Every now and then a scripture text slaps you in the face. In the Acts of the Apostles Paul presents his apologia before the Sanhedrin with this remark: I was zealous for God, just as all of you are today. What Paul came to realize and what he hoped to get his co-religionists to realize, is that being zealous for God does no preserve one from error. One also must be in touch with what the will of God actually requires. Those who led the crusades or ran the Inquistion were zealous for God. The right-wing evangelicals in the US are zealous for God. But they presume to know what God wanted — a restored holy land, doctrinal purity, a national standard. What St. Paul found in his conversion experience is that what God really wants is for us to recognize the face of Christ in every single person we meet and to treat them as the presence of the Lord among us.
