The Scandal of Love
The Scandal of Love
William E. Hull, Research Professor, Samford University
Birmingham, AL
If the prophecy of Hosea were to be classified by the mass media for public consumption today, it might well be X-rated, "reader discretion advised," for it tells the sordid story of a preacher whose wife went astray. Such scandalous moral lapses are not unknown in our time, but the most surprising feature of this shocking escapade is that God was its instigator from start to finish. He played the matchmaker in prompting Hosea to marry Gomer, then to send her away when she played the harlot, then to take her back again when she had lost the last vestige of decency. Is that any way for a prophet to be acting, much less for his God to be telling him to act? Why, we wonder, did such a tawdry tale ever find its way into the Bible?
The answer to that question is not long in coming. Inserted between the beginning of the story in chapter 1 and its ending in chapter 3 is an oracle applying Hosea`s domestic tragedy to the relationship between God and his chosen people (Hos. 2:2-23). The prophet`s obedience to divine promptings provided the catalyst for his revolutionary discovery of the deepest passion of God`s own heart. Hosea soon realized that he was being called to proclaim a truth so scandalous that it could not be grasped in words until it had first been acted out in deeds. Until the people saw the radical nature of God`s love embodied in the experience of the prophet, they would not be able to fathom its meaning for themselves. So let us revisit the story as a drama in three acts, seeking to learn what its provocative plot tells us about a sovereign love that has no limits.
Act I: Love Hopes
Hosea and Gomer were a study in contrasts. He was an inflexible moralist, wholeheartedly embracing the stern preachment of the prophet Amos with its message of doom and gloom for Israel. The failure of the people to honor the righteousness of God, particularly in their lusting after the corrupt religions of Canaan, would lead to swift and certain judgment, punishment, and rejection. Gomer, on the other hand, was a good time girl, the life of the party, quick to share her favors with friends old and new. We would call her a tease, a flirt, even a cheat, for there was a hint of harlotry in her frivolous spirit. In lifestyle, she was everything that Hosea abhorred, which explains the chagrin he must have felt when the Lord commanded him to take her as his wife (Hos. 1:2). To be sure, it would shock the entire community, but it shocked him most of all.
So why did Hosea agree to obey the divine imperative? Clearly this woman needed the ethical earnestness that he had to offer. True, her reputation was a bit tarnished, but his puritanism would eventually reform her promiscuousness. After all, they would be pledging sacred vows to each other that she had never made before. Living with him on a daily basis would be enough to overcome her occasional dalliances in the marketplace. And why did Gomer agree to accept his strange proposal? Already she was beginning to realize that passions quickly squandered are just as quickly forgotten. What would she do when her charms hardened with age and a nubile competitor showed up to claim her territory? Life with Hosea would be confining, even boring at best, but at least he offered her security and the chance to rehabitate her reputation, which was more than she was getting from the men who tickled her fancy on Friday nights. Perhaps the odd couple could complement each other and maybe-just maybe-learn to love each other.
Make no mistake, this was a marriage with nothing going for it except a handful of risky possibilities. Centuries later the Apostle Paul would pen the core insight struggling to find expression here: "love . . . hopes all things" (1 Cor. 13:7). Hosea married Gomer in the hope that their union would impart to her the integrity and character that she lacked. The more his own experience forced him to think about it, the more he came to realize that God`s relationship with his people had begun in exactly the same way (Hos. 11:1-4). Israel was loved before the people were ready to realize it. The Lord had led them out of slavery in Egypt and taught them to stand on their feet and walk despite their continued infatuation with the idolatrous practices of their former masters. Just as Hosea vowed fidelity to Gomer in an effort to help her mature, so God entered into covenant with his people to make them strong. He knew all the weaknesses of their long bondage in the past but, because he loved them, he hoped to give them a better future.
