Audacious faith
Commentary
Object:
There are Sundays when we look at the lectionary readings and wonder how all three passages work together. Well, the answer is that the committee charged with establishing the lectionary didn't intend that all three of the scriptures should have equal weight as we consider what and how to preach. This Sunday is an obvious example. The lectionary has been leading us through the gospel of Luke, and this week's reading from Colossians goes easily with the gospel reading, emphasizing the fresh new approach to God that Christ introduces. The passage from Hosea really does not speak of God in the way that Jesus or Paul do, and it does not easily mesh with them.
Jesus and Paul are giving the followers of the Christ some instruction in our freedom before our Lord God. In Colossians, Paul is talking about the rules of Judaism as having been transformed by Jesus' teachings. In Luke's gospel, the discussion of prayer focuses on the audacity that Jesus teaches us to have in our relationship with God. If we're intent on tying Hosea to these New Testament passages, this audacity would be the hook to use, because God is certainly asking Hosea to be audacious in his choice of wife and the names of his children.
Luke 11:1-13
Jesus Teaches the Disciples How to Pray
The teachings on prayer in this section reveal the truly radical teachings of Jesus on the nature of our relationship with God. First, Jesus refers to God as his Father, and encourages us to do the same. He isn't inventing this idea. Isaiah and Jeremiah both refer to God as the Father of the people. But Jesus is consistent in calling God his father and relying on that relationship in good times and hard, which is not the case in the prophets' writings -- especially Hosea, who sees the relationship between God and Israel as being seriously broken.
This passage begins with one of the disciples asking Jesus to teach them to pray. Apparently John the Baptist had taught his disciples how to pray, and Jesus' disciples want the same kind of guidance. This needs to be understood when we look at the prayer we have come to call "The Lord's Prayer." This prayer is not necessarily to be prayed exactly as it is recorded in the Bible. For one thing, Luke records this prayer in a skeletal kind of way compared to Matthew's version. For another, there are a variety of forms of this prayer recorded in various ancient manuscripts of the gospel.
Let's take a close look at the prayer as we see it in the NIV along with a variety of translations in ancient alternative manuscripts. I have put the differences in brackets.
He said to them, "When you pray, say:
'[Our]Father[in heaven],
Hallowed be your name [.]
Your kingdom come[. May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.]
Give us each day our daily bread.
Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us. [is indebted to us.]
And lead us not into temptation [but deliver us from the evil one].' "
We can see, in looking at these differences, various ways that this prayer was prayed in the ancient times. But it does provide us with a template, so to speak, that teaches us how Jesus prayed. The prayer is actually more intimate than it appears in our Bibles. To start at the beginning, the Aramaic word used at the start of the prayer is actually the intimate form used by small children: "Daddy" rather than "Father." The fact is that most Christians are taken aback by that difference, even after 2,000 years of praying this prayer, which is why it was translated as "Father" in the first place. So immediately we're aware of the radical nature of Jesus' teaching -- it was too radical for the translators to keep in the vernacular.
The next line seems straightforward enough; we want our holy God to rule over all the earth, so that God's will may be perfectly done on earth, as it is in heaven. Or do we? Are we ready for God to take over our own lives, or just over the lives of others? The prayer calls on us to yield our lives, our plans, our families, our money, our old age, and all other aspects of our future. In America, we seem to assume that the reign of God would look like our own republican form of government, but that is not included in the language of verse 2. Instead, this line begins with the desire that everyone may hold God's name in reverence. That would eliminate swearing by God's name, except to call on God to witness our truthfulness and honor. And no kingdom is democratic; the king's word is law and obedience is mandatory, without excuse. That makes this part of the Lord's Prayer truly radical.
The plea for "our daily bread" is the easiest part of the prayer. In the original language, we are asking for tomorrow's bread being guaranteed today! This part is easy for us. But it is a statement of profound faith for people who live day to day, hand to mouth, uncertain if they will be able to find work to do for pay, or if that money will be enough to buy what they need in order to eat tomorrow. And that was the situation for those listening to Jesus, especially since Jesus and his disciples were dependent on the good will of others and their ability to keep them fed.
