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Today we are going to explore the fruit of “faithfulness” in the book of Hosea with Jesus. We are going to discover that faithfulness is the ever-present, unrelenting, covenant-mercy of God to love and heal us no matter what we have done. So what does it mean to be faithful? Three things about faithfulness that I would like you to learn today: 1) to read the Bible faithfully – read it lovingly with Jesus; 2) to understand God faithfully – remember “covenant”; 3) to live for God faithfully – receive and practice mercy, no matter what.
1) To read the Bible faithfully – read it lovingly with Jesus.
When Jesus is confronted by the religious leaders for hanging out with tax collectors and sinners (Matt. 9:13), he responds by saying: “Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy not sacrifice,” quoting from Hosea 6:6. This verse might seem like an odd justification for hanging out with sinful and broken people, but it opens up a wider field of vision on what Jesus imagines he’s doing. He’s telling us that his decision to sit down with spiritually broken people is a symbolic acting-out of God’s loving-faithfulness regardless if someone is a good person or not, or whether someone is obedient to Scripture or not. The word “mercy” from Hosea in Hebrew and Greek [hesed and eleos] carries the connotation not of “pity,” but rather of “steadfast love.” So Jesus tells the authorities that to read the Bible faithfully and understand God rightly requires them to participate in a willingness to faithfully love people no matter how unfaithful they are. When Jesus says, “Go and learn what this means,” he’s telling them to go back and study Hosea’s prophetic words and actions in order to better understand why their position of morality over mercy is wrong. How do we know that’s what Jesus means? Well – you have to know Hosea.
The book of Hosea tells the story of a prophet who lived in the 8th century in the kingdom of Israel. Tragically, he experiences a broken marriage to a woman named Gomer, who commits adultery, after having three children together. After things fall apart between them, God tells Hosea that, despite her unfaithfulness, he is to find her, pay off her debts, and faithfully love her once again. God then says that these circumstances—the broken marriage and Hosea’s terrifying commitment —are prophetic symbols that tell the story of who God is for Israel – a faithful husband no matter what . That’s a quick summary – you too, should listen to Jesus and “go and learn what this means.” But always remember that to read the Bible faithfully is to bring Jesus along, let Jesus interpret, let Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection determine the meaning. Later in Matthew 12, Jesus will once again quote Hosea 6:6 to the Bible teachers who charge him with not doing what Scripture says. He responds by arguing that they are wrong because they refuse to interpret the Bible with a “no-matter-what mercy” that will not let faithless people go. What does this look like?
In Hosea 11, the prophet will describe God’s faithfulness as a parent who refuses to give up his own rebellious child. God says, “How can I give you up, Ephraim [another name for Israel]? . . . My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender . . . for I am God and no mortal. The Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath” (Hosea 11:8-9). This poetry becomes the source for a story that Jesus will tell about the faithfulness of a Father-God who is always compassionate – even when we are faithless children (Luke 15). So we will only understand God and the Bible correctly if we read it with Jesus and learn that mercy is always its meaning, even above morality. If your reading of Scripture constantly finds you breaking fellowship with people who disagree or don’t measure up, Jesus teaches, you’re not reading it with “mercy over sacrifice.” So to read the Bible faithfully - we must read it lovingly with Jesus.
2) To understand God faithfully – remember “covenant.”
In Hosea 2:18, in response to Israel’s unfaithfulness, we hear God faithfully declare: “I will make a covenant for them . . .”. Understanding “covenant” is critical if we’re going to figure out what God is doing in the world. Too often, I hear many Christians confuse “covenant” with “contract.” A covenant represents promises made between two parties that are not conditioned on the other’s behavior. We understand this with the relationship of marriage. When I married my wife, I did not promise to love and care for “IF” she in turn did the same for me. No, my promises were unconditional – I didn’t use any “ifs.” I didn’t say, “I promise to be loving and faithful “only if” you do so in return. I promise to live with you and cherish you “only if” you don’t get sick or we become poor.” If you use an “if”, you are not talking about a covenant but a contract and a contract makes promises conditional upon something. The message of Jesus, reading Hosea, is that the gospel is God’s unconditional promise to love us at all times, even at our very worst. This shouldn’t make us glib about sin. It’s deadly and dangerous. But the danger of sin is not that it cancels God’s love but that it does terrible harm to us resulting in degradation, misery, and death. The judgment of God isn’t so much the active action of God to punish people who go their own way but a warning that when “you have planted wickedness,” Hosea declares, “you [will] reap evil (Hosea 10:13).