As the curtain falls on Act I of our drama, we have learned for the first time in Scripture that God is a passionate lover with high hopes for his children. The marriage of Hosea to Gomer not only enabled him to give tangible expression to this truth for his time, but also to anticipate the very essence of the ministry of Jesus who, in everything he said and did, was proclaiming "God believes in you because he loves you!" That is why his followers set off an explosion of hope in a jaded and cynical world. You can see it in the way that the early church dared to make incredible claims for the misfits and rejects of the Roman Empire. It says to us that true religion is not so much a code to be obeyed or a ritual to be performed as it is a relationship to be embraced. Why do we want the best for those whom we love regardless of their failings? Because we are made in the image of God who wants the same for us.
Act II: Love Hurts
If ever there was a marriage made in heaven it was that of Hosea to Gomer. Once God said, "Go, take for yourself" a risqué wife, "so he went and took Gomer" (Hos. 1:2-3). There was no dating, courtship, or engagement to encourage romance, only a divine command to be obeyed without delay. Indeed, their domestic arrangement became little more than an extension of his prophetic ministry. Immediately he set about having children to whom he gave Hebrew names that sounded like the titles of his judgmental sermons. The first, a son, was named Jezreel, referring to a battlefield where God would soon punish his people by putting an end to their nation (Hos. 1:4-5). The second child, a daughter, was named Lo-ruhamah, meaning "not pitied," because God would no longer have pity on the Israelites to forgive them (Hos. 1:6). The third child, another son, was named Lo-ammi, or "not my people," for they could no longer claim the Lord as their God (Hos. 1:8-9).
Let us concede that Hosea may have overdone it a bit in using his infant children to curse the society into which they had been born. Imagine them having to explain such names for the rest of their lives! Notice how each was more severe than the one before: the first said that the people would be punished by defeat in battle, the second that they would no longer be forgiven for their follies, the third that they had been completely disowned by God. This may suggest that, in the early months of his marriage, Hosea was becoming ever more morose as his message failed to receive a favorable hearing. We can almost hear him gritting his teeth as he named the children, muttering to himself, "Maybe this will get their attention!" People sometimes express their underlying values in the way that they name their children, but Hosea was doing it with a vengeance! It was not easy for him to keep a light touch when living in desperate times.
And what about Gomer: how was she adjusting to life with a gloomy prophet? Our account is silent, but it is not hard to read between the lines. From the outset she was saddled with three babies in swift succession. As soon as one was weaned, another was on the way (Hos. 1:8). No time for the fun-and-games she had enjoyed before marriage. Hosea was gone a lot trying to get his message out across the northern kingdom before it was too late, leaving most of the household chores for her to do. When he was there, he brooded about the fate of the nation whereas Gomer was more interested in finding a little happiness within their family circle. To be sure, she wanted her reputation upgraded from what it had been, but she was not trying to become a saint overnight! This subtle clash of temperament made her wonder if she really was cut out to be a prophet`s wife. The constant pressure to live a cut above the crowd, to prove every day that now she was different, began to wear upon her spirit, but Hosea was unrelenting in his expectations.
We do not know how long it was before the hair-line cracks in their relationship became an open break. Perhaps it was on one of his longer trips away from home that she went back for the first time to the marketplace at night. In any case, once the rupture came it was swift and complete. Hosea was broken and embittered, made worse by that "I-told-you-so" look in the sidelong glances of his neighbors. Gomer`s fall, if anything, seemed to confirm his message of judgment (Hos. 11:5-7). He had kept every promise, but she had played fast and loose with her vows and it had led her into lasciviousness. No longer the young beauty of earlier years, now she could market her charms only as the village tramp. She had laughed in the face of decency; now she would cry on the pillow of remorse. She had sown the wind, now she would reap the whirlwind (Hos. 8:7).
If anything, however, Hosea`s sense of shame was greater than hers. For in that ancient patriarchal culture the male was responsible to protect, defend, and insure the virtue of the female, whether it be his wife, unmarried daughter, or widowed mother. So serious was the maintenance of chastity that adultery was a capital offense. Since a husband`s honor depended upon his wife`s fidelity, for Gomer to become promiscuous meant public humiliation for Hosea. But underneath the disgust and disgrace of it all lay a new kind of loneliness, a sense of forsakenness that he could never have known until he gave his heart to her in hope. Indeed, it was precisely because of those dashed hopes that he hurt as never before. And as he pondered that pain he had to ask himself: "Did God get me into all of this because he wanted me to feel his own forsakenness? Is there a hurt like mine deep within his own heart?"
