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Pentecost 7
28/7/2019

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

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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).

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Pentecost 6
21/7/2019

Hosea 1:1-10
Psalm 117
Luke 10:38-42

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In a sentence:
Our mercy requires God’s mercy

^1.2 When the Lord first spoke through Hosea, the Lord said to Hosea, ‘Go, take for yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord.’ ³ So he went and took Gomer daughter of Diblaim…

The characterisation of God’s relation to Israel as a marriage and off Israel’s unfaithfulness to God as ‘whoredom’ are central to Hosea’s preaching. It is powerful language and, with our modern sensitivities to the power hidden in language, it is probably too strong for many of us today. As will become even clearer when we get later to chapter 2, the language of ‘whore/dom’ must be referenced with great care. We must seek to discover what Hosea reveals about ourselves and God without allowing for any abuse of how he chose to express it.

But our focus today will more on the usefulness of the marriage metaphor for Hosea. This is not a straightforward observation of human relationships which is then applied to the God-Israel relationship. To understand how marriage is presented we need insight into the local pagan religion which has so strongly tempted Israel. Central is the Canaanite interest in fertility – the fertility of the fields which sustain human life. The Canaanites are not alone in that interest, of course, but pagan religion links the way of the gods and the way of the world in a closeness we cannot approach today. For them, the workings of the world depend on the action of the gods; the gods themselves make the fields fertile in a manner which compares to human sexual intercourse. The gods and the land are ‘sexually’ linked in order to bring forth the abundance of the fields. We encourage this divine activity by modelling it in a kind of spiritual homeopathy: in the right context, our sexual activity encourages the fertilising of the land by the gods. In certain circumstances, then, human sexual intercourse becomes a religious activity – even a pious activity, a kind of ‘prayer’ (although presumably some of the faithful were not in it only for the prayer). In this kind of religion, temple prostitutes are not a corruption of piety but a requirement for it (cf. 4.13f). In this process, the land and its people are ‘married’ to the gods.

What Hosea does not do is dismiss all this as nonsense. Instead, he adopts this understanding of the link between the gods and the land. He does this in order to make sense to those he addresses, for this is how they think about the gods. To this extent, he agrees with them: our actions reflect and encourage the actions of God, if he disagrees about what the action of God is.

Hosea allows, then, the notion that God does something to the land – the people – and that the people are expected to ‘do’ the same something in order to encourage God to do it over again. This ‘something’, however, has no relation to fertility, with sex as the currency of exchange with the gods.

For what the God of Israel ‘does’ to the land and its people is not fertilise them but have mercy on them. This is heard in Hosea’s many references back to the Exodus. And so what the land – the people – are to do is also to have mercy (cf. 6.6). The reciprocation of the activity of God and the people is the same as in the pagan system. We need what God does, so we do what God does, to encourage God to do it again. The dynamic is the same but what is reciprocated is entirely different.

And it reflects a different sense for what we actually are. The pagan system turns the wheel of the seasons one more time around to where it once was and to which it will again return. Nothing really changes for us or the world. It is an existence of ‘eternal return of the same’.

Israel’s receiving and giving of mercy, however, has nothing to do with natural cycles. Mercy is unnatural – outside of what is necessary by law. It is a violation of what should happen. It is this breaking of expectation which creates history: the possibility of something which should not have been there given what has happened before. Mercy does not make the world go ‘around’; mercy moves the world on to something new.

It is this ‘something new’ which is disappearing from Israel. The failure of the people to reciprocate in mercy and justice leads to the withholding of mercy on the part of God. This turning away – this withholding of God’s mercy – is what is threatened in Hosea’s preaching, and this is how he and the survivors of the Assyrian onslaught interpret the fall of the northern kingdom.

But this is not merely a moral problem – something that Israel can simply rectify by starting again in mercy. Mercy no longer has value because the people do not encourage God toward mercy, and so God does not give mercy, and so the meaning of mercy is lost. With this, true history is lost, and we are back in the realm of necessity.