More difficult is the line about our sins. Eugene Peterson's Bible translation, The Message, translates the clause this way: "Keep us forgiven with you and forgiving others." This bypasses the question of "debts" vs. "trespasses" or "sins." And it puts the emphasis where Jesus seeks to put it: on forgiveness rather than offenses. The business of forgiving others easily is where most of us stumble. If we simply forgive others, we ask, won't they keep on offending us? It certainly removes us from parenting one another and moves us into living with each other in love and acceptance. This is truly radical faith.
Peterson's version does have one problem -- it leaves out the dependent conjunction "for," as in "for we also forgive everyone who sins against us." That construction tells us that if we refuse to forgive others, we will remain unforgiven. Matthew's gospel says expressly (in 7:1-3), "For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you."
Finally we come to the clause about temptation. Flip Wilson, a television comedian a generation ago, made people shriek with laughter in playing both the woman tempted to spend too much on a dress and the devil who is being held responsible for her failure to resist. She tells her husband, "The devil made me buy this dress!" How much easier it is to blame the devil rather than acknowledge our own willingness to give in. In our increasingly greedy society, it has become ever easier to give in to every kind of temptation and to blame the misdeeds of our celebrities for our failure. Again, Eugene Peterson's translation in The Message helps to put this in perspective: "Keep us safe from ourselves and the Devil." No matter who may have contributed to our fall, ultimately we must take responsibility for our behavior.
Having given them his own template for prayer, Jesus goes on to tell his disciples that we need to be serious and persistent in our relationship with God. He actually encourages us to practice "shameless audacity" with God!
The story that Jesus tells his disciples is of one adult's behavior with another, but we might understand the audacity of Jesus better if we think about the times when our children (or someone else's children) start asking for something they want in a store. Does the child ask just once for a toy or food s/he wants? Not likely. If Mom or Dad says "No," the child may wait a bit, but will ask a second time, usually with a more wheedling tone to her voice. "Pleeease?" she says, believing that this is a magic word. If she behaves very prettily, she may be able to wrap Daddy around her finger, so she tries that. The answer is still a firm "no." She tries out her best begging manner: "Pretty please?" If Mom sighs, the child knows she is weakening, and she may promise to share her treat with a younger sibling, or even with Mom or Dad, if she can just have what she wants. Is this perhaps why Jesus says to his disciples that we cannot get into heaven unless we are like little children?
How amazing that Jesus encourages this kind of behavior with God! If we really need something, we need to persist. In the parable, the man who is already in bed, his children around him, doesn't want to wake his little ones. He doesn't want to have to step over them (because they are all sleeping on the floor of their one-room house), and he wants to go back to sleep. But of course the continuous pounding on the door will eventually wake the children anyway, so with a sigh the man gets up and grabs whatever bread they have left over from the day and thrusts it at his friend, who now has what he needs. In alternative versions of this passage, it is said that he will give his insistent neighbor the bread to preserve his good name. The homes of the Jews in Jerusalem were built with shared walls, so they were very close together, and the exchange between the two neighbors can probably be heard by other homeowners, who also wish the man will get up and give his friend the bread so they can all get some sleep. They may also think poorly of the man if he does not give the bread, because not much is being asked for -- just three loaves of bread. What's a friend for, after all, if not to help when we're in trouble? His generosity will impress others, but his stinginess would too.
Are we to take it from this that God cares what we think of him? Yes, at least in the view of Jesus and the prophets before him. Compare the reading from Hosea: "Go and marry a promiscuous woman, and have children by her, for like an adulterous wife this land is guilty of unfaithfulness to the LORD." Abraham himself asked God, when God said he was going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, "What if there are fifty righteous people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing -- to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?" (Genesis18:24-25 NIV). Abraham kept after God like this until God promised to spare the place for the sake of just ten righteous people in that city. (When God found only Abraham's nephew Lot and his family of eight to be righteous, the angels got them out of town before fire descended on the city. In this way, God was faithful to keep his promise to Abraham.)
