of mind, ardor, fervor of spirit. Zeal is embracing, pursuing, or defending anything. Zeal has power.

So what’s in your wallet? What do you have zeal for?

Come on, even the most placid and even-tempered people are zealous underneath it all. You have only to offend their loves and you will see their zeal erupt. Take Jesus, for example.

In Jerusalem for Passover, Jesus goes to the temple, where visitors and locals are buying and selling animals for sacrifice and changing their foreign currency for the local coin. A temple sacrifice and a donation were requirements for (the over 20 and male) Jews of the day, so this was all pretty much business as usual.

(The sellers and money-changers hadn’t always been within the Temple courts, but over the years had moved closer and closer. Location. Location. Location.)

Jesus’ love — his zeal — for his Father’s house was assaulted by all this ‘business as usual’ (having to do, mind you, with things that were needed for worship) taking place in the actual place of worship. The money-changers and the sacrificial animal sellers were providing a service, but their zeal for maximizing their profits by being so close to the crowd, and the crowd’s zeal for the ease of an Amazon Prime-like transaction took the focus off the worship of God and put it on the worship of revenue and convenience.

So Jesus disrupts the Temple’s activity. Jesus opens his zeal-valve and steamily starts driving out the animals and overturning the money tables, which I suspect most of those present found extremely upsetting. But I don’t think this episode is merely a rant against economic activity besmirching sacred space (which of course it is). I think it’s also a challenge to the expectations and requirements placed on worshippers (like sacrifices and donations) and the loss of true focus that results.

These days it takes such large amounts of bandwidth and busyness just to get to a place and a space and a mind-set of worship (watch this video, signup for this lecture, do, do, and do some more) when I believe (naively?) that God’s invitation is so much simpler, that we are much closer to the sacred than we might believe, and that access is always available, even without me bringing a goat to slaughter or a shekel to drop in the basket.

(Feeling like mixing my scriptures today, so here’s another:
It’s what I love about God saying from the Burning Bush “I Am”. He doesn’t say “I Do” or “I Sell” or “I Sacrifice” or “I Work Hard”. He simply says “I Am”. And so I would like to “Be” like God and exist in the Divine Presence/Present.)

Jesus ended the Temple requirements. Jesus cleared out all the commotion and took away the ‘to do’ list of conditions and demands. Jesus IS the Temple and his door is open. Shall we enter?