28 July – Jesus the [whore]

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 7
28/7/2019

Hosea 2:1-7, 14-23
Psalm 15
Revelation 22:1-15
Matthew 16:13-23


In a sentence:
The healing grief of God raises the dead and restores the lost

Recent statistics on the impact of domestic violence in our society indicate – among many other things – that each week a woman is killed, dozens of women are hospitalised and police make about many hundreds responses to domestic violence incidents.

Our recent awareness that this is part of our culture is the context within which we hear of what sounds like a violent ‘domestic’ incident between God and Israel, in which Israel is cast in the role of humiliated wife.

The parallels are not easily dismissed. Violence is rarely ‘mere’ violence – violence for the sake of violence. Violence is – to the perpetrator – just as all sin is: necessary, unavoidable (see last week’s sermon). ‘See what you made me do’ is the title of a recent study of domestic violence. The abuser calls his victim to recognise that ‘you made me do this’. This casts his violence as a necessary response to her and so he cannot be held responsible for it.

And part of the point of Hosea’s second chapter is, surely, ‘You made me do this’.

More distressing than that, the fact that such a dynamic of necessary violence could be read out of Hosea as Scripture lends divine permission for abuse in our own relationships: this is how some Christian communities have justified violent ‘discipline’ in Christian families. It is sad that, even in this place, it might need to heard that such violent and non-violent abuse has no place in the church of God.

Do we not have here one of Scripture’s ‘texts of terror’ (Tribble)? Any reading of Hosea, then, requires of us a careful [bracketing] of his language, even as we seek to hear in it the full depth of the divine accusation, punishment and promise which it would give us to understand.

To this end, we will treat tody’s passage from the very heart of Christian confession – that Jesus is the Christ – and proceed by identifying [whore] Israel with Jesus. The rationale for this is clearest in seeing where it leads us.

Of course, the impiety of speaking of ‘Jesus the [whore]’ will cause most of us to side immediately with Peter: ‘God forbid it! This must never happen to him’ (cf. Matthew 16.22). But what must never happen? Peter means that Jesus must never be – as Hosea explicitly prophesies for Israel – stripped naked, exposed as on the day he was born, made like a wilderness, turned into a parched land and left to die of thirst (cf. 2.3). And yet do we not see precisely Jesus on the cross here? Israel’s prospects, as described here by Hosea, are no more or less than what led Jesus to cry, ‘My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?’ (Mark 15.34).

Perhaps we want to object that the reason for the abandonment is different. Jesus suffers ‘innocently’ and for a higher cause whereas Israel is guilty, so that only Israel is ‘really’ judged here.

Yet this is too simple an account of the relationship of sinfulness to innocence – as mutually exclusive realities. Sin is not only moral failure, whether the failure of an individual or of a whole community (if the latter is even possible). Sin is no less effect, in the sense of ‘ripple’ effect. The sin of one in a relationship of two effects (delivers) two sinners, not one. Sin is always relational and so its effect is not only on the guilty one but also on the innocents to whom the sinner is joined. This is why we baptise ‘innocent’ infants; their innocence is corrupted by having chosen the parents they did; it is also why Hosea allows that the children of the unfaithful mother will are also condemned (2.4).

Into this dynamic of sin comes the ‘innocent’ Jesus.

Yet God does not really give us the innocence of Jesus, as such.[1] God gives us a Jesus who is ‘infected’ by the contagion of sin. This is an infection not from his own culpability but from his relationship to those around him. ‘Became truly human’ – as the Creed has it – means that he experienced what we all experience: living in a body, with other bodies, subject to sin-tinted death. (St Paul writes that God made Jesus ‘to be sin who knew no sin’ [2 Corinthians 5.17]; the verse continues, ‘so that in him we might become the righteousness of God’ [2 Corinthians 5.17; cf. Galatians 3.13]).

What is important for the moment is that the outcome is the same, innocent or not. All – including Jesus – die the death of sinners, abandoned by God. The guilty [whore] of God and the crucified Jesus end up in the same place; the third verse of Hosea 2 could have been a kind of gospel Midrash on the crucifixion.

If we can, then, identify Jesus with Israel here on account of their common fate, how does this help? Having rejected a misreading of the innocence of Jesus, we now need to bring it back in appropriately.