Luke's gospel is not done with Jesus' teaching on prayer. He includes here Jesus' saying "Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you." Everyone who does this gets what they need. But do we? We have a hard time reconciling this verse with unanswered prayers, especially if we have been denied the survival of a loved one. We may realize a lessening of our grief or pain at our losses, but that hardly seems to overcome the gap between this passage and our experience. And that disconnect can only be made worse when we have books telling us that if we want to be rich, powerful, famous, and happy every day, all we have to do is concentrate on what we want and keep asking for it. And if that doesn't work, the fault must be in us. Nothing could be more alienating than to have our grief and anger at a loss characterized as faithless.
This conundrum clears up when we look at Jesus' audience. The people to whom he was speaking were not the upper class (and as John Dominic Crossan points out, there was no middle class), those who were in charge of their own lives. He was speaking to people who had been told that they were too dirty, too ritually impure, and too small for God to notice. They could not afford to go to the temple and make sacrifices on behalf of their families. They could not afford the price of a mikvah, or ritual bath, and this barred them from temple worship as well. These folk were spiritually cut off, disenfranchised, and I suspect that the urging of Jesus that we should ask, seek, and knock will encourage the powerless in any place at any time. The rich expect God to listen; the poor often don't even bother God with their problems. After all, if we were better people, how could it be that we lost our job, our home, our family, or that our child got so sick that he died?
The last part of the gospel reading presses us to understand what group constitutes Jesus' audience. Jesus compares the good will of a father toward his child to the love God has for those listening. Here are fathers who oftentimes have their children ask for food that they cannot provide. In fact, some of the old manuscripts, rather than using the "...fish, will give him a snake instead?" say "...bread, will give him a stone?" The latter phrase, of course, draws our attention to the beginning of Jesus' ministry, when he was hungry and the devil offered him bread -- if he would use the powers a Son of God ought to have.
Jesus seems to be playing on the efforts of the devil to deceive. Some fish can resemble snakes. A curled-up scorpion can in fact look like an egg to the unwary. And those pita bread loaves do look like some flat stones of the desert around Judea. The devil wants us dead, separated from God, in pain from the bite of a snake or scorpion. This is most decidedly not what God wants for his children. God wants us to know that we are loved, we are free to ask God for what we need, the door to the kingdom of heaven is open to us even before we knock, but decidedly when we ask to come in. No matter what we may have been told by those who are pompous about their standing with God, we are beloved children of the Creator of the universe.
Colossians 2:6-15 (16-19)
Freedom from Human Rules
The book of Colossians is written to Christians living in Colosse in Asia Minor. While the book itself is apparently a writing against an early form of Gnosticism, this short passage has a good deal to say against the idea that Christians must follow Jewish law, and this was an overriding theme of Paul's ministry wherever he preached.
The first of the things Paul tosses to one side is the body of purity laws found in the Torah. Kosher law has a multitude of rules about food, what kinds of meat can be eaten, how it must be prepared, and how to care for the cooking and eating utensils. The same thing goes for what is kosher in the way of drink. Paul's instruction is that neither side in this debate is to judge those who are eating and drinking according to their own customs.
The second area Paul addresses is that of religious festivals. The Jews did not work on the first night of the new moon, and there were religious rituals connected with that monthly occasion. Likewise, the Jews did not work during any of their yearly festivals, nor on the weekly Sabbath day. The rules of what constituted "work" were enumerated so that no one would accidentally break one of them.
But Paul says that all of these rules are mere shadows compared to the glory that is the Christ. All of these rules were meant to keep us safe, but when Christ came they all began to fall away. This is because Christ is the head of the body of Christians and aims us at the glory of God. The old props are done away with. There is no need of them. They are all doomed to pass out of the world anyway.
There is no evidence that any of the Jewish people ever worshiped angels, nor is there any such worship in Greek or Roman manuscripts. So whatever group might have done this is uncertain. The Gnostics did believe that one is saved by what you know (gnosis, in Greek), and it may be that the search for spiritual knowledge led some to attempt to call up angels so as to gain that kind of knowledge. Today we cannot know exactly what Paul was referring to, but it does read as though there were some who had visions, and they thought those visions ought to trump what was being taught in the early church. Paul says that "they have lost connection with the head," meaning Christ. We need to know, he goes on to say, that God causes the body of Christians to grow, not those who claim special knowledge.
