It seems that we have developed a tabloid mentality. That is to say, we seem to have developed an overzealous fascination for information about the private lives of public people. The real or supposed exploits of actors and actresses, politicians, entertainers, athletes or business moguls appear in lurid headlines on papers and magazines that are more interested in sensation than news. Photographers stalk the rich or famous to catch an image of an unguarded moment. Fact blended with fiction becomes the means to enhance or discredit; to glorify or defame. The popularity of this material in tabloid papers, magazines and talk shows indicates that the public seems to have an insatiable appetite for it. Probably most of the subjects of the scandal and gossip, half-truth and innuendo would far rather be left alone than to see their names and pictures, and the supposed details of their lives, paraded before the public.
The prophet Hosea, however, used the painfully lurid details of his own personal life to reach people. It was an attention grabber all right. If there had been copies on the newsstands, so to speak, one can imagine them being grabbed off by the gossip-seekers. The story told by Hosea himself is that he married Gomer, a woman with a past, to put it politely. To put it not so politely, she was a prostitute. She probably plied her trade in connection with the Caananite fertility cult of the Baal gods which used prostitutes as a form of worship. But Hosea loved Gomer and their marriage covenant provided her a new beginning - a new life - and he took her away from that past. Gomer became his wife. There were children, too, but here some other issues are raised, as to whether they were even Hosea’s offspring or not. Can you imagine the headlines over all this? But there is still more to come.
Gomer apparently got tired of the marriage and left Hosea, and returned to the life of a prostitute. Hosea urged the children to plead with their mother to return, but she did not. Eventually Hosea found Gomer in a slave market and bought her freedom - redeemed her - and declaring his love for her took her home once again to be his wife.
It is at once a shocking and a beautiful story. It is shocking in the painful revelations of domestic tragedy that it portrays. It is beautiful in that it expresses a love that redeems. One can imagine that those reading it would think Hosea had been foolish in taking Gomer as his wife in the first place, let alone buying her at the slave market and taking her as his wife a second time. Perhaps in their eyes what they saw as Hosea’s apparent foolishness and poor judgment would even disqualify him as a prophet of the Lord. Hosea was sure the match was one, if not made in heaven, at least still bound by a sacred covenant, and more than that by his love for Gomer. Surely it was after the full force of his marital troubles struck him that he began to see in it how he imagined God must feel at Israel’s failure to fulfill its part of the covenant with Yahweh.
Hosea was not a professional prophet by any means. In fact he was a farmer who liked to write poetry. The book of Hosea, as we have it, represents several of these poems which he may have written on the road, on marketing trips to Samaria and Jezreel. One often has a lot of time to think on a long trip. And Hosea had quite a lot to think about, considering the sad state of his home life, and the equally sad state of the nation. He apparently saw some striking similarities, and put his prophecy in the form of poems designed to call people back to their obligations of their covenant with Yahweh. Lest anyone doubt the power of poetry to move people, Bible historians hold that Hosea’s prophetic work was instrumental in saving Israel from absorption into the baal cults, the indigenous sexually-oriented fertility cult religion of the Caananites, which would have meant the loss of the very thing that distinguished the Israelites as a people.
The one thing that set Israel apart from all the other peoples around them was their covenant with Yahweh. That Israel would break that covenant surely must have pained Yahweh, in the same way that Gomer’s breaking of the marriage covenant pained him. Hosea saw in Yahweh a God of infinite love, who loved Israel despite its disobedience, and who would no less pursue and redeem Israel than Hosea pursued and redeemed Gomer as his wife.
A covenant, of course, is an agreement of mutual benefit whereby each party agrees to certain obligations. Covenants were the legal arrangements which made society work, and by which peaceful relationships were established between peoples and tribes, and even individuals. Deals were struck and a covenant arrived at, and there were often symbols that were to serve as reminders. Sometimes tokens were exchanged - as a wedding ring is used today - to symbolize that covenant. But in those days a cairn of rocks might be set up, or a single large stone, and even anointed as a witness, or a sacrifice might be made to formalize the sacred vows that constituted the covenant.