In searching for an answer, Hosea came to realize that sin at its deepest level is an alienation of the affections, a violation of sacred vows, a harlotry of the heart. Jesus carried forward this insight by referring to his fickle contemporaries as an "adulterous and sinful generation" (Mk. 8:38). And if infidelity lay at the root of the problem, it could be overcome only by the achievement of true intimacy. Hosea`s chief complaint against the people had been that they did not know God (Hos. 5:4). But the Hebrew language of that day also used the verb "know" to signify the conjugal relationship in which two lovers seek to bond with each other at the deepest level of their being. In the abyss of his abandonment, a stern prophet was learning that God does not want just to be feared and obeyed but that he also wants to be loved with all of the passion and tenderness and sympathy of marital love (Hos. 2:20).
Now Hosea understood the high risk involved in a religion of love. He had failed to keep Gomer`s love just as God had failed to keep Israel`s love, for love, by its very nature, can be neither coerced nor controlled. To love anyone is to be vulnerable to heartbreak, for spurned love is the cruelest cut of all. That is why the love that "hopes all things" also "endures all things" (1 Cor. 13:7). It is here that we come to the cross in the heart of Hosea long before it cast a shadow over the Savior at Calvary. So have we reached an impasse that our story is powerless to resolve? Is every hope that love awakens cancelled by a hurt that love inflicts? Is the human heart just too fickle to be mastered even by the love of God? Where would Hosea take his heartbreak? Back to the old message of defeat, punishment, and rejection summarized by his children`s names, or forward to a new unimaginable breakthrough that might change his message and prepare for the gospel of Jesus?
Act III: Love Helps
Gethsemane is the agony of struggling with impossible options. For Jesus it was the intolerable choice of escaping disaster by compromising his message versus the equally intolerable choice of being crucified as a common criminal. For Hosea it was the unthinkable alternative of having anything further to do with the disgraced Gomer versus the equally unthinkable alternative of living the rest of his life with the crushing pain of a broken heart. The prophet had reached an impasse in his understanding of love. At first he had learned how much it could hope, but now he knew how much it could hurt. These two warring emotions of desire for the best and despair over the worst seemed to cancel out each other, leaving only bitter ashes in their place. He had risked everything on the power of righteous love to reform Gomer`s wayward heart, but that strategy seemed to have failed him. God had gotten him into a mess from which he could not extricate himself!
Clearly, therefore, the next move was up to God and, when it came, Hosea could not believe his ears. Hard as it had been to marry Gomer, and even harder to give her up as a failure, what God now proposed would be hardest of all to do: "Go give your love back to the woman who betrayed you despite the fact that she is now an adulteress, the paramour of her latest boyfriend" (Hos. 3:1). The arguments against such a reckless reclamation project were compelling indeed. Hosea had already done everything he could for Gomer, having kept every promise and honored every vow. Why would yet another effort be any more likely to succeed? Gomer had become such an object of contempt in the community that any association with her would certainly discredit Hosea`s message of righteous judgment and might well wreck his entire prophetic ministry. Up to this point the children seem to have taken their father`s side, but to bring that hussy back into the house could cause them to leave. Obviously it was foolish even to consider such a possibility.
So why did Hosea agree to do it? Because he realized that it would dramatize the deepest truth about divine love, namely, that God never gives up on his beloved no matter how faithless they become. Now Hosea`s challenge was to learn to love Gomer in the same way that God loved Israel. His well-known domestic tragedy would enable him to incarnate the kind of love that forgives without limit. At the moment, the people were infatuated with false gods whose worship offered them the immediate gratification of supposedly sacred raisin cakes (Hos. 3:1). But as Hosea thought back over the centuries to the beginning of the covenant in the wilderness, he could not count the number of times that the chosen people had been seduced by superficial religions offering such momentary pleasures as temple prostitution. In light of their recurring relapses, what chance would Israel ever have of keeping the covenant unless God provided them with an endless number of fresh starts?