Hosea 1:2-10
Hosea's Wife and Children
Hosea begins his writing by telling us that God told him to marry "a promiscuous woman." In so doing, he says, he shows the way God feels about the Northern Kingdom throwing in their lot with Assyria and following after the gods of that nation (Ba'al and Astarte, Father and Mother gods, whose marriage was supposed to bring fertility to the land and people). There have been speculations in the past that Gomer may have been a temple prostitute in that religion, but there is no indication of that in the text. The word for promiscuous is definitely not the same as the word for prostitute in Hebrew. That she is promiscuous becomes plain later in the book, but that is not part of today's text.
Each child that she bears to Hosea is given a strange name by their father. First is a boy, whom Hosea names Jezreel. The name itself is not so strange, there are many children named after a famous city, but the reason he chooses the name is that this is the scene of a bloody battle in which two generations earlier Jehu led a rebellion against the king of Israel, making an alliance with both Egypt and Assyria. The name is a witness against the current king, who descended from the rebels.
The second child she bears, a girl, is named "No Pity" because God swears he will have no pity or forgiveness on the house of Israel for going after other gods.
Their third child, a son, is named "Not My People." Hosea says that God is no longer the God of Israel. This would be a breaking of the covenant between the Lord and Israel, a serious business. But, Hosea says, Israel broke the covenant by worshiping the gods of Assyria and entering into a treaty with Assyria. The covenant between a husband and wife is much like the covenant between God and God's people, so Hosea says his marriage reflects the state of Israel in relation to God.
Hosea is not the first prophet whose calling was to act out in their own lives the words that God has to say to the people of Israel. Isaiah named one of his sons "A Remnant Shall Return," for example, as a promise to the people that although they were going to be taken by Babylon there would be survivors to return to a restored land. Jeremiah wore a yoke to demonstrate how God was going to lead the people into Babylon. And Ezekiel was told to make a model of the city of Jerusalem and to build a siege-work against it, and to lie down on his side, acting out the end of Jerusalem, eating the kind of bread the people will have to eat while their supplies dwindle.
This kind of acting-out is foreign to us, but it is also strange to the people of Hosea's time. The audacious nature of his actions does, however, remind us that God wants to be involved in every part of our lives. The willingness of the prophet to enter into this sort of thing is extreme in any society, and is intended to attract the attention of the general public so that they can hear the prophet's warnings.
When Jesus came, he attracted the attention of the people by his healing acts. That is because Jesus' message is completely the opposite of Hosea's. It is a message of salvation, or wholeness, a message of belonging, a message of the invitation of God to come close. They are both speaking on behalf of God, but in a very different time and place. When we preach, we can use either approach, but what do we want to accomplish? That is what we need to ask ourselves and God as we approach this week's lectionary readings.
Jesus and Paul are giving the followers of the Christ some instruction in our freedom before our Lord God. In Colossians, Paul is talking about the rules of Judaism as having been transformed by Jesus' teachings. In Luke's gospel, the discussion of prayer focuses on the audacity that Jesus teaches us to have in our relationship with God. If we're intent on tying Hosea to these New Testament passages, this audacity would be the hook to use, because God is certainly asking Hosea to be audacious in his choice of wife and the names of his children.
Luke 11:1-13
Jesus Teaches the Disciples How to Pray
The teachings on prayer in this section reveal the truly radical teachings of Jesus on the nature of our relationship with God. First, Jesus refers to God as his Father, and encourages us to do the same. He isn't inventing this idea. Isaiah and Jeremiah both refer to God as the Father of the people. But Jesus is consistent in calling God his father and relying on that relationship in good times and hard, which is not the case in the prophets' writings -- especially Hosea, who sees the relationship between God and Israel as being seriously broken.
This passage begins with one of the disciples asking Jesus to teach them to pray. Apparently John the Baptist had taught his disciples how to pray, and Jesus' disciples want the same kind of guidance. This needs to be understood when we look at the prayer we have come to call "The Lord's Prayer." This prayer is not necessarily to be prayed exactly as it is recorded in the Bible. For one thing, Luke records this prayer in a skeletal kind of way compared to Matthew's version. For another, there are a variety of forms of this prayer recorded in various ancient manuscripts of the gospel.
