Richard Davenport
June 11, 2023 – Proper 5
Hosea 5:15-6:6
Guys, husbands, you’ve all been there. You’ve been out and about, maybe at work or running errands, doing some yard work, whatever the case may be. You get in the house and your wife is standing there giving you…the look. Suddenly you realize you have done something terribly wrong. You probably don’t even know what it is, but it doesn’t matter. You have made some sort of grave mistake.
What are you going to do? First you have to figure out what you did. She might be very direct and vocal about it or you may have to suffer through the silent treatment for a while. Did you forget your anniversary? Did you forget to pick your kids up from school? Whatever the case may be, it’s now on you to resolve the problem that you have apparently caused.
How are you going to do that? There’s the age-old standards, flowers and chocolate. I remember going to a florist to pick out some flowers for Laurie’s birthday at one point and the guy there asked what I had done to necessitate flowers. In this case I could say, “Nothing…that I know of.” Still, I’m sure he asked because it’s still very much a thing that husbands buy flowers as a way of getting back into their wife’s good graces. It has probably always been this way. I can picture Adam coming upon Eve and receiving the look, whereupon he is forced to figure out how to solve this problem. He doesn’t have the benefit of a helpful florist however, so he has to go pick the flowers himself.
At any rate, this sort of thing might help you if what you did was genuinely some kind of oversight or honest mistake. Missing your anniversary is pretty bad, but it’s possible you’ve been so overwhelmed with work that your schedule just got all out of sorts and you forgot. Forgetting to pick up the kids probably threw her day all out of whack and caused a lot of grief. Your mind runs on autopilot sometimes and something out of the ordinary like that can get lost in the shuffle. Could you have done better? Sure. But, at least you didn’t do it to be a jerk. You didn’t do it deliberately. Deep down, she may be disappointed, but she still knows it wasn’t intentional.
No, that’s a whole different problem. I’ve seen situations that have been much worse. A husband’s gambling addiction that drained the family’s bank account and left them unable to pay the bills and forced them to sell their house. Or alcohol addiction, this time with the wife, the death of her father drove her into despair and alcohol. She refused help and it eventually shattered her family. Then, of course, there’s adultery. There really isn’t any way to argue adultery as anything but a deliberate act. You know what you’re doing and you know what it means and you did it anyway.
That’s where Hosea comes in. Hosea isn’t a book we get to very often. Hosea is a prophet sent to the wayward and idolatrous people of Israel. Hosea is a lot like the prophet Ezekiel, in that God uses them both as object lessons. Their lives are meant to outwardly display God’s relationship with his people and how that relationship suffers when the people don’t hold to the promises they’ve made.
In this case, Hosea was specifically told by God to marry an adulteress, someone who for whom those sorts of promises have little meaning. Still, God didn’t quite twist his arm to do it. We’re told that Hosea truly loved his wife, despite her background, and meant to keep his promise to her. God, in his wisdom, knew this would be the case. Hosea wouldn’t have been a proper object lesson if married her because he was forced.
That’s the point, after all. As an object lesson, Hosea’s relationship with his wife tells us something about God’s relationship with his people, those he refers to as, “my beloved.” Still, the betrayal is every bit as real. She still made a promise to her husband. She broke the promise and the trust her husband had given her was betrayed.
Granted, in this instance it’s the wife who’s in trouble, not the husband. When Hosea rescues her and they confront the situation and how she got there, what does she do? If it was the husband, he could go pick up some flowers and chocolates as a way of apologizing. For the wife, maybe a six pack of cold beer? Maybe this warrants a twelve pack. Maybe a ticket to the ballgame. After that it’s, “Well, lesson learned. I’ll be more careful next time, I promise.”
Wait a minute. Hold up. Really? I haven’t personally heard of anyone trying to give a gift as a way to make up for something like this and I suspect that’s for a good reason. Did you think that giving some flowers or a case of beer would put everything behind you? The audacity of such a thing, that anyone would think you could just fix it all like that, like you’re trying to buy their forgiveness. It’s rather insulting to even be thinking like this.
So maybe the problem isn’t so much the giving as it is the scale. I mean, flowers or beer aren’t very convincing. If the gift was a little grander, more extravagant, maybe that would enough to buy your way back into good graces. Jewelry, tickets to the big game, or a concert perhaps? Was what you did really that bad? Maybe you need to go all the way up to something like a new car. Perhaps that would be enough to smooth any ruffled feathers caused by your bad behavior.
