Hosea: Boundless Love
What time do you call this? What on earth are you wearing?
Where have you been? Who have you been with?
We can perhaps imagine this scene being played out between parents and children or perhaps between marriage partners. Sometimes the words are the result of acute worry and concern, turning to angry relief, but often they may be uncomfortably justified by hurtful actions.
I am conscious that there will be some here this morning who have had or who are experiencing difficult or broken relationships and I don’t wish to cause any additional, unnecessary pain for you, but relationships are at the heart of the message of the prophet Hosea and he uses the example of a dysfunctional family to model how God feels about his relationship with his chosen people and how he plans to deal with that.
God is unhappy about his people’s infidelity, waywardness and self-destruction, unhappy to the point of furious anger, in fact, and God sends Hosea to speak to the people about this. But before he does, and in order that Hosea may convey his message with appropriate emotion, God wishes to ensure that Hosea has a real, personal appreciation of exactly how God feels in this situation, and he does this by telling Hosea to put himself through a similar experience by marrying a promiscuous woman. Not what you might have expected perhaps, but God often does surprising things to call his people to attention.
Hosea is from the northern kingdom of Israel and his ministry spanned about 20-25 years during the 8th century BC; a significant period in the history of Israel and Judah. The Assyrian Empire, to the north-east, which had threatened the small kingdoms of this region into submission, had recently lost a lot of its influence, and both Israel and Judah had regained a certain degree of independence, national identity and prosperity.
In addition, Israel had had a succession of weak kings, who had cultivated unhealthy alliances with unsuitable partner nations, had abrogated much of their responsibility for the cultural, ethical and spiritual direction of the nation and had allowed the people to do much as they pleased. This included syncretism, that is, a mingling of some aspects of different faiths, including the fertility rites of Baal worship, the god of the Canaanites. This was about to change, however. A new Assyrian king was beginning to reassert the empire’s supremacy, and God was planning to use this as a means of bringing his people back into line and restoring them to a right relationship with him; if they didn’t heed his prophet’s warnings, Israel would be facing a tragic end at the hands of the Assyrians, and this overshadowed much of Hosea’s message.
So, as a result of God’s command, Hosea married Gomer and they had three children. The children’s names were to be symbolic. The first child, a boy, was to be called Jezreel, which means ‘God sows’ (as in, scatters seed), which sounds on the face of it to be a hopeful name, but it has other connotations too. The one-time capital city of Jezreel had been the site of an atrocity in which the first king of the present dynasty had taken power by massacring the whole of the previous dynasty. And the Valley of Jezreel was where some famous, decisive battles had been fought, and its name was synonymous with the prospect of humiliating defeat, in much the same way as Waterloo has been in our own time.
The second child, a girl, was to be named Lo-ruhamah, which means ‘no compassion’, or ‘not pitied’, and the third, another boy, named Lo-ammi, meaning ‘not my people’. Names in this culture were hugely important and were taken to indicate the very character or destiny of a person or place, often carrying a sign of God’s blessing. The names of these children would therefore have been quite disturbing to people within their community, announcing a complete breakdown of the relationship between God and his people in this place, and the prospect of a pitiless massacre of the royal household and defeat for the nation.
But, as Hosea’s prophecy continues, God promises to his people that, beyond the immediate, dark future, there is the hope of blessings to come. Because of God’s deep, abiding love for his people, the first prophecy will eventually be reversed, the people will be pardoned and will have a new start, the divided kingdom will be reunited and will prosper and there will be peace and security. No longer will they be without pity or compassion; no longer will they be excluded by God but they will be called ‘Children of the living God’. This may be a long way ahead, but it will come.
Hosea’s prophecy oscillates between despair and hope. God’s offer of a brighter tomorrow is always there but his people seem reluctant to accept it and remain wedded to their dismal fate. God encourages, pleads, rages and threatens; nobody hopes more than he that his people will heed his prophet’s words before he has to carry through with his threats. But this is looking increasingly unlikely.
The story began with Hosea experiencing the infidelity of his new wife and this imagery continues with God as the wronged husband seeking revenge on Israel as the faithless wife who betrays him with her various lovers. Hosea pleads with Gomer to stop her infidelity, otherwise her punishment is to be stripped naked and humiliated in front of her lovers and to see her children also being punished for her sins. Desperate situations require desperate measures and, although God wouldn’t normally condone such violence, he means to shock his people out of their self-serving, immoral complacency so that they might turn back to him, the one who has always loved them and has always provided for them.
