CT - Catholic Telegraph

God does not walk away from us

Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Hosea 2:16b, 17b, 21-22.

Of all the prophets whose writings have been preserved for us in the Old Testament, only Hosea was from the Northern Kingdom. His ministry unfolded between 750 and 725 B.C. We do not know whether he lived to see the destruction of Samaria by the Assyrians in 721 B.C.

Most of Hosea’s preaching was directed against the people’s involvement in the Canaanite cult of Baal, an idolatrous religion that seemed to have a special appeal to the wealthy and the worldly during the prosperous decades in which Hosea exercised his ministry. In delivering his message, Hosea’s most fundamental metaphor is marriage. The people of Israel were God’s bride. But they were an unfaithful bride who abandoned her husband in order to take up the life of a prostitute. (Note that cultic prostitutes were part of the religious practice associated with the worship of Baal.)

In this Sunday’s reading, God addresses an unfaithful Israel, a people who has abandoned God and given herself over to other gods. But our reading is not an oracle of threat and blame. It is rather a kind of love song that God sings to His beloved, unfaithful though she is.

God will take back His adulterous spouse. He will carry her off into the desert on a kind of second honeymoon "and speak to her heart." They will be together as they were in the good old days in the time of the exodus. Israel was faithful then (at least most of the time), before she was corrupted by the ways of Canaan.

Then God speaks of the bridal gifts that He would confer on His bride. First of all, their marriage will be forever. It will involve right and justice, love and mercy, faithfulness and the experience of intimacy (knowledge) with the Lord.

This reading tells us that God is madly in love with His people. God has every reason to walk away from His adulterous bride. She has been unfaithful in many ways and for a long time. But God does not walk away from His beloved. He takes her back and offers to spirit her away to where they had first been happy together.

It doesn’t make much sense for God to be this generous to this kind of a bride. But God’s association with His people is not something that can be explained in rational terms. God is in love with her and God acts like somebody who is head-over-heels in love. That’s all there is to it. No more need be said. No more can be said.

Note that the qualities that God promises to bestow on His bride are qualities that are characteristic of God Himself: eternity, righteousness, justice, mercy and steadfast love. This is to say that God loves His people so much that He wants to confer on her His very own personal attributes. His gift to His unfaithful yet beloved bride is to remake the bride into God’s own image, to make the bride live as God Himself lives.

This Old Testament reading provides background for this Sunday’s Gospel reading (Mark 2:18-22). There we see Jesus comparing himself to a bridegroom, a bridegroom whose presence brings joy to everyone connected with the wedding.

Read in the light of Hosea, Jesus’ use of the bridegroom image is filled with richness. For one thing, it hints that Jesus is more than another religious teacher. If He is a bridegroom, might He not be the bridegroom, the divine bridegroom who would wed a whole people to himself?

If Jesus is a bridegroom, He is also a lover, one who reaches out passionately to draw His beloved ever close to himself. And the beloved to whom Jesus reaches out is the community of those who believe in Him. Jesus reaches out to His church. Jesus reaches out to us. We are the ones with whom the Lord wants to run off into the desert.

If we are to see a parallel between the Jesus of the Gospel reading and the Lord who speaks through Hosea, we can also see a parallel between what the bridegroom of the Old Testament and the bridegroom of the New Testament offers to the beloved. Just as the Lord in Hosea offers to re-make His adulterous people into His own likeness, so also Jesus offers to remake those who believe in Him into himself. When we are espoused to the Lord through baptism, we begin to share the very life of the Lord. This is what we call grace. What God had promised to His first chosen people has been fulfilled in us.

For reflection and discussion

How does Christ express a husband’s love for His church?

In what ways has God taken me back from unfaithfulness?