Human beings are often victims of their own contradictions and paradoxes. We want to believe in God, but we have our own reasons and/or feelings for not doing so. There are basketsful of reasons, perhaps excuses for doing or not doing just about anything. We call them by various terms, those that we see or feel, and we don’t give a much attention even to recognition of some matters that need early resolution if life is to give us what we desire of it. We miss proper motivations, opportunities, values, and the like because of our delays, uncertainties, laziness, ignorance, underdeveloped character, relationships, virtues, and that story too can be expanded in the story of human fault lines. Once we set a stutter step backward and forward in our lives, we pick up other influences until the factors expand into major matters, both in our personal lives and spilling over into society, perhaps to deadly ends. In limited space, we will take one factor as illustration of many human distortions damaging to effective life, personal and/or social.
Jealousy (right and wrong) is our factor for discussion. Jealousy is, in its pure meaning, a part of love. It relates to exclusiveness in that which is loved accepts no competition for that love. Even God has it. Words used in tandem with jealousy are zeal, envy, provoke and others with good and bad meanings. God is jealous – in the good sense of the word – as used in the address of the Apostle Paul to the Corinthians. It is helpful for us to remember that God works in language to express life affirmatively, but using the flip side to accent the affirmation. The negative statement, Thou shalt not bear false witness, is the flip side to the affirmation, Always tell the truth. Jealousy addresses the intimacy of experience that ought to be private to the individual. That there is a good side to jealousy is announced in the assertion that God is capable of jealousy, and that for holiness. This means there is something between self and another self that is not to be invaded by anyone or anything else. This is to say that each person is treated in relationship to God in that personal way relating to both God and the individual. There is a privacy related to some factor of love that must not be bridged to others or the consequence is problematic. The point is so large that the law of Moses permitted some tests for jealousy in the seeking for the intimacy of God, illustrated in that love that is supposed to hold with husband and wife. In this context the mother and father are examples of exclusiveness, of modesty, of privacy, of loyalty – of love unity. In much of history the point was so taken even in secular affairs that the husband was not expected to testify about his wife, or the wife about her husband in legal proceedings. There was the flip side to the coin in that a mate might lie to protect the other mate, or to gain some revenge. There is love that deserves exclusivity with jealousy if broken.
The exclusivity concept related to issues of dominating love related to perfect love (sometimes sung at marriage ceremonies) has been largely lost or discarded in modern life. Some media offer striking illustrations of the point relating to sex, voyeurism, gossip, and private affairs of human beings paraded for general public interpretations, innuendos, shame, doubt, and distortions. Much of it splashes the mud of some lives on to the general public so to produce a soiled context with reduced understanding of the right to self-experience to be managed by the individual and God, perhaps the individual alone if a love faith is not in the context. There is a cruelty in it, in that the voyeurs of the public heap additional suffering on those who are already in some distress on the breakdown of something that may have begun as the most beautiful course of events expected for life. The young may become jealous for something of a sordid experience to discover if its end is scintillating. Knowing elders shake their heads, jealous for the meaning of personal (private) life to be ultimately accounted for both in self and before God. Defenses in such instances deter us from turning in penitence to God for repair and redirection to how to live as one person in a society of multiple persons. Many stories have been published about the contradictions we make for ourselves in violating either the private or public context of a life. A part of parenting ought to relate to teaching the child that there are two contexts in life to which we are to be true – to self and to others. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020