Eucharistic meditation

Exodus 20:3: You shall have no other gods before Me.

In the explanation of the Second Word, God declares that He is a jealous God, but His jealousy is already implicit in the First Word. Among the gods of the ancient world, Yahweh alone is jealous. Ancient temples teemed with images of gods. Baal didn’t mind if you worshiped Molech and Ashtoreth, as long as you gave Baal his due. Not Yahweh: He demands exclusive worship.

In Scripture, jealousy is not covetousness or envy. God does not covet what He doesn’t have, because everything is His. He doesn’t destroy others because they have something He doesn’t. Covetousness and envy come from pride, and God is not proud.

Jealousy is an aspect of love.

Jealousy is God’s passionate defense of His claim to His beloved. Jealousy is love made protective.

We can only understand jealousy if we know God is Triune. Yahweh is jealous for His own holy Name (Ezekiel 39), but He is not egocentric. When Scripture speaks this way, it is telling us in a veiled Old Testament way that the Father passionately defends His Living Name, His Son, sanctified as a Holy Name by the Spirit. God is jealous for God, but that simply means that the Father loves the Son with a searing love that is stronger than death.

God is jealous too for His people, because He has set His name on us. The Father not only claims the Son, but claims and defends all that bears the Name of His Son. Jerusalem and Judah are His and He is jealous for their restoration (Zechariah 1:14; 8:2) because He defends His beloved.

This table is an expression of the Father’s love. This is a foretaste of the Bridal Feast of the last day. Sitting at this table, we are God’s Bride, whom He loves with a jealousy is fiercer than Sheol. Paul mentions this in his exhortation to the Corinthians concerning communion: We cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons, because that would provoke the Lord to jealousy (1 Corinthians 10:22).

Every week at this table, we are constituted as the Bride of Jesus, and pledge ourselves again to hear and do the First Word: “You shall have no other gods before Me.”