Scripture: Hosea 6:4-6; John 6:24-35

“For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.”

-- Hosea 6:6

This statement is precious to a Protestant, because it contrasts inner piety with outward observance, and we have historically thought ourselves to be the champions of inwardness. God wants us to love Him and know Him intimately rather that to burn animals in His honor. It is now clear that historically this was an exaggeration for polemical purposes, that Catholic and Orthodox Christians value inwardness as much as we, and so we are now free to appropriate the prophet without the distraction of polemics.

We have before us a piece of poetry that according to Hebrew convention is in two parallel lines, each stating the same thing in slightly different words. So steadfast love and knowledge of God are two facets of the same relationship. We are to love God faithfully and that means to know God intimately. Faithful love entails intimate knowledge, and intimate knowledge of God compels faithful love. Let us look at the facets of this text and allow them to reflect back to us the nature of our God.

The Hebrew word translated here as “steadfast love” (HESED), is the word that describes the relationship between God and Israel within the covenant, and thus every individual relationship with our covenant God. One of the chief marks of God’s covenant love is its steadfastness, its faithfulness. God never ceases to love us, never turns from loving to hating us, never abandons us, is absolutely reliable. This is what the Bible means when it says that God loves us and forgives us  “for His own name’s sake.” He loves and forgives us not because of what we offer but because of His own faithfulness to His own love. In our little world that is called integrity, the quality of consistent wholeness that makes a person utterly trustworthy. It is also called character. Such is the steadfastness of God’s covenant love, and He demands from us a comparable steadfastness in return. Such is the reciprocity built into the very logic of covenant, and one might add here in passing that slaves do not expect reciprocity with their masters, nor hirelings with their bosses, so covenant reciprocity with God is already a long way from relationships of terror and bargaining with the divine. We are lovers not slaves.

The other part of the meaning of hesed is of course the mystery that we name by the word love. Hesed is steadfast love. The KJV translates it especially in the Psalms as “lovingkindness,” (but not in our text, for a reason I do not understand). I call love a mystery deliberately because it is surely the most elusive of the major preoccupations of our race. We use the word constantly as if it named the panacea for our ills, but we hardly know it when we see it, and it has so many counterfeits we often misidentify it. Let us spend the rest of our time trying to understand what the prophet Hosea means by this word love, because he is the major conduit by which it came into the faith of the Bible. If Amos is the prophet of universal morality, Hosea is the prophet of steadfast love. If the God of Amos wants justice to prevail in the courts and righteous order in society, - no oppression, no swindling, no lying, - the God of Hosea wants our relationship with Him to be like the faithful love of a good marriage, the intimate knowledge of God to fill our hearts and minds, and our relationship with one another to be reconciliation and trust.

Where shall we look for an understanding of this love? Where did Hosea look? Why, in his own dysfunctional family, where else? Hosea married a woman who turned out to be a whore. Whether she was just a common whore for casual hire or a functionary in the fertility cults many Israelites patronized is not clear. Whether she was a whore whom God commanded Hosea to marry so as to act out the pain of God in his own life, or whether she was a good woman at the start and became a working girl in the course of marriage is not clear. It does not matter because in either case Hosea’s marital misery became for him and all of Israel a message from God. It is typical for these prophets to hear the word of God in the circumstances of ordinary life – a basket of figs, a branch of an almond tree becoming transfigured – and so it is that Hosea hears God’s word in his failed marriage and dysfunctional family. Out of the agony of his love for his wife he hears God telling him to read his experience as a message and to show that message to Israel, and so to make it absolutely clear, he names their children symbolically. He calls his son Jezreel, after the venue of a major recent political slaughter, a valley also known as Armageddon, because he expects doom for Israel (which indeed came barely 40 years later). He calls his daughters “Not loved” and “Not mine,” because he does not know if he is their father. He makes his family a symbol of Israel in its sin, and his own agonized love a pale reflection of the divine pain and pathos; and pity the poor kids!