Let's take a close look at the prayer as we see it in the NIV along with a variety of translations in ancient alternative manuscripts. I have put the differences in brackets.
He said to them, "When you pray, say:
'[Our]Father[in heaven],
Hallowed be your name [.]
Your kingdom come[. May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.]
Give us each day our daily bread.
Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us. [is indebted to us.]
And lead us not into temptation [but deliver us from the evil one].' "
We can see, in looking at these differences, various ways that this prayer was prayed in the ancient times. But it does provide us with a template, so to speak, that teaches us how Jesus prayed. The prayer is actually more intimate than it appears in our Bibles. To start at the beginning, the Aramaic word used at the start of the prayer is actually the intimate form used by small children: "Daddy" rather than "Father." The fact is that most Christians are taken aback by that difference, even after 2,000 years of praying this prayer, which is why it was translated as "Father" in the first place. So immediately we're aware of the radical nature of Jesus' teaching -- it was too radical for the translators to keep in the vernacular.
The next line seems straightforward enough; we want our holy God to rule over all the earth, so that God's will may be perfectly done on earth, as it is in heaven. Or do we? Are we ready for God to take over our own lives, or just over the lives of others? The prayer calls on us to yield our lives, our plans, our families, our money, our old age, and all other aspects of our future. In America, we seem to assume that the reign of God would look like our own republican form of government, but that is not included in the language of verse 2. Instead, this line begins with the desire that everyone may hold God's name in reverence. That would eliminate swearing by God's name, except to call on God to witness our truthfulness and honor. And no kingdom is democratic; the king's word is law and obedience is mandatory, without excuse. That makes this part of the Lord's Prayer truly radical.
The plea for "our daily bread" is the easiest part of the prayer. In the original language, we are asking for tomorrow's bread being guaranteed today! This part is easy for us. But it is a statement of profound faith for people who live day to day, hand to mouth, uncertain if they will be able to find work to do for pay, or if that money will be enough to buy what they need in order to eat tomorrow. And that was the situation for those listening to Jesus, especially since Jesus and his disciples were dependent on the good will of others and their ability to keep them fed.
More difficult is the line about our sins. Eugene Peterson's Bible translation, The Message, translates the clause this way: "Keep us forgiven with you and forgiving others." This bypasses the question of "debts" vs. "trespasses" or "sins." And it puts the emphasis where Jesus seeks to put it: on forgiveness rather than offenses. The business of forgiving others easily is where most of us stumble. If we simply forgive others, we ask, won't they keep on offending us? It certainly removes us from parenting one another and moves us into living with each other in love and acceptance. This is truly radical faith.
Peterson's version does have one problem -- it leaves out the dependent conjunction "for," as in "for we also forgive everyone who sins against us." That construction tells us that if we refuse to forgive others, we will remain unforgiven. Matthew's gospel says expressly (in 7:1-3), "For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you."
Finally we come to the clause about temptation. Flip Wilson, a television comedian a generation ago, made people shriek with laughter in playing both the woman tempted to spend too much on a dress and the devil who is being held responsible for her failure to resist. She tells her husband, "The devil made me buy this dress!" How much easier it is to blame the devil rather than acknowledge our own willingness to give in. In our increasingly greedy society, it has become ever easier to give in to every kind of temptation and to blame the misdeeds of our celebrities for our failure. Again, Eugene Peterson's translation in The Message helps to put this in perspective: "Keep us safe from ourselves and the Devil." No matter who may have contributed to our fall, ultimately we must take responsibility for our behavior.
Having given them his own template for prayer, Jesus goes on to tell his disciples that we need to be serious and persistent in our relationship with God. He actually encourages us to practice "shameless audacity" with God!
