Yesterday, we noted a great moment in the history of the Church: the story of Noah. From it and from Augustine, we noted the difference between the City of God and the City of Man, and how these two are continually opposed.
In the same way Noah had been rejected by men for holding fast to the faith and preserving the City of God, King David prayed in the Psalms:
“Let not those who hope in you be put to shame through me,
O Lord God of hosts;
let not those who seek you be brought to dishonor through me,
O God of Israel.
For it is for your sake that I have borne reproach,
that dishonor has covered my face.
I have become a stranger to my brothers,
an alien to my mother’s sons.
For zeal for your house has consumed me,
and the reproaches of those who reproach you have fallen on me.
When I wept and humbled my soul with fasting,
it became my reproach.
When I made sackcloth my clothing,
I became a byword to them.
I am the talk of those who sit in the gate,
and the drunkards make songs about me.” – Ps. 69:6-12
David was so filled with fervour and faith in his fighting for the City of God that the City of Man mocked him. Even his family and those close to him began to see him as a stranger. A more colloquial way of putting it (as Haddon Robinson did) is that people were so put off by David’s faith that they even thought: ‘If this is what a person becomes who truly follows God, why on earth would I do it?’ and the local drunks made songs mocking him for being a zealot. Rather than people flocking to David and asking what the secret to his faith was, they hated him all the more for his devotion.
It would ultimately be our Lord Jesus who these words spoke most truly about. In the Gospel according to St. John, Jesus attacks the moneychangers in the Temple in righteous anger and it is written: “His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.”” (Jn. 2:17) For these men had conflated the City of Man and the City of God in their actions (unless Rowan Williams’ exegesis of this text is to be trusted). In the Latin West (the Catholic Church before the Reformation) this episode was called the “cleansing” or the “purging” of the Temple, of which there are some great religious images. One I find greatly emotive is that done by the Russian, Boris Olshansky (which evokes a Marxian reading):