There is interesting word play in our passage. In ch. 2 verse 16 God speaks using the affectionate word for husband, like hubby, in opposition to the word Baal, which means “master” in Hebrew as well as the name of the Canaanite god that the Israelites were also worshiping and offering child sacrifices. In English, one wonders if translating the term as “abuser” or “Abusive-god” doesn’t more accurately capture the intended point that God is an affectionate partner and not an abusive lover like the Canaanite god. Look at the covenant promises made by God in our passage, Hosea 2:16-20: to restore the earth and our relationship to it, to abolish warfare, to create safety, to bring righteousness and justice, steadfast love and compassion – in faithfulness forever. None of these are conditional. And then it says, that God’s faithfulness will allow us to yada or know the Lord.
That word isn’t so much an intellectual knowing but a deeply intimate knowing, like knowing what someone is thinking. In Hebrew it was also the word used for sexual intimacy and our marriage-like covenant to join with God and what God wants. Friends, what if these faithful commitments were ours? So let’s recap: to read the Bible faithfully – read it lovingly with Jesus and to understand God faithfully – remember covenant NOT contract.
3) To live for God faithfully – receive and practice mercy, no-matter-what.
This would be an easier sermon if not for this last point. It would be far better if we could speak about God’s love and faithfulness and didn’t also have to speak about our own. And we’ve seen that “faithfulness” is a commitment to love regardless of another’s response and regardless of circumstance. It is a love that refuses anything less than complete and utter solidarity. It is a love that I’d rather not talk about. It’s a love that I feel so incapable of offering. It is the love of Etty Hillesum.
Etty Hillesum was a Jewish woman living in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam who encountered the God of Hosea, the God of Jesus, and chose a faithfulness of love and solidarity over her own self-interests or security. Like many Jews with some means she had ample opportunities to escape and hide but instead, because of a profound sense of faithfulness to her own people, she refused. She wrote to a friend, “And if I should not survive, how I die will show me who I really am.” Her friends were so bereft that they tried but failed to kidnap her. One of the would-be kidnappers wrote about it:
She wormed herself free and stood at a distance of about five feet from me. She looked at me very strangely and said, ‘You don’t understand me.’ I replied: “No, I don’t understand what on earth you’re up to. Why don’t you stay here, you fool!’ Then she said: ‘I want to share the destiny of my people.’ When she said that, I knew there was no hope. She would never come to us.”
Before she was murdered in a concentration camp, in one sentence Etty revealed what the fruit of faithfulness looks like in the face of unimaginable horror: “There must be someone,” she wrote, “to live through it all and bear witness to the fact that God lived, even in these times.”
Friends, that is someone is who yada-d God intimately. That is someone who lived faithfully. And yet, if that is too much for you and I’m going to be honest, it’s too much for me, never forget that our faith is not in our ability to be faithful but God’s promise in Jesus to always be, whether we are faithful or not. And that brings us back to Hosea and God’s project of faith fulfilled only by Jesus himself:
“Come, let us return to the Lord.
He has torn us to pieces
but he will heal us;
he has injured us
but he will bind up our wounds.
2 After two days he will revive us;
on the third day he will restore us,
that we may live in his presence.
3 Let us acknowledge the Lord;
let us press on to acknowledge him.
As surely as the sun rises,
he will appear;
he will come to us like the winter rains,
like the spring rains that water the earth.” (Hosea 6:1-3)
May we bear witness to the fact that God still lives, that God is still faithful. And when we can’t, because we always won’t, God is – God is steadfast, no matter what. Amen.
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