The story that Jesus tells his disciples is of one adult's behavior with another, but we might understand the audacity of Jesus better if we think about the times when our children (or someone else's children) start asking for something they want in a store. Does the child ask just once for a toy or food s/he wants? Not likely. If Mom or Dad says "No," the child may wait a bit, but will ask a second time, usually with a more wheedling tone to her voice. "Pleeease?" she says, believing that this is a magic word. If she behaves very prettily, she may be able to wrap Daddy around her finger, so she tries that. The answer is still a firm "no." She tries out her best begging manner: "Pretty please?" If Mom sighs, the child knows she is weakening, and she may promise to share her treat with a younger sibling, or even with Mom or Dad, if she can just have what she wants. Is this perhaps why Jesus says to his disciples that we cannot get into heaven unless we are like little children?
How amazing that Jesus encourages this kind of behavior with God! If we really need something, we need to persist. In the parable, the man who is already in bed, his children around him, doesn't want to wake his little ones. He doesn't want to have to step over them (because they are all sleeping on the floor of their one-room house), and he wants to go back to sleep. But of course the continuous pounding on the door will eventually wake the children anyway, so with a sigh the man gets up and grabs whatever bread they have left over from the day and thrusts it at his friend, who now has what he needs. In alternative versions of this passage, it is said that he will give his insistent neighbor the bread to preserve his good name. The homes of the Jews in Jerusalem were built with shared walls, so they were very close together, and the exchange between the two neighbors can probably be heard by other homeowners, who also wish the man will get up and give his friend the bread so they can all get some sleep. They may also think poorly of the man if he does not give the bread, because not much is being asked for -- just three loaves of bread. What's a friend for, after all, if not to help when we're in trouble? His generosity will impress others, but his stinginess would too.
Are we to take it from this that God cares what we think of him? Yes, at least in the view of Jesus and the prophets before him. Compare the reading from Hosea: "Go and marry a promiscuous woman, and have children by her, for like an adulterous wife this land is guilty of unfaithfulness to the LORD." Abraham himself asked God, when God said he was going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, "What if there are fifty righteous people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing -- to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?" (Genesis18:24-25 NIV). Abraham kept after God like this until God promised to spare the place for the sake of just ten righteous people in that city. (When God found only Abraham's nephew Lot and his family of eight to be righteous, the angels got them out of town before fire descended on the city. In this way, God was faithful to keep his promise to Abraham.)
Luke's gospel is not done with Jesus' teaching on prayer. He includes here Jesus' saying "Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you." Everyone who does this gets what they need. But do we? We have a hard time reconciling this verse with unanswered prayers, especially if we have been denied the survival of a loved one. We may realize a lessening of our grief or pain at our losses, but that hardly seems to overcome the gap between this passage and our experience. And that disconnect can only be made worse when we have books telling us that if we want to be rich, powerful, famous, and happy every day, all we have to do is concentrate on what we want and keep asking for it. And if that doesn't work, the fault must be in us. Nothing could be more alienating than to have our grief and anger at a loss characterized as faithless.
This conundrum clears up when we look at Jesus' audience. The people to whom he was speaking were not the upper class (and as John Dominic Crossan points out, there was no middle class), those who were in charge of their own lives. He was speaking to people who had been told that they were too dirty, too ritually impure, and too small for God to notice. They could not afford to go to the temple and make sacrifices on behalf of their families. They could not afford the price of a mikvah, or ritual bath, and this barred them from temple worship as well. These folk were spiritually cut off, disenfranchised, and I suspect that the urging of Jesus that we should ask, seek, and knock will encourage the powerless in any place at any time. The rich expect God to listen; the poor often don't even bother God with their problems. After all, if we were better people, how could it be that we lost our job, our home, our family, or that our child got so sick that he died?
The last part of the gospel reading presses us to understand what group constitutes Jesus' audience. Jesus compares the good will of a father toward his child to the love God has for those listening. Here are fathers who oftentimes have their children ask for food that they cannot provide. In fact, some of the old manuscripts, rather than using the "...fish, will give him a snake instead?" say "...bread, will give him a stone?" The latter phrase, of course, draws our attention to the beginning of Jesus' ministry, when he was hungry and the devil offered him bread -- if he would use the powers a Son of God ought to have.