The innocence of Jesus stands as a sign of God’s willingness to give up divine innocence, divine purity. ‘Go take for yourself a [wife of whoredom]’, God commands Hosea, ‘For that is what I have done’. The marriage metaphor serves here to speak not only of the divorce in Israel’s turning away; it speaks also of the ‘two-become-oneness’ which marriage entails: what happens to Israel happens to God. That Jesus is innocent is not to say that he is not sin-affected. It is to say that God’s being affected by sin is not a barrier to God’s desire for us.[2]

The death of Jesus on the cross is the revelation that God is willing, so to speak, to be contaminated by sin and all its effects. Put differently, the divinity of this God is not ‘above’ death but ‘through’ it. The rupture of this marriage is a tearing into two of the one – a kind of dying of Israel and of God. Not only Israel’s but God’s very being is torn here, and so also with the cross.

Yet, this is not very helpful if all we hear is that God, in Israel and in Jesus, is willing to go down with the ship. It remains unhelpful despite how often such a word is offered as a ‘pastoral’ response to suffering – that God suffers with us. That we all drown – God included – is only half of the word of God. If we stop here we have only the comfort that God dies with us, which is not much comfort at all.

The only reason we find anything of real value in the death of God with Israel and Jesus is the resurrection of Jesus. For here is revealed the mystery which is this God.[3] 

There is a death in God which we might speak of as the death of God but it is death as death’s ‘sting’, death’s effect (1 Corinthians 15.22; cf. Hosea 13.14). This sting is the pain of separation and not the mere ending of God’s or some other’s life.

The principal separation in the biblical narrative is the loss of the son, the wife, we have been considering here (and which we might even read into Genesis 2 and 3).

We all know this pain: the death which is separation. Whatever fear we may hold of our own death, we feel the death which has separated us from others. The presence of death to us is in our separation from those who make us what we are – a separation which yet leaves us still standing, zombie-like. And so we fear the death which is the life of the survivor, the death which separation is. The God of the exile and of Easter Saturday is dead in this way – torn into two, only half a heart still beating.

The gospel of the resurrection of Jesus (anticipated in the promised reconciliation with wife‑Israel [Hosea 2.14ff]) is that – with this God – half a heart is enough.

It matters that God suffers with us not because misery loves company but because – unlike our grief – the grief of God raises the dead: who was dead is now come to life, who was lost is now found. Our tears barely drip from our faces but God cries a river, which flows from heaven’s throne, across which grows the tree of life (Revelation 22).

Noe of this is to diminish Israel’s apostasy in the time of Hosea or of Jesus, or our own here and now. It is, however, to relativise these failings to each other, with Christ at the centre.

Jesus’ suffering – as part of Israel – is prefigured by Israel’s own in Hosea. So also the suffering of God. We who identify ourselves with Christ find ourselves at the centre of this, suffering in Christ – even as we might be the cause of that suffering.

If we locate ourselves here in the Jesus who suffers all things, and so in the God who suffers and overcomes the death of Jesus, one extraordinary consequence emerges: there is no more sin to commit, no wrong which would make a difference to the totality of sin or the extent to which grace must reach, and has reached.

God’s heart is already broken, the Son is already crucified – cast out as a [whore] – and that is the end of sin, its goal and completion. To imagine that we – with our faithfulness or unfaithfulness, pure doctrine or apostasy, joy or grief, love or fear – could add or detract anything from what is already done is to have heard neither the bad news of the gospel nor the good news.

For what is already done is that the full impact of sin has been felt and, because it is felt by Jesus himself and not by us, sin matters ‘no more’ to us.

What is done is that God has lost, and then won. To our shame, it is indeed in the river of tears of God that we are washed in our baptism, but to God’s glory we now are clean, nonetheless.

[1] ASIDE The innocence of Jesus has, historically, been very important to the church, leading us even to go to the extent that we can speak of an ‘immaculate conception’. This refers not to the birth of Jesus but to the birth of Mary his mother; her conception was such that the contagion of sin was not passed to her, so that she would not pass it to Jesus. On the understanding that sinful character was transmitted through procreation, this isolated Jesus from the full impact of sin.

[2] It is also to say that the innocence of Jesus is not – as some atonement theories have it – a coin of salvation which ‘someone’ has to pay in order that God be satisfied and now able to forgive. This understanding over-reads the important metaphor of the sacrificial victim ‘without blemish’; cf. Leviticus 1.10, 22.17-25; 1 Peter 1.19; Hebrews 9.11-14.

[3] (We considered the relation of the resurrection of Jesus to the promises given to Israel in the two reflections on Hosea 11: June 30 and July 7).