What God has in mind is a sort of second honeymoon, he wants to rekindle in his people the sorts of tender feelings that they had for him in the early days of their relationship when he brought them out of Egypt and there was a deep mutual love between them. Their passion may have cooled during the years they have spent together but God’s hasn’t, and he wants them to work through their differences and to build a renewed relationship.
So, as we heard in this morning’s reading from Hosea, God commands the prophet to work heroically through the pain of Gomer’s repeated infidelity and to persist in loving her and in maintaining that relationship, well beyond the understandable limits of most people in such a situation, with no compromise and no giving up. The main thrust of the story is that God loves his people despite their infidelity and their inappropriate religious practices, described in the text as a love of raisin cakes (which were used in Baal worship).
Just how far Gomer has fallen is clear from the fact that Hosea has to buy her return to him; either he has to pay off her debts to her lovers, or he has to buy her freedom from slavery. She is to remain with Hosea and to abstain from sexual liaisons with anyone. This foreshadows the fate that awaits the Israelites, who will spend a lengthy period of enforced deprivation from their independence, their beloved monarchy and their sacred places and rites of worship, which had all contributed towards their downfall. God doesn’t want anything at all to distract his people, not only status, wealth and power but also the little luxuries, delicacies, habits and material things which lure us away from him. Afterwards, God envisages the Israelites seeking a penitent, heartfelt and humble return to him and to his goodness and grace; thus renewing the marriage which had seemed beyond repair.
These first three chapters of the Book of Hosea give us the broad-brush substance of the prophet’s message. The remainder of the book elaborates on this, bringing in further social and political themes, including complaints of more disastrous alliances with surrounding nations, especially with Egypt and Assyria, putting trust in unreliable friendships rather than in God, and complaints about empty, meaningless religious rituals, paying lip-service to God whilst the people’s hearts and minds lie elsewhere.
There is more detail about the sins of the people, swearing, lying, murder, stealing, idolatry, adultery and sexual immorality, to name but a few, and about the intimate, loving relationship God yearns to have with his people, which is at the root of his patience and persistence in the face of the people’s habitual sinfulness and rejection of his love.
So much has gone wrong with Israel that the blame cannot be placed with its leaders alone. Hosea stresses that every individual has to accept responsibility for his or her own words and actions; they can’t hide behind their leaders or argue that they are only doing what everybody else is doing. Faith is about growing and maintaining a personal relationship with God and about making a personal stand for what they honestly believe is right in God’s eyes. Having said this, Hosea does reserve special condemnation for the leaders, especially the priests and the prophets, who are expected to have a better knowledge of God and his ways than the people, and who are expected to pass on that knowledge. If the people are going astray, it may be partly the result of their wilful disobedience, but it may also be through a lack of proper instruction and guidance.
And knowledge of God, says Hosea, is one of the foundational elements of the behaviour God asks of his people, along with faithfulness and steadfast love. In this context, knowledge of God is not merely an intellectual gathering of facts about God but a much deeper, intimate understanding of God’s mind, a sharing of his concerns for the whole of his creation, without which his people will struggle to do his will. And this understanding can only be reached by coming and remaining close to God; repeatedly studying his word, having frequent prayerful conversation with him and sharing in regular, collective, heartfelt worship and Godly instruction. And the occasional ‘thank you’ would be nice too.
Despite Hosea’s prophecy, ‘If you sow the wind you’ll reap the whirlwind’, the people of Israel continued to go their own way, convinced, as so many people are when life feels good and things appear to be going well, that they are the architects of their own success, can manage their own affairs and have no need of God’s love, providence, generosity and grace. Tragically, their world was shortly to be turned upside-down with crushing defeat by the Assyrian army and exile.
But in all this mess of their own making, God still cares for them; he can’t give them up. ‘I will bring my people back to me, I will love them with all my heart. I will be like the rain that makes the trees grow and the flowers bloom. If their prayers are for me, my answers will be for them; if they seek me, I will shelter them and bless them.’
Hosea ends by reminding his listeners that the promise of return, healing and salvation is conditional; those who ignore his message will stumble and fall. We are not 8th century BC Israelites, but Hosea’s words remain relevant to us today. As he says, if we are wise, we shall understand these things and take them to heart.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen