Hosea and Jesus
(6/9/02) (WOL-Mat.9:10-13)
University Congregational Church—Wichita, Kansas
Rev. Gary Cox
Throughout history there have been people who insist they
have figured out how to please God through religious rituals. Even in the time before written history it
seems clear that our earliest ancestors developed burial rituals intended to
secure one’s passage into the afterlife.
And as religion became more and more defined, and more and more cultic,
those rituals were hammered into doctrines.
In our own religious tradition—the
Judeo-Christian tradition—rituals developed around the tabernacle and then the
Temple. The ancient nomadic Hebrews
actually carried a giant tent with them, which was known as the tabernacle, and
which was supposed to have been crafted following the precise directions of
Yahweh. (Yahweh, of course, is the
Hebrew name for God.) This tabernacle
served as the sight of religious observance and ritual sacrifice. Once the Hebrews settled in the Promised
Land, King Solomon built a Temple, which served as a permanent site for
religious rituals.
About a thousand years after the
building of the Temple there lived a man named Jesus of Nazareth, who while a
devout Jew, called into question the obsession of the Jewish people with ritual
and sacrifice. He maintained that
Yahweh—our Creator—is a God of love, and not a God of rules and regulations.
This seems to be what the religious
leaders hated most about him—his refusal to rigidly obey the rules. If somebody was hurting on the Sabbath, he
had no problem violating the rules and working on that day which was set aside
as a day of rest. And what upset people
more than anything was the fact he ate with people who were unclean. God was a holy, clean, and perfect God, and
people were meant to be clean and pure.
A set of purity laws developed over the centuries, and to violate those
purity laws was to place yourself outside the reach of God, who insisted on
perfection and purity at all times.
Jesus insisted that we had God all
wrong. God’s primary nature is not that
of cleanliness, or righteousness, or even perfection. God encompasses all those things, but God’s primary nature is
that of love—of compassion. It is God’s
perfect love that makes God so clean, and righteous, and perfect. This was not a popular message, especially
for those in the religious establishment who made their living offering
sacrifices to Yahweh in order to cleanse people of their impurities.
People in the modern church tend to
forget what a big issue this whole purity thing was at the time of Jesus. For example, remember the story of the Good
Samaritan? A man is lying at the side
of the road, bloody and beaten, and possibly dead. A priest comes by, and seeing the body, he walks as far away from
it as possible. Another priest—a Levite
comes upon the scene and also stays as far away from the body as he possibly
can. What we have to understand is that
for the people of first century Israel who heard Jesus tell this story, those
priests did exactly what they were supposed to do. For a person to touch a dead body, or to come in contact with
someone else’s blood, was to become unclean in the eyes of God. People hearing this story would have thought
those priests did what they were expected—even required—to do.
And look how Jesus turns the story
upside down. A Samaritan comes along
and actually helps the bloody stranger.
And Jesus tells us that this Samaritan was righteous in the eyes of
God. What we fail to realize in the
modern world is that people would have heard this story and said, “No way! No way is the Samaritan righteous and the
priests unrighteous! The priests
followed the rules! And the
Samaritan—why, everybody knows about the Samaritans. They’re the ones whose ancestors married the pagans. They’re half-breeds and worse. Why, Samaritans are born
unclean. Don’t tell us that pagan
Samaritan who actually touched a bloody body is pure and the priests who
maintained their perfect cleanliness are impure! No way!”
Jesus was really stepping on some people’s
toes when he told stories like that.
And then, to make matters worse, he more than just told stories. He was constantly making himself unclean. He was often seen in the company of eunuchs
and prostitutes, and he even ate with those people! And if there’s one thing everybody knows for sure, it’s that you
must go through a ritual washing before meals, and eat only in the presence of
the holy, of the clean, of the pure.
In the Bible passage you heard read
from the lectern this morning, why were the religious authorities upset with
Jesus? Because he was eating dinner
with sinners—why, even a tax collector was there among his entourage! And how does Jesus respond to their
accusations of religious impurity? How
does he respond to those righteous men who indignantly accuse him of violating
God’s rules? He say, go and learn
what this means, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.
Well, that’s the type of talk that could get a guy killed. And it did. But it wasn’t Jesus alone who was killed for such talk. In fact, throughout our religious history,
those who have claimed God is more concerned with love than with ritual—with
mercy than with sacrifice—have often met cruel fates. We don’t know for sure what happened to many of Israel’s ancient
prophets, but it is clear that many of them were killed for saying unpopular
things. In a later passage in Matthew,
Jesus says to the religious leaders, Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees,
hypocrites! For you build the tombs of
the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous, and you say, “If we
had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them
in shedding the blood of the prophets.
When Jesus tells the Pharisees to,
quote, go and learn what this means—I desire mercy, not sacrifice, he is
quoting one of the ancient Hebrew prophets.
Jesus was devoutly Jewish. The
person he became developed as a result of his Jewish faith. And when he read the scriptures, he was
shaped by prophets like Micah and Hosea, who 800 years before Jesus, were
saying things that sounded a lot like Jesus of Nazareth.
The passage to which Jesus refers in
today’s Bible text is Hosea 6:6. The
most common method of being made clean before God was to have the priest offer
a burnt offering on the altar on your behalf.
Hosea, claiming to be a vessel of God’s voice, says to the religious
leaders of 8th century BC Israel, I desire steadfast love and not
sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.
That sounds a lot like Jesus. Likewise, my very favorite passage in the
Old Testament, written in the same era as Hosea, also sounds a lot like
Jesus. In the face of all that ritual,
and all that obsession with holiness and purity, Micah 6:8 reads, What does
the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk
humbly with your God? These were
the people who shaped Jesus, and it is no wonder that the religious
establishment greeted both Jesus and the prophets with the same lack of
enthusiasm.
I thought it would be interesting to take a little
time this morning and talk about one of those ancient prophets—Hosea. I don’t spend a great deal of time on the
Old Testament, but Hosea is worth a closer look. The Book of Hosea develops this strange and troubling metaphor
regarding the relationship between God and Israel. Hosea compares God with a betrayed husband. The nation of Israel becomes the promiscuous
wife. He takes this metaphor to the
extreme. God is the husband; the wife’s
infidelity is Israel’s sin; the husband’s beating of the wife is God’s
punishment of Israel; the wife’s repentance and return to her husband is
Israel’s repentance of its idolatry; and the husband’s forgiving love and
renewal of the marriage covenant is God’s forgiveness of Israel’s sin and God’s
renewal of the covenant between God and the chosen people.
Sometimes people tell me they think the Bible is
boring. Well, they just aren’t opening
to the right pages! If you think the
daytime soaps are steamy, you should check out the Book of Hosea. Because Hosea doesn’t just write a story
about that metaphor between God and Israel and a husband with a philandering
wife. Hosea intentionally marries a
woman of ill repute to bring the story to life!
The story begins, When the Lord first spoke through
Hosea, the Lord said to Hosea, “Go, take for yourself a wife of whoredom, for
the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord.” So he went and took Gomer daughter of
Diblaim, and she conceived and bore a son.
I suppose many of us would like to hear a word
directly from God, but I doubt if we would welcome the message God delivered to
Hosea. And consider his new wife’s
name—Gomer. You know you’re in for a
bad time when you wife is named after a goofy Marine. Gomer lives up to her bad reputation, and starts delivering
children, none of which are in any sort of biological relationship to her poor
husband Hosea.
The Lord tells Hosea what each child is to be named,
and the first child is named Jezreel (jez’ ray-uhl). Jezreel was the place where Jezebel and the house of Ahab met
their bloody deaths, and the name of this son symbolized the fact that God
would punish Israel in a bloody and violent way. (Not a bad prediction since shortly after this writing Assyria would
conquer Israel, and ten of the twelve tribes—the ten lost tribes of
Israel—would be lost to history.)
Next Gomer conceives a daughter, and Hosea is told to
name her Lo-ruhamah (Lo-rue’-umah), which means “God sows.” God tells Hosea to name her this because, “I
will no longer show love to the house of Israel.”
And finally Gomer gives birth to
another son, and Hosea is told to name this child Lo-ammi, which means,
basically, “not mine.” That’s a great
name for a kid, isn’t it? Not mine! Of course, the symbolism lies in the fact
that God no longer considers the people of Israel to be his chosen people.
Now, if Hosea lived today, we would
probably be locking him up in a nice, safe padded room. Anytime a guy names his children, in effect,
“Bloody Death, Unloved, and Not Mine,” it’s probably time to be seeking out
some professional help. But the message
comes through the story loud and clear.
The people had turned away from God.