Gift giving doesn’t actually solve any problem of this sort. At best it becomes a distraction. It could be that’s all you’re really hoping for anyway. If you don’t have to talk about whatever it was that landed you in hot water, then maybe you got what you wanted to begin with. Giving a gift, even a really expensive and extravagant gift, ends up being easier to stomach than actually admitting you did something wrong, admitting that you willfully, intentionally hurt someone who loves you. Now you’re compounding the problem by being unwilling to admit what you did and face the hurt you’ve caused. It’s easier to hide, to redirect, to deflect the blame and the hurt because your pride and self-image is more important than healing, than reconciliation, than repentance. Easier to buy a gift or do some other nice things to try and make it all just go away so you don’t have to deal with it anymore.
Had Hosea’s wife gone back to her old ways, what would have been the result? We can only speculate. The rest of the book is taken up by prophecies God sends against Israel. God looks at the covenant promise he made with them and how they have treated him in spite of the promise they made to him. He doesn’t have to welcome them back. He didn’t have to promise them anything to begin with. His relationship with them wasn’t forced. He established a covenant with them because he loves them.
Their love for God is fleeting and transitory. Israel is as likely to give its love to God as it is to chase after basically anything that catches its attention. Holding to their covenant promises just isn’t a big priority for them most of the time. But, there are those times when they realize that leaving God is when things start to go badly. Ok, I mean, not great that they abandoned their promise to begin with, but now that they’ve come to your senses, now what?
A gift? That’s what you do when you’re trying to get things back to normal, right? God isn’t so much about the flowers or case of beer, though maybe those would be acceptable too. In the Old Testament it was easy to figure out. You just brought the right kind of sacrifice and everything was good again. A goat or a ram or something like that would smooth over any relationship difficulties your bad choices caused. So an Israelite knew just what to do.
How about now? If you’ve found yourself making some bad life choices and forsaking your promise to God, to love him above all else, what do you do? A gift? Again, that’s what you do in this kind of situation, right? You probably won’t have much luck with a ram or a goat. I’m certainly not going to sacrifice it for you, so that’s a no go. Flowers and beer probably won’t get much traction either. Maybe you put a little extra in the offering plate, or you put in a little more time helping out around here with church functions. Those are their own kinds of sacrifices. Perhaps that will solve my problem here and bring us together again with no ill will.
But it doesn’t. That kind of mentality doesn’t make any sense in human relationships, so why do we think God should act any differently? There are many who think it should work this way in all relationships, that a big enough gift should overcome any problem. But, even well meaning people can make this mistake. You find yourself thinking this way because you don’t realize the magnitude of what you’ve done. A little lie here, a little gossip there, a little envy or a brief outburst of anger, quickly come and gone with little consequence, should be relatively minor and should easily fall into the “gift” category. A little gift, a little sacrifice and everything is taken care of.
But God doesn’t want your sacrifice. Not like that. If you aren’t going to buy your way back into the good graces of a spurned lover, an abandoned spouse, why should God treat your gifts any differently? Those of you who have hurt or been hurt like that know, the only thing that begins true healing is an apology, genuine sorrow and repentance. None of us are especially good at forgiveness, especially when hurt, but that forgiveness and healing can never truly begin until the one who has hurt us comes and admits what they’ve done.
Sin isn’t merely a debt to be paid off. It is abandoning the promise you have made to God. In theory, you can pay off a debt. But you can’t pay someone to love you. No amount of sacrifice or good work will ever make that right again. It doesn’t work in the world. It doesn’t work for God.
When we look to Christ, we see him offering a sacrifice. He offers his own life. His sacrifice is accepted. Why? He had never abandoned his relationship to his Father. He simply gives out of love. Jesus gives what you cannot. Where you and I are constantly breaking our promises to God, Jesus stays true. God tells us he doesn’t want our ill-conceived sacrifices. So what are we to do? What we always should be doing, healing through repentance. God’s a lot better at forgiveness than we are. He doesn’t hesitate or waver. God is always committed to his people, no matter what. If we come back to him and admit our guilt, he will always welcome us back and forgive our former offenses.
Looking to Christ, we see the value in sacrifice. His sacrifice meant something because there was no sin standing between he and his Father. There was nothing separating them, no offenses to create a rift. As forgiven Christians, our sacrifices of money, time, and even humble thanks and praise, have meaning because they have no agenda. They aren’t intended to buy anything from God. They are simply our way of showing our love for the God who has done so much for us. Whether you give a little or a lot isn’t so much the issue as why you are giving it. A bouquet of flowers for your wife or a case of beer for your husband is an insult when you’re trying to buy off your offenses. But, that same gift, given without any agenda, becomes a joyful expression of the love you have for each other.
Come to God. Seek his forgiveness and know that you will receive that forgiveness every time you repent. It isn’t easy to admit guilt, but his love for you is such that he is willing to forgive anything and everything you’ve done. Look at your life and you will see the gifts he has given you, gifts given purely out of love, gifts given so that you may live, even when the gift was the sacrifice of his own Son.