God in His holiness forgives us – Hos 11:1-6, 8-9

Hosea 11:1-6, 8-9; Morning Prayer at Old College Retreat on the Sacred Heart.  I used the NABRE translation, because it's a very hard passage to translate and I didn't have time to do it myself.  I did re-translate a few things, including nehpak ("[my heart] was overwhelmed") to "overthrown."

Hosea knew what it meant for a city to be overthrown.  He knew what it looked like for enemy forces to outflank troops, to press hard and conquer.  He lived most of his life threatened by exile and slavery at Assyrian hands, living among a people that had imposed the same on others.  When he talked about something being overthrown he knew what kind of violent destruction he was talking about.  When he says that God’s heart is overthrown, that’s not throw away language.

God’s heart is overthrown.  God’s heart is outflanked.  On one side tugs his fatherly love for the people of Israel, the son he has brought from Egyptian slavery and tenderly nurtured, not merely nourished and cared for like an animal on a leash, but infused with his likeness and adopted as his special nation, being brought up with human cords, the freedom a parent tries to form a child to exercise.  Fed?  Yes.  Protected?  Yes.  But also nuzzled against God’s cheeks and taught to live lives of freely offered worship.

God’s fatherly love tugs, and on the other side presses the reality of infidelity and sin.  Israel refuses the hard work of freedom in virtue, of the life-giving dependence on committed familial love with its Creator and turns to the Ba’als.  The people shun relationship and embrace a god who offers easy rewards: if you participate in fertility rituals (which even if they hadn’t been idolatrous were pretty sinful judging by the accounts we have), then you’ll have crops and descendants.

Love for his people and hatred for sin press on and overthrow God’s heart.  When mortals are overthrown, we’re done for, but God is a God of life.  There is no failure He cannot reverse.  He is God and no mortal; His overthrown heart is so radically holy it can respond with nothing but forgiveness.

That feels like so utterly different a response than we find in almost any human who has been overthrown. He is God, and he became man.  That radical forgiveness beat in a human heart.  That’s what it means to be holy.  That’s what it means to be sacred.