9781644135945

The Light of the World
assure them of His love. With the power of His miracles He delivered the people out of Egypt,
led them into the Promised Land, and revealed Himself in various ways. Time and again He
chastised the people in order to bring them back to the right path. But the majority of the poor
people of Israel did not understand the chastisement, the jealous love of their God. Forgetting
Him, they turned their thoughts to vanities, to the idols of the heathens, and to worldly goods
and interests. They came to the temple year after year to offer sacrifices, but they honored God
with their lips only; their hearts were far from Him (Mt 15:8). “If thou also hadst known . . . the
things that are to thy peace.” The jealous love of God becomes, after so many fruitless efforts,
the love of justice and punishment, leaving no stone upon a stone in Jerusalem. God’s love does
not spare His people. He permits the enemy to cast a trench about Jerusalem and surround it.
Thus His avenging love takes up the scourge, purging away everything that does not belong in
the sanctuary, and then He Himself takes possession of the temple.
“I am jealous of you with the jealousy of God” (2 Cor 11:2). Just as the Lord was jealous of
Jerusalem, as He demonstrated in today’s Gospel, so He is also jealous of the soul which He has
lovingly drawn to Himself and made the object of His love. He is jealous of us and desires that
our heart and mind pay homage to Him. He wants our entire being. He wants our thoughts,
our judgments, and wills, that these faculties of our soul may be lifted above flesh and blood,
beyond the merely natural way of thinking and judging; He desires us to think the thoughts of
God and Christ, and to see all things in the light of eternity. He desires that we value whatever He
values, love what He loves, renounce and despise what He renounces and despises. He desires the
homage of our hearts; He wishes to become the center of our plans, desires, and inclinations, of
whatever we do or omit. He wants us to look at Him first of all, and at Him alone, rendering love
and homage to Him at all times. Thus He jealously asks us to die to our own desires and wishes,
knowing only His good pleasure and looking for nothing in heaven or on earth but God and His
holy will. He wishes to be “the God of [our] heart, and the God that is [our] portion forever” (Ps
72:26). His jealousy knows no bounds. Only after we have given Him all that He asks, the sum
of our own desires and wishes, will He be satisfied. He knows no rest until we are entirely His.
Since we ourselves, however, are unwilling to sacrifice our self-love, He undertakes to destroy
it. Showing no mercy or consideration, He breaks all the ties that link our hearts and our
spirits to anything that is not Himself. He sends us interior trials, spiritual dryness, humiliating
experiences, temptations of a kind we may never have known before; there will be exterior
trials, sickness, suffering, humiliations, and calumny. Sometimes He does not even spare us
that bitterest of all spiritual trials, the feeling of being left in darkness, of being abandoned and
repudiated by God. By these means God works with His jealous love within our souls. Thus
the soul becomes purified and freed from all the fetters of egoism. Now it is ready to accept
whatever God may send, sorrow as well as joy, poverty no less than abundance, death as well as
life. The soul knows only Him, who now enters into the sanctuary of its innermost being. “He
was teaching daily in the temple.” The soul is His property, His abode. Now when He talks to
it, it listens like Mary did at the feet of the Master. It experiences the inexpressible sweetness of
the jealous love of the Lord: “I am jealous of you with the jealousy of God.”
“Behold God is my helper, and the Lord is the protector of my soul.” He loves me with a jealous
love. “If thou also hadst known, and that in this day,” in these times when love is tried, when
Christ, seeking entrance, leaves no stone upon a stone, but calls upon suffering, hardships,
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