To see that this is no mere ‘theoretical’ matter we might glance sideways for a moment at the recent resolution of our Synod regarding ‘voluntary assisted dying’ (VAD) – something which, for the record, I consider to be bad idea. That much can only be heard as personal opinion but what comes next is more than that.

There are many things which could be said about the way our church has dealt with this but I’ll draw attention to just one. Read most charitably – and we must be charitable, because this brings us to where the resolution is strongest – read charitably, a community would affirm such a thing as assisted suicide by understanding it to be an act of mercy. This seems to be the rationale of our Synod in its allowing of VAD, although there’s not anything in the resolution to this effect and we have to read between the lines. Such a reading suggests that when a person is suffering greatly and has no prospect of recovery, facilitating her early death at her request is a matter of rendering aid, out of mercy. Honesty might require that anyone of us would feel the temptation to ask or assist if the circumstances were extreme enough, and perhaps even succumb to it.

But whatever any one of us might choose under such circumstances, that personal choice is less important than the framing of the issue by the Synod. For this framing effectively encourages what we have to call a Godless mercy. In affirming voluntary assisted dying in the way that it has, the Synod seems to declare that neither the ill person nor anyone who helps her has need of God as the bringer of mercy at that moment or in the aftermath. We might have need of the God who ‘comforts’ – if we believe in God – but that is as much as God seems to contribute here.

The point is that, on this understanding, we do not need to ask for mercy for having chosen or assisted in voluntary dying; the work – the grasping after death, or the putting to death – is held to be inherently righteous; God does not judge us here. (It would be unrighteous only if it contravened the legislation.)

Put differently, there is here no ‘fear and trembling’ before God as we reach out to contradict what seemed before to be God’s promise or command. God might require us to suspend ethics at some point but, should that happen, we will not have a Synod resolution to assure us. Fear and trembling – an utter casting of ourselves onto the mercy of God, even as we tell ourselves that it is right to do this – this is the only way in which we could act in such matters. This is the true leap of faith: living in the knowledge that God’s mercy is not guaranteed.

Yet against God’s freedom here our Synod resolution has made God part of a system: a guarantee. And so we have no need of justification by grace in VAD, for our actions are already sanctioned, kind of ‘pre-approved’. Whatever we might say about the sanctity of human life and injunctions not to kill, the mercy intended in the Synod’s resolution is Godless because there is no gospel in it. There is no gospel in the resolution because it does not allow that we can be wrong here.

In this reflection on VAD we have not wandered far from Hosea. The failure of Israel is not so much that it failed to be merciful, as if mercy were an end in itself. Rather it has failed to acknowledge and to seek mercy – the mercy it once sought and acknowledged. On the model of the pagan cult, Israel has failed to do seek what God gives by ‘helping’ God give it, and so God does not give it.

To recall our second reflection on Hosea 11, once divine mercy and forgiveness fade from the scene, so also does knowledge of sin – knowledge of sin, if not the sin and its effects themselves. There will still be moral and social breakdown – such as Hosea describes – but these things come to be seen as ‘necessary’, part of what is required to keep things ticking over. The surprising thing about sin is that it is always necessary so far as the sinner is concerned. A merciful God is not required for what counted is necessary, for there is no failure to forgive. But against this, on the day of judgement we will be better served by declaring, ‘Lord, the devil made me do it’ than ‘Lord, I had to do it.’

To link back to the VAD reflection, the Synod seems to have allowed that VAD might be ‘necessary’ in this way, and so sets anyone who chooses or assists in VAD outside judgement, as a matter of course. (The same assessment applies to those who choose not to opt for or assist in VAD; this too is righteous, of itself).

The problem here is not so much – or not only – an unaccounted-for contradiction of the command not to kill. [The contradiction is ‘un-accounted for’ because the resolution itself does not tell us why we might do this, other than that some believe we can]. The problem is the sanctioning of what I do or say apart from the justifying mercy of God – the fact that what I do is Godless: a mercy which does not seek mercy.

As we noted before, there is much more we might say around the VAD legislation but it’s enough for us to note from the Synod’s resolution that not much has changed between God and God’s people in the last 3000 years.

What, then, is the good news here?

