THE GREEN EYED GOD

In the beginning the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back. Let’s think about a jealous god.

Paul writes that love is not jealous. God is love, so love is not jealous.

So what do we do with the jealous god of Israel who is the founder of our divine theological feast?

I have a theory that is not very original. It is related to the Deuteronomic theory of history that I read about in so-called Old Testament (Jewish Bible) classes. The idea of a jealous god may be one of the seeds that grew that theory.

Just a review: the Deuteronomic theory of history states that God blesses the nation when it obeys his Torah. Bad things happen to the nation, bad things like Babylonians, when the nation disobeys Torah.

Indeed, worshiping other gods is a serious violation of Torah. That, more than violence, rape, and genocide, really makes the god of Israel’s green eyes blaze.

We have modern Biblical studies to thank for our knowledge of trends in Israel’s theology. God was imagined to be jealous so that priests could blame the failures and sufferings of the nation on the disobedience of the Hebrew people, and eventually, also, the disobedience of Jewish people after the Babylonian Exile. That explains how a theology as anthropomorphic as that could hold the devotion of countless people for centuries.

We are always looking for answers to the question of why bad things happen to us. For the longest time in the ancient past, writers expressed their fear of vengeful gods. Earlier than Israel’s jealous sky god, the earliest Mesopotamian legends imagined gods who punished men and women for their wickedness.

That idea is still prevalent in the minds of our fundamentalist brothers and sisters. When we hear a preacher praying that his god will use the Ebola virus to surgically murder gay people from the world, we are hearing an echo of an ancient theology that sounds strange to our modern ears.

It most certainly sounds incongruous and disingenuous to hearts attuned to our God of love.

I’m reminded of the Bubonic Plague when priests told the common rabble that they were being punished for their sin. That was all fine and good for the priests, until they began dying as well. They shut up after that.

Our God of love does not burn with envy for our devotion, nor does God rage with jealousy because we worship other gods.

There is no place or direction or path that we may go where God is not. Whatever we love, wherever love is, God is there.

Please don’t say, as if it were a valid objection, “I love violence. Is God there?”

Violence has nothing to do with love and everything to do with passion. Jealously springs from passion. It is a form of madness that has been known to destroy lives and nations.

Love that is love as our God is love is not passion, though we may feel so passionately for such love that we would live or die to possess that love most divine.

In the movie Hawaii based on Michener’s novel, Reverend Abner Hale despairs because he loves his wife more than God. He sounds like a broken man when he confesses his love to Jerusha…as if he were confessing a sin.

The theology, not the man, was broken. I love my wife more than I love God, but my love for her is our God of love shared between us. Whenever we love, God loves within us.

Where love is, there is God. It is impossible for God to be jealous of God.

Where love is, jealousy is not, for there our God of love is.

Blessings…