He pleads with his wife to return to him, and receives her back time and again, only to have her cheat on him again and again, and return to her job at the idol shrine or in the streets of Samaria.  To his children he says, “Denounce your mother, denounce her/ for she is not my wife/ nor am I her husband. / Let her rid her face of her whoring, / and her breasts of her adultery, / or else I will strip her naked,/ expose her as the day she was born;/ I will make a wilderness of her /, turn her into an arid land, / and leave her to die of thirst (2:1-3 JB).” We see how the person becomes the land, and how the anger of wounded love drives the vision of destruction. But then, “ Ephraim how could I part with you? / Israel how could I give you up? …my heart recoils from it, / My whole being trembles at the thought. / I will not give rein to my fierce anger, / for I am God, not man:/ I am the Holy One in your midst / and have no wish to destroy (11:8-9 JB).”   How human this is! And how divine!  From vengeful anger to reconciling love!

Hosea is the first biblical source to introduce us to the notion that our relationship with God is one of love and that sin is a breach of love and in the case of a perfect love is perfectly horrible. This absolutely definitive revelation came to him from the agony of his own defiled love for his wife. All the hurt and horror of such rejection spoke to him of God, and it told him that God feels the same thing, only infinitely, and bears the same burden of rejection only perfectly. God turns from vengeance not because He is not deeply wounded but because He is not man but God. We would take vengeance; everyday the newspapers tell of women killed by rejected lovers. God bears the prefect agony of defiled love, and now that we know the whole story we know that he bore not just the wound of adultery but also the horror of expulsion and murder on the Cross of Christ.

I have said that the idea that our relationship with God is one of love came first through Hosea, and you might wonder, “Does not Deuteronomy tell us to love God with all our heart, etc, and Leviticus tell us to love our neighbor as ourselves?” You should, therefore, know that Hosea predates Deuteronomy by about 150 years, and Leviticus by about 250 years; because the latter two documents precede Hosea in the order of the biblical canon does not mean that they precede him in time. In the middle of the 8th century BC Hosea taught us that God relates to us as an ever faithful lover who will never stop loving us no matter how much agony of betrayal we heap on him. To know that might shame some of us into restoring our relationship with God, ceasing our sin, seeking reconciliation, spending time with our beloved. In any case to know that is to honor the prophet Hosea who made this massive discovery that has determined our faith ever since.

Let us end by reflecting on the fact that he made his discovery by interrogating his own pain, and that his pain was caused by depraved sex. This gives us a clue to the meaning of love, the mystery that is so elusive. Over against depraved sex, - promiscuity and adultery, - our text places faithful married love and its parallel, intimate knowledge. Clearly sex can only be a metaphor when used of God, - one cannot know God in the “biblical sense” - nevertheless, human sexual relations are the place to start a reflection on the meaning of the love that is a metaphor of the relationship God wants with us. Good sex expresses and cements good relationship and good human relationship reveals the possible nature of our relationship with God.

Good sex reveals and redeems and reconciles, corrupt sex kills more surely than a dagger in the heart. For this reason it is so important that the churches get it right. I remind you that right now the Episcopal Church in General Assembly is debating the recognition of a practicing homosexual as bishop, and the blessing of same sex unions. I remind you that our own UCC has for some years had no qualms in such matters. I mention this not because I want to press you to take a position but because I want to impress on you that according to the Bible our sexuality is integral to our relationship with God and that that is the context in which the discussion should take place. What is a loving relationship with God? It is clearly not what Hosea experienced with his promiscuous wife.

If the church is in crisis right now one of the powerful causes of that crisis is the confusion in our teaching about right sexual practice. In a culture drenched with pornography, in churches more or less infected with sordid sexuality, how shall we find the faithful love that reconciles and renews our relationship with God? I believe if Hosea were among us today he would be crying out that we have been unfaithful to our divine lover and gone whoring after the trends and trinkets of the times.     

Well I could have been less direct, less clear about the link between sexuality and revelation in Hosea’s prophecy, but that would have been to mock his suffering and to waste the high price he paid for this precious insight, that God loves us like a lover, and we hurt him cruelly when we are unfaithful, and unfaithfulness has strong marital associations. So why not just spend time with your lover? It’s called prayer, and worship, and meditation.