We have seen that Hosea takes on the pagan system of encouragement of the gods, substituting mercy for fertility as what we most need from the gods. But the thing about mercy is that it is radically disruptive even of disruption. For, if we fail to seek mercy, will God then fail to be merciful?

^1.9 _…you are not my people and I am not your God.’ ¹⁰ Yet the number of the people of Israel shall be like the sand of the sea, which can be neither measured nor numbered; and in the place where it was said to them, ‘You are not my people’, it shall be said to them, ‘Children of the living God.’ ¹¹The people of Judah and the people of Israel shall be gathered together, and they shall appoint for themselves one head; and they shall take possession of the land, for great shall be the day of Jezreel.

This mercy against all expectation is a word which seems irrelevant to the sense for God’s grace and mercy implied in the Synod’s resolution, for the resolution allows no judgement which mercy might yet overturn.

Be that as it may, let us also keep in mind that the Word did not come to Hosea convict us of the sins of others. This reading of the Synod’s resolution at least serves to show how our very best intentions – and they are good intentions – can betray our best convictions: and so we can crucify the Son of God for God’s own sake.

In our best intentions we still need the mercy of the One whose very property is to be merciful. It is only then that we might begin to be merciful as God will be.

If our best effort today reveals that nothing much has changed since Hosea, we might wonder whether the prayer for mercy, for ourselves as well as for others, is more central to life with this God than we typically care to admit.

It’s not for nothing that this prayer falls in the very middle of our worship each week.

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Pentecost 5
14/7/2019

Hosea 4:1-3, 7-10
Psalm 51
Ephesians 5:21, 28-33
Mark 8:34-38

Sermon preached by Rev. Bruce Barber

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“I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of slavery, (therefore)….
“You shall not commit adultery”

In our journey through the commandments it is worth recalling the way we have come. The first four, or perhaps five, commandments have to do with the being and character of the God of Israel. The promise: “I shall be your God; you shall be my people” inevitably implies how the covenant people are to live. That is what we have already heard in the demands of the previous commandments: what it is to have no other gods; to reject an idol; to honour the name of the Lord; to remember the Sabbath day; not to kill. That is to say, what is significant about the commandments is not merely their individual focus. The reason why each is to be obeyed is because the identity of the God of the covenant has first of all been established.

Therefore, each commandment illustrates the offer of a genuine freedom guaranteed by the covenant, not a new bondage. To isolate these commandments from this covenantal basis would be to make them into mere arbitrary assertions as to how people should behave. The fact that as a cold legalism this is how such injunctions are invariably understood readily gives rise to counter claims and contrary opinions, such as: “This commandment once made sense, but really not now in the modern world”.

To be specific, and given the inescapability of human sexuality, this seventh commandment concerning adultery appears to be one historically honoured as much in the breach as in the observance, and certainly no less in our day. Some weeks ago, an article appeared in The Age, by of all people a female Jewish rabbi, encouraging the potential value of a little bit of adultery. Although the article concluded by asking for reader response, there was none.  What does that silence signify? Presumably that the matter is of no real consequence to the wider society. Why, then, persevere with our undertaking?  One answer is that only if we can provide compelling reasons for taking account of anything that looks like a commandment is it conceivable that such considerations might gain a hearing in the contemporary climate.

To this end, each of the readings charts a profitable course for us to take. Hosea makes clear that moral confusion and disobedience in his day arise through religious apostasy. Because Israel has become faithless, there is no knowledge of Yahweh in the land. Despite his constancy, the people play the harlot in the attempt to forestall anarchy by making gods of the forces of nature. As night follows day, who the god is determines what the worshipper performs. In that religious culture, cultic prostitution existed in order to encourage the “gods” to be equally fertile by bringing rain, without which all is lost. For this reason, the commandment against adultery has real force in demonstrating the difference between Yahweh and the fertilising rain god Baal. When the prophets, as does Hosea, chastise the people for “whoring after false gods”, they use the word adultery because in that religiously pluralistic world loyalty to the one God is diluted, or adulterated. Again, and again the prophets show us how hard is the fight between the pure worship of Yahweh and the fertility rites of Baal and Ashtoreth, and of how idolatry and sexual license go together. For example, Jezebel, Ahab’s queen, is treated as “a whore’ for no other reason than that she introduced the worship of Baal into northern Israel. So, we are certain to miss the point if we restrict the matter of adultery merely to that of sexuality.