Israel was bound to Yahweh not just loosely and casually, but by a covenant, whereby Yahweh chose Israel to be his people, and Israel in turn chose Yahweh to be its God. Keeping the covenant with God, or failing to keep it, was the determinant of prosperity, of life or death, of blessing or curse. The scripture narrative is essentially the story of the fortunes of the people in regard to how faithful they were to that sacred covenant. So anything from drought and failure of crops, to defeat in battle and captivity by another nation, was attributed in some way to Israel’s unfaithfulness to Yahweh. Likewise Israel at its best was interpreted as due to its faithfulness and righteousness before the Lord.
When the prophet Hosea came upon the scene about 740 B.C.E., things were becoming rather chaotic. The nation’s unity and prosperity had given way to factionalism and conflict, and even civil war. The fragmented and weakened nation, then, was a sitting duck for Assyria in its westward campaigns. Hosea was much saddened by this turn of events. He was sure that it was because Israel had turned away from the holy covenant with Yahweh, and put its trust in alliances and might. Just as Gomer had abandoned him, he saw that Israel was abandoning Yahweh, so he tried to unify and save his nation, principally by calling the people back to the covenant. The dramatic means he chose to gain attention was by the revelation of his own very painful domestic tragedy.
It was that tragedy which so deeply affected his own life that became the means of insight into what he supposed were the feelings of Yahweh toward the faithless nation of Israel. Gomer abandoned him, but he continued to love her through the pain of feeling deserted. Thus he posited the idea that Yahweh’s love for Israel would cause him to seek and redeem and restore Israel.
Therefore, I will now allure her,
and bring her into the wilderness,
and speak tenderly to her.
From there I will give her vineyards,
and make the Valley of Achor a door of hope.
Then she shall respond as in the days of her youth,
as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt.
- Hosea 2:14-15
The promise is that the remembrance of the sins of the past, symbolized by the reference to the Valley of Achor, will not be an eternal reminder of the sins of the past, but a door of hope. Achor, you remember, was the place where, upon entering the Promised Land, Israel sinned and acted contrary to the word of the Lord (Joshua 7:20-26). Hosea hopes, then, that Israel will realize its faithlessness and return to Yahweh, and be faithful to the covenant. Again he uses the image of marriage.
On that day, says the Lord, you will call me, "My husband," and no longer you will call me, "My Baal," for I will remove the names of the Baals from her mouth, and they shall be mentioned by name no more. I will make for you a covenant on that day with the wild animals, the birds of the air, and the creeping things of the ground; and I will abolish the bow, the sword, and war from the land; and I will make you lie down in safety. And I will take you for my wife forever; I will take you for my wife in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love, and in mercy. I will take you for my wife in faithfulness; and you shall know the Lord.
- Hosea 2:16-20
Here, a poetic prophet 750 years before the time of Jesus, reveals his own painful marital woes before the people in order to also reveal a God of infinite love. The foolishness that some might have perceived in Hosea, in continuing to love his wayward wife, illustrates the wonderful love of God, whose love is not shortened by human disobedience. That love still extended to Israel in its abrogation of the covenant relationship, and even when it abandoned Yahweh, whoring after the pagan Baal gods. And the love of Yahweh would even redeem Israel from the lowest degradation, to be restored again in the family, and the covenant renewed. That is the very theme that Jesus portrayed in the parable about a prodigal son. The socalled foolishness of God is love that knows no limits.
Jesus portrayed in his life this loving and redeeming God. Mark’s gospel, in the reading for today, tells first of Jesus teaching by the sea, and then as he passed by the place where Levi the son of Alphaeus was sitting and collecting taxes, Jesus said to him, "Follow me," and Levi rose and followed him.
