Biblical
Words
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God’s love may temper even
God’s justice, but the new life excludes the idolatry of greed.
The second reading
from the prophet Hosea is one of the most remarkable passages in
scripture. It interprets God in terms of
human emotions carried to their most extreme.
Most of Hosea
4-14 (quite separate from chapters 1-3)
are words of denunciation and predicted destruction for the people and places
of the northern kingdom. But after that
barrage of judgment has gone on some time (through chapter 10), our passage
gives it a climax, and then a violent reversal.
A comment on
Hosea’s language and text. The book
of Hosea is only partly legible. The
historical Hosea spoke his poetry in a dialect of the northern kingdom, though
his words have been preserved in Judean dialects. The text also is one of the oldest in the
Israelite scriptures, being recited and re-copied many times before becoming
standardized. These uncertainties affect
the translations, and this is a particularly good place to compare other
translations with the NRSV ,
such as the New Jerusalem Bible, the New Jewish Publication Society, and the
Revised English Bible versions. These
others are translations of the same Hebrew text, but are independent of the
English tradition continued by the NRSV . Some rather different renderings, given by
the ancient Greek translators, can be seen in the translation in The
Orthodox Study Bible (Nelson, 2008) or A New Translation of the Septuagint, ed. Albert Pietersma and Benjamin G. Wright (Oxford, 2007).
The human emotions
by which God is interpreted are especially those of a father for his
children, or for his one special son.
Favorite sons have been loved since birth.
·
When Israel
was a child, I loved him…
·
It was I who taught Ephraim to
walk, I took them in my arms;…
·
I led them with cords of human kindness,
with bands of love; …
(Verses 1-4, NRSV.)
But throughout
this love the sons were ungrateful and disobedient.
- The more I called them, the more they went from me…
- … they did not know [did not acknowledge] that I healed them…
- I seemed to them as one who imposed a yoke on their jaws,
The punishment for
such continued disloyalty is a reversal of the salvation. If Israel
was brought out of Egypt
to be given good things, they will be sent back into slavery, not only in Egypt
but under the new great power, Assyria (verses 5-6,
especially in the NRSV ).
So far this is the
expected word of God’s judgment through a prophet.
Now however we get
a personal outburst by God.
(Fortunately, the text and language are relatively clear here.)
How can I give you
up, Ephraim?
How can I hand you over, O Israel? …
My heart recoils
within me;
my compassion grows warm and tender.
I will not execute
my fierce anger;
I will not again destroy Ephraim; …”
(verses 8-9a, NRSV )
And now the
encompassing declaration that shapes the cosmos:
…for I am God [’El]
and no mortal [’īsh],
the Holy One in your midst,
and I will not come in wrath (verse 9b, NRSV ).
The personal
emotion of loss over the beloved son(s) becomes the dominant motive of the
Almighty.
What is not possible for humans will nevertheless be done by God. A way will be found to both execute judgment and to continue in caring love for the disobedient and judged beloved children.
What is not possible for humans will nevertheless be done by God. A way will be found to both execute judgment and to continue in caring love for the disobedient and judged beloved children.
Psalm 107:1-9, 43.
The Psalm reading is
an excerpt from a long psalm that calls on many groups of people to give thanks
and praise to God for deliverance. It is
“the redeemed of the Lord” who are called on to join the praise, and their
various experiences will be held up as examples in the course of the full
psalm.
The first group
whose experience is described are those who were lost, wandering and in danger
of thirst and hunger, in the wilderness (verses 4-9). This is a fitting response to the Hosea
passage because it can be applied to Israel ’s
experience when brought out of Egypt .
They cried to the
Lord in their trouble,
and he delivered them from their distress;
he led them by a
straight way,
until they reached an inhabited town.
(verses 6-7, NRSV )
The wilderness
generation qualified supremely as the “redeemed of the Lord”; from day one,
they were journeying from a place of deliverance toward the place of God’s
rest.
The writer of
Colossians also speaks of a great reversal – one that has already
happened. It is the believer’s
death: “for you have died, and your life
is hidden with Christ in God” (verse 3, NRSV).
Those baptized
into Jesus have died to the destructive and enslaving forces of the world and
are freed to live empowered from above, in Christ – equal across all social and
religious barriers. The image of the
heavenly Christ exercising rule over the earth, an image known to the
baptized, defines the believer’s way of life.
That is the image that discredits the superstitions and demonic powers
that surround the Lycus valley people in their daily lives.
In our passage it
is the things to avoid, the things that are excluded by the heavenly
image of the Christ, that are mainly listed.
We have two lists of negative traits: (1) sexual immorality,
etc., ending with greed, in verse 5, and (2) anger, malice, etc. in verse
8.
It is recognized
that avoiding these things requires some effort. “Put to death whatever in you is earthly”
(verse 5).
The new life
requires rigorous honesty with fellow believers in caring mutuality. “Do not lie to one another, seeing that you
have stripped off the old self with its practices, and have clothed yourselves
with the new self” (verses 9-10).
Baptism was the
stripping off; one now lives in the new garments – those of the reborn (which
are described more fully in 3:12 -14,
following our passage).
The Epistle
reading contained an incidental identification of greed with idolatry – “Put to
death…greed (which is idolatry),” Colossians
3:5 .
The Gospel concentrates even more on greed, suggesting also that love
of possessions becomes idolatrous.
The episode begins
with a request from someone in the crowd asking Jesus to serve as arbiter in a
dispute over an inheritance. Jesus’
response is to decline becoming an arbitrator of the Mosaic law. He declines getting into the business of the
Pharisees, which would in later times produce such compilations of rabbinic law
as the Mishnah and Tosefta. Instead,
Jesus tells a parable putting all devotion to material goods under an intense
eschatological critique.
The parable
describes a man wealthy from his agri-business enterprises. He is determined to keep investing and
expanding, no doubt absorbing many smaller and marginal farm operations along
the way. At a critical juncture, he has
a dialogue with his soul and decides to make the great break, to tear down the
old infrastructure and replace it with new super-capacity facilities. How very modern and progressive! Think of the new jobs created for the
displaced farmers!
Jesus’ entire
“journey” in Luke, however, is about living in a time of urgent judgment, when
priorities must be radically altered.
This man’s preoccupation with capitalist expansion leads him into
hubris, into forgetting that he stands on a daily basis as a humble mortal
before the instant judgment of God.
In today’s world
he would have an excessive cholesterol count, be over-weight, and have high
blood pressure. We know what form the
judgment of God takes in such cases.
Greed may make a capitalist economy heat up, but it leaves the barns of
the soul empty before God.
The journey to judgment that Jesus leads makes poverty the way to wealth-that-really-matters.
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