Trying to answer that question brought Hosea to the sticking point in the whole proposition: "go love her again . . ." (Hos. 3:1). We all know from the testimony of divorcees that shattered marriages are almost impossible to mend. Once love is spurned it usually dies or turns into hatred. When the prophet cried out, "It is not human nature to love like that!," God replied, "I am not asking you to love like humans do but like I do-and I am different from you" (Hos. 11:8-9). Just as Israel had been given many a second chance, so God was asking Hosea to give Gomer another chance, to not let their failure become final (Hos. 2:14-15). As Jesus would later explain to Peter, forgive again and again, so many times that you can`t keep track of the number (Mt. 18:21-22). In a word, Hosea was being told to love her with an everlasting love. As Frederick Buechner put it, "God is love . . . and there`s no end to it."
Does this mean that God was setting up Hosea for an endless succession of heartbreaks? If so, it would be no worse than God himself had endured for centuries. But the implementation of this reconciliation involved a number of remedial strategies designed to minimize that possibility. Unlike the first time, when Hosea was told to "take" Gomer as his wife (Hos. 1:2-3), this time he was bidden to "love" her as the Lord loves Israel (Hos. 3:1). This would be a costly love that required him to purchase her out of servitude (Hos. 3:2). To secure her as his "wife forever," he would need not only to free her from the claims of others but to also give her a spiritual dowry made up of righteousness, justice, steadfast love, and mercy (Hos. 2:19). She, in turn, to prove her good faith, would be sequestered for a season, overcoming her addiction to promiscuity by total abstinence from all sexual activity, even with him as her husband (Hos. 3:1). Together they would break the vicious cycle of proving her self worth by dispensing cheap intimacies to others.
This austere regimen was what we today would call "tough love." Why was such a strategy not followed during Hosea`s first marriage to Gomer when she obviously needed greater discipline? Back then, he expected her to measure up just because of the terrible consequences if she failed to do so. He had not yet had his heart broken or realized that God would want him to love again the one who broke it. At first he experienced a love that hoped, then a love that hurt, but now, precisely because she was back again in worse shape than ever before, he needed a love that helped. If he could never quit loving her, he would have to do everything possible to help her become more lovable. If we were labeling this journey we might say that Act I describes the optimism of love, Act II the pessimism of love, and Act III the realism of love.
As the curtain falls on our drama, we in the audience are left with the question of how we shall love. There are three options offered by its three actors.
We can love like Hosea, expecting it to be requited in full measure or, failing that, to be withdrawn. The problem here is that we humans are so self-centered that we often fail to reciprocate the love we receive even from parents and spouse, plunging us into loneliness and bitterness when others treat us the same.
Or we can love like Gomer, expecting nothing in return but the pleasures of the moment. The problem here is that we end up frittering away our heart until it finally belongs to no one.
Or we can love like God, expecting covenant fidelity from the beloved but freely forgiving when it is not forthcoming as the basis for a fresh start. The problem here is that human nature has too much pride to practice such radical grace. But we can overcome that pride if, like Hosea, we realize that we are already loved by the Lord of the universe just like that!
1 Gale A. Yee, “The Book of Hosea,” The New Interpreter’s Bible(Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), 7:206-9.
2 Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets(New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 57-60.
3 H. Wheeler Robinson, The Cross of Hosea, ed. Ernest A. Payne (Phi ladelphia: Westminster, 1949).
4 John Mauchline, “The Book of Hosea: Introduction and Exegesis,” The Interpreter’s Bible (New York: Abingdon, 1956), 6:594-5.
5 Frederick Buechner, Peculiar Treasures: A Biblical Who’s Who(San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), 44.
6 Norman Snaith, Mercy and Sacrifice: A Study of the Book of Hosea (London: SCM, 1953), 70-87
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