It is in this sense that eight centuries later Jesus describes the actual situation in which the world finds itself as an “evil and adulterous generation” seeking some sign. This description helps us to understand that adultery in the Bible refers in the first place more to theological irregularity than it does to sexual.

It is perhaps not made sufficiently clear that the word adultery is derived from the same root as the word “adulteration”. The word refers to corruption through association with an alien source – not the comedian’s play for laughs that adultery is associated with adults as infancy is with infants. Adultery always has to do with adulteration, with a breach of loyalty. That is why there is such a close connection between who God is understood to be, and what people believe is open to them in their dealings one with another.

But the difference between that world and our own is now considerable. Whereas the ancient texts link the religious and the sexual, we now live in the secularised Western world, where the self and its own future is detached from any redemptive context, and where religion is increasingly held in quiet or strident contempt. Because relationships become self-constructions, and because they are all we have, literally everything is expected of them.

In the final analysis, given the logic of the repudiation of the covenantal foundation of the commandment in favour of self-determination, the risk of adultery has to be inevitable.  With nothing to qualify the self, Jesus’ description of his own day as “an evil and adulterous generation seeking signs” assumes some force in our own technologically predatory society. While the serious minded are likely to espouse practical, if not theoretical serial monogamy, for many all that is left it seems is the frequently experienced insecurity, anxiety, and loneliness of the always at hand on-line search for the elusive encouraging “sign”.

Where God is not, compensatory “sign seeking” reveals how serious is the misunderstanding to think that today we are liberated from the ancient connection between human sexuality and faith in the God of the covenant.  But it is not just a case of their mutuality. It is how that mutuality is understood. In this respect, and with regard to marriage, Paul is saying something that otherwise would be exceedingly odd – that is, he makes marriage dependent on the love that Christ has for the church. Who would have thought that it is the Gospel that actually constitutes a marriage? That is to say, that the covenant of the natural – the relationship between husband and wife – is made dependent on the covenant of grace, the love that the Lord has for his church.

Once rooted in the Western tradition, secular society no longer understands this reversal, if indeed it ever did. It is not simply that marriage is able to be dismissed as “only a piece of paper”. It is that even if any connection at all is made between marriage and God, invariably it is to reverse this priority, and to make what the culture vacuously calls “religion” secondary to natural instinct. The problem is compounded when, as the increasingly hostile letters to the daily press reveal, it is apparent that the culture believes that “religion” should only be about religion, and not anything to do with the actual substance of what it means to be a human being. “Religion” thereby becomes merely a form of therapy if, or when, things go wrong, but only if one happens to be so inclined.

Inevitably, the culture must be incredulous of Paul’s insistence that it is Christ’s love for the Church that constitutes marriage. Perhaps we share that incredulity. Not surprisingly, therefore, where marriages are in difficulty it is as much likely to be due to an inadequate theology as to some manifestation of human incompatibility. What secular marriage guidance course helps rectify that? Is not the human condition to expect far too much of each other and ourselves in matters where we should not really expect much at all? And on the other hand, where we have every right to expect the gifts of God, just here in relation to human commitment, that we seldom seek them even if we knew that we can and should.

The Easter gospel of the vindication of the crucified One declares that this commandment has been so believed, and, consequently, has been truly lived in unadulterated faithfulness, even to death. This is what we affirm when the liturgy invites us to confess the faith of the Church, for example in the Nicene Creed, when we say “for us and for our salvation”.  And since this “us” of salvation is both public and universal in its scope, the commandment, too, has now become public truth, not just a private ethic for Jews and Christians.

In other words, continuing to live as do the people of the covenant in “an evil and adulterous generation”, the command: “You shall not commit adultery” has now become not only possible in principle, but actually achievable in practice. And that has to be good news.