That Jesus would call such a man to follow him was scandalous in itself, for Levi was a renegade Jew. That is, he was one who deliberately chose to separate himself from the Jewish community and become a collaborator with the Roman occupation forces, serving as a tax collector. It was a way of getting rich, and we are familiar with the fact that principles and ideals are often compromised for personal gain. In the understanding of the Judaism of the time he had knowingly separated himself from the precepts of the covenant, and add to that what they saw as disloyalty to Israel, and for all of that there was no forgiveness. He was hated and shunned by the Jews. But Jesus came along and called him away from that, saying, "Follow me!" And in that call, and Levi’s response, is the very incarnation of forgiveness and redemption. The clear implication to Levi was, "Your sins are forgiven." For Levi, at that very moment, there was a new covenant in force. The very thing which he did not deserve, he received as a pure, unconditional, and unqualified gift of God.
The gospel, though, is not just a "once-upon-a-time" story. It is contemporary. It is the context in which we can behold what is available now, to each one of us. What happened to Levi can happen to anyone. The story of Levi is an invitation to follow Jesus and receive the new life that is offered to us.
Jesus apparently went home with Levi, and there in his house he ate with Levi and some of his friends - other tax collectors. Shunned by the Jewish community, the tax collectors had only themselves with whom to associate. Of course Jesus was roundly criticized by the righteous Pharisees and scribes for eating with tax collectors and sinners. In fact, these persons were not just distasteful for what they did, but were considered culticly unclean. In other words, they were unfit for God’s community. For Jesus to sit at table with such people, in the Pharisees’ view, was to defile himself.
The human tendency is to divide people from one another. Though not stated in the terms my high school English teacher would approve, we divide people into categories of them and us. Like the Pharisees of Jesus’ time, who divided people between the righteous and the sinners, clean and unclean, Jew and Gentile, we do the same thing. One of the sad commentaries on our own day is that we continue to build more walls of separation than bridges of acceptance. Like those Pharisees even good church people can come to believe they have a corner on truth and goodness, and that others, by reason of belief, or race, or sexual orientation, or a host of other reasons, are somehow less worthy and less acceptable in the community of faith. In every age, even good people are blinded by their own self-righteousness and deafened by their own self-protectiveness.
Jesus on the other hand, in sitting at a meal with those people, erased those commonly held lines of distinction. The new covenant operates on an entirely new assumption, that there is no such thing as ritual uncleanness, but that we all have in our own way been unfaithful. "The kingdom of God is at hand," said Jesus, and forgiveness is the sign that the new order - the new covenant - is already present and operating, and so new patterns of behavior are mandatory.
The ancient prophet Hosea declared that God’s love would redeem the people, from the forces of rebellion and disobedience. Jesus declared that all people - even the hated tax collectors and sinners, and any other category you want to name - are offered forgiveness and entry into the kingdom. Judgment and grace operate together in this new order. Judgment declares that all have fallen short of the glory of God, and grace offers the gift of undeserved forgiveness. Jesus ate with Levi and his friends because God’s grace included all of them. When people come to church to receive the sacrament of the Lord’s supper that same idea is at work. We do not receive Christ because we deserve to do so, but because we do not deserve to, and not because we are righteous, but because we recognize our need to be forgiven.
Jesus’ enigmatic statement that, "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I came not to call the righteous, but sinners," should raise questions in our minds, as undoubtedly it did in the minds of the Pharisees. Just who are those righteous ones, and who are the sinners? At first glance the distinction may seem clear, but upon closer examination we must confess there is no clear distinction at all. Jesus shares the meal with sinners because there is nobody else. Nobody is excluded from his presence except those who choose to exclude themselves.
The idea of the out-reaching, forgiving and redeeming love that was planted as a seed by Hosea found its full growth and flower in Jesus. Hosea risked the ridicule and embarrassment of public scrutiny of his personal life to reveal the aspect of love that was to become the foundation of the new covenant. Jesus risked the criticism of the Pharisees, and eventually gave up his life in showing the extent to which the love of God reaches, even to people who despise and reject him. That we are invited to accept that love and live as people of the new covenant is cause for joy. Hosea promised that the Valley of Achor would become a door of hope for a whole people. Jesus opens the door of the kingdom wide and bids everyone enter. Yes, even those avoided and shunned and condemned by pharisaic self-righteousness. Wherever and whoever we are, Jesus offers new life not just patched up with the religious legalisms and practices of the past, but completely made new, and as effervescent as new wine.