Monday of the Fourteenth Week in Ordinary Time
Prophet Hosea and Yahweh had in common that they both were married to a prostitute.
Harlot Gomer (Mrs. Hosea) symbolized Israel whom God had taken as his bride, but who now spurned his love and went chasing after other gods. Israel was guilty of spiritual adultery.
Hosea & Gomer. Yahweh & Israel. You might say that they were the ultimate “odd couples.” Hosea identified intimately with the divine anguish as both were jilted by their lovers.
We may be ill at ease with such a concept. We speak freely of God’s omnipotence — the infinity of God. But as 21st century westerners, 2,750 years removed from Hosea & Gomer, our analytical minds with abstract and logical thinking are completely foreign to the ancients. The vivid, the tangible, the immediate, the gut — these alone could they grasp. And grasp they did!
We may claim more sophistication than they, but there are roadblocks to our approach alone, too. Jesus himself would, as a first century Jew, associate more with Hosea’s image of God than with ours. Rationality and abstraction must bow before the heart — both then and now.
Hosea admonishes Israel as no better than common harlots. Idolatry, in particular false worship, brought with it all kinds of vices. Hosea was able to recreate the angst that so deeply wounded Yahweh because he experienced it first hand. Perhaps he married a prostitute as a prophetic gesture to startle his neighbors in hope that they might decode that Hosea represented Yahweh and that they were Gomer. Prophets like Hosea, and later Jeremiah, didn’t always use words. Actions speak louder than words, both then and now.
Out of righteous anger, Hosea would leave Gomer again and again and again, but return to her again and again and again. It was the same with Yahweh. Yahweh just couldn’t let Israel go, no matter her treachery, her fickleness. Yahweh kept pursuing her in spite of her rudeness, her crassness, her arrogance. Never ending faithfulness and mercy were hardly deserved. Yahweh is presented as a lover consumed.
To enter the very heart of God we may need to leave behind abstract concepts and analysis and exchange them for the more emotive, vivid and tangible. Sometimes this requires more gut than reason. That doesn’t mean that we check our brains at the door, but rather that we might know first hand the wildly consuming and pursuing lover that the ancients knew - a God who just won’t take no for an answer.
What kind of prophetic gesture might Hosea act out if he walked among our Bread of Life/ Pan de Vida Family? In what ways would Hosea feel the pains and disappointment of our consuming God and communicate God’s angst to us as he did Israel?
—Timothy J. Cronin