Homily for Friday, 1 August 2014– Memorial of St. Alphonsus Liguori

Friday of the 17th Week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Jeremiah 26:1-9; Psalm 69:5, 8-10, 14; Matthew 13:54-58

What is zeal? This is a word we do not hear often, and yet in our Responsorial Psalm today we hear: “Zeal for your house consumes me.”

How many of us recognize this and other parts of our Psalm today, especially from references to this Psalm in the New Testament. “Zeal for your house consumes me.” This is the verse that Jesus’ disciples remember in John’s Gospel after Jesus overturns the money changers’ tables. Other verses from this Psalm are used in Jesus’ Passion: “Those outnumber the hairs of my head who hate me without cause… The insults of those who blaspheme you fall upon me… O God, in your great kindness, answer me.”

But this verse about “zeal for [God’s] house” stands out for me today. What does it mean to be zealous for God’s house. The prophet Jeremiah risks his life because of his zeal for God’s house. The central message of his prophecy is that, unless the people of Israel of his time return to faithfulness to God; to covenant relationship with God that involves attention to both social justice and right worship, the temple, the very center of Israel’s worship, would be destroyed and the people exiled. Of course, the people did not listen to Jeremiah, the temple was destroyed, and Israel and Judah were invaded and the people exiled.

Jesus, too, has zeal for God’s house, and again the people he teaches “in their synagogue” do not listen to him. They dismiss him as merely “the carpenter’s son.” So what good is zeal for God’s house; what good is prophecy, speaking for God, if it brings only scorn and possibly death?

Even today, cannot zeal have a bad connotation: Someone is “zealous” in the sense of being prudish or moralistic. This is not the kind of zeal shown by either Jesus or Jeremiah, and yet we are called to the same zeal for God’s house as Jesus or Jeremiah showed; zeal that risks being unpopular from time to time; standing for something that is right even when it is counter-cultural.

Zeal does not need to mean preaching so-called “fire and brimstone.” The saint we celebrate today, St. Alphonsus Liguori, founder of the Redemptorist order, is an example of one who was zealous for God’s house in that he preached not a punishing God but a God who is merciful; the God of “great love” that the author of our Psalm today knew. This went against the culture of St. Alphonsus’ day; a culture that understood God as harsh and condemning of sinners; that understood receiving communion at Mass as being only for those totally without sin. St. Alphonsus taught that our response to sin; God’s response to our sin is one of mercy and of forgiveness (while of course not condoning sin). St. Alphonsus is the patron saint of both confessors and moral theologians for this reason. He is also known as one of the greatest teachers or Doctors of the Church; as “the Zealous Doctor.”

What is zeal, and how are we called to be zealous? St. Alphonsus Liguori, like Jeremiah and our Lord Jesus before him, shows us what it means to be zealous for God’s house; a zealous prophet of God’s mercy.