15 February 2020
Saturday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time
In today’s reading from 1 Kings 12-13, we see that, for political reasons, rather than allowing his people to continue to go to Jerusalem to worship in the temple, King Jeroboam wishes to create alternative places of worship in his own kingdom. He does so by creating new places of worship in Bethel and Dan, and in what might be considered today to be a democratic flourish, he consecrates as priest anyone who wishes to be a priest, since the hereditary priests from the tribe of Levi remain faithful to their service at the temple of Jerusalem. Having done all this, he tells his own people that the people can go to Bethel and Dan instead of Jerusalem to worship their God: “Here is your God, O Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt.” (1 Kings 12:28).
The same thing can and does happen to us today. People will create places of worship and will claim to worship our God and will invite us to do the same, but we should always ask ourselves, even if they use the name of Jesus or of the most holy Trinity, whether the God that they call by these holy names is in fact the same God that we worship, the God revealed in Jesus Christ come in the flesh. After all, Jeroboam creates idols and calls them by the name of the God of Israel. It is not just the name that matters, but the reality that stands behind the name. As Jesus helps us understand elsewhere (https://www.magisspirituality.org/ignatian_reflection/17-03-06/), “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven” (Mt 7:21).