What had they done? They were
worshipping idols. They were worshipping
false gods. And one of those false gods
was the ritualistic ways they had developed to supposedly stay in God’s good
graces.
Religion had become a game. “You stole something?” asks the priest. “Bring me your finest lamb for sacrifice,
and you will regain your purity. You
broke three commandments in a single week?
That will be two doves, a lamb and your finest calf.” I’m making up the rules here, but the point is
there were rules.
I suppose it would be easy for us to
look at some of the rituals and traditions attacked by the ancient prophets and
Jesus, and congratulate ourselves on having evolved past such petty ideas. I mean, the notion that we can make
ourselves right with God by going through a prescribed ritual seems a little
insulting to God. What type of God is
that, anyway? What type of God looks
upon a person in 8th century BC Israel and thinks, “I want to give
that person my love, but I can’t. I
will not be able to love and forgive that person unless a priest slaughters and
burns a cow on a stone altar on his behalf.
Then the scent of the burnt meat will be pleasing to me, and I will be
able to forgive him.”
What type of God looks down at a man
lying bloody and beaten at the side of the road and thinks, “Don’t go near that
man! Don’t help him, because if you get
any blood on you I will be unable to hold you in my loving presence unless and
until, in the company of a priest, you undergo a series of precise ritualistic
cleansings.”
It seems clear that Hosea didn’t
believe in such a God, and Micah didn’t believe in such a God, and Jesus spent
his life telling us that if we were thinking about God in that way, we had God
all wrong.
But as Christians, let’s not get big
heads over this. The human desire to
put God in a little box where we can maintain complete control over the
relationship between ourselves and the eternal is very strong. In fact, does any religion have a more
detailed set of rules than Christianity?
Think about it. Our faith is
supposed to be based on the teachings of a person who told us that God’s love
is unfathomable; a person whose life was dedicated to the radical inclusion in
God’s kingdom of even those the world has rejected; a person who told us to
never draw lines in the sand between the in and the out, between the good and
the bad, between the clean and the unclean; the person whose entire philosophy
of life can be boiled down to four simple words: Love everybody; judge
nobody.
Isn’t it almost incomprehensible
that in the name of that person we have built one of the most exclusive
religions the world has ever known?!
Practically every version of the Christian faith has some element of
“we’re in and they’re out.” Even at
very liberal seminaries, like the one I attended, the majority opinion is this:
We are radically inclusive.
Everybody is a part of God’s kingdom, as long as they’ve been baptized.
WHAT?! How is that so different from the rituals that purified people
three thousand years ago? Once again,
we have put God in our little box. We
have envisioned a God who is powerless to act unless a person with religious
authority performs a ritual on our behalf!
So do we still believe in that God who looks upon a person and says, “I
would love to have that person as a part of my eternal kingdom. She works all day for the poor, and gives
selflessly of her material wealth. She
does justice, loves kindness, and walks humbly through life with me in her
heart. But alas, she is doomed forever,
unless some ordained minister pours some water over her head?!”
Baptism is a wonderful and
meaningful sacrament, but let’s not pretend we control God with our
rituals. Likewise, after discussing
religion with one of my fundamentalist friends—something I don’t do anymore—and
trying hard to find some common ground, she finally said, “I see your point and
maybe you’re right. Christianity is a
big tent, and as long as people believe Jesus was born of a virgin, shed blood
and died for our sins, and will come again for the final judgment, the other
details don’t really matter. It is okay
for them to call themselves Christians.”
I stopped arguing with her, but as far as I’m concerned she drew one
huge line in the sand between who’s in and who’s out when she established those
three rules for being a Christian.
Okay, I’m a Congregationalist. I don’t like rules and regulations. I personally enjoy ritual, but hope we
always keep it in perspective.
Christian rituals, from baptism to Communion, are ways we embrace the
mystery of life, of Christ’s presence among us, and celebrate God’s love in our
lives. They are not strings we pull to
move God into certain positions.
Well, here we are in the 21st
century. If Hosea and Micah could see
us now, they would probably say, “Wow.
The more things change the more they stay the same.” But let us vow to keep their prophetic
voices alive. Because now, like then,
most religious people want to turn faith into an exclusive club. And that’s just not the way it is. It has never been popular to say, “If you
think you’re in, you’re out; and if people think you’re out, you’re in.” It’s kind of a crazy world sometimes, but that’s
the way the world is...at least, according to Hosea, and Micah…and Jesus.