Jesus seems to be playing on the efforts of the devil to deceive. Some fish can resemble snakes. A curled-up scorpion can in fact look like an egg to the unwary. And those pita bread loaves do look like some flat stones of the desert around Judea. The devil wants us dead, separated from God, in pain from the bite of a snake or scorpion. This is most decidedly not what God wants for his children. God wants us to know that we are loved, we are free to ask God for what we need, the door to the kingdom of heaven is open to us even before we knock, but decidedly when we ask to come in. No matter what we may have been told by those who are pompous about their standing with God, we are beloved children of the Creator of the universe.
Colossians 2:6-15 (16-19)
Freedom from Human Rules
The book of Colossians is written to Christians living in Colosse in Asia Minor. While the book itself is apparently a writing against an early form of Gnosticism, this short passage has a good deal to say against the idea that Christians must follow Jewish law, and this was an overriding theme of Paul's ministry wherever he preached.
The first of the things Paul tosses to one side is the body of purity laws found in the Torah. Kosher law has a multitude of rules about food, what kinds of meat can be eaten, how it must be prepared, and how to care for the cooking and eating utensils. The same thing goes for what is kosher in the way of drink. Paul's instruction is that neither side in this debate is to judge those who are eating and drinking according to their own customs.
The second area Paul addresses is that of religious festivals. The Jews did not work on the first night of the new moon, and there were religious rituals connected with that monthly occasion. Likewise, the Jews did not work during any of their yearly festivals, nor on the weekly Sabbath day. The rules of what constituted "work" were enumerated so that no one would accidentally break one of them.
But Paul says that all of these rules are mere shadows compared to the glory that is the Christ. All of these rules were meant to keep us safe, but when Christ came they all began to fall away. This is because Christ is the head of the body of Christians and aims us at the glory of God. The old props are done away with. There is no need of them. They are all doomed to pass out of the world anyway.
There is no evidence that any of the Jewish people ever worshiped angels, nor is there any such worship in Greek or Roman manuscripts. So whatever group might have done this is uncertain. The Gnostics did believe that one is saved by what you know (gnosis, in Greek), and it may be that the search for spiritual knowledge led some to attempt to call up angels so as to gain that kind of knowledge. Today we cannot know exactly what Paul was referring to, but it does read as though there were some who had visions, and they thought those visions ought to trump what was being taught in the early church. Paul says that "they have lost connection with the head," meaning Christ. We need to know, he goes on to say, that God causes the body of Christians to grow, not those who claim special knowledge.
Hosea 1:2-10
Hosea's Wife and Children
Hosea begins his writing by telling us that God told him to marry "a promiscuous woman." In so doing, he says, he shows the way God feels about the Northern Kingdom throwing in their lot with Assyria and following after the gods of that nation (Ba'al and Astarte, Father and Mother gods, whose marriage was supposed to bring fertility to the land and people). There have been speculations in the past that Gomer may have been a temple prostitute in that religion, but there is no indication of that in the text. The word for promiscuous is definitely not the same as the word for prostitute in Hebrew. That she is promiscuous becomes plain later in the book, but that is not part of today's text.
Each child that she bears to Hosea is given a strange name by their father. First is a boy, whom Hosea names Jezreel. The name itself is not so strange, there are many children named after a famous city, but the reason he chooses the name is that this is the scene of a bloody battle in which two generations earlier Jehu led a rebellion against the king of Israel, making an alliance with both Egypt and Assyria. The name is a witness against the current king, who descended from the rebels.
The second child she bears, a girl, is named "No Pity" because God swears he will have no pity or forgiveness on the house of Israel for going after other gods.
Their third child, a son, is named "Not My People." Hosea says that God is no longer the God of Israel. This would be a breaking of the covenant between the Lord and Israel, a serious business. But, Hosea says, Israel broke the covenant by worshiping the gods of Assyria and entering into a treaty with Assyria. The covenant between a husband and wife is much like the covenant between God and God's people, so Hosea says his marriage reflects the state of Israel in relation to God.
Hosea is not the first prophet whose calling was to act out in their own lives the words that God has to say to the people of Israel. Isaiah named one of his sons "A Remnant Shall Return," for example, as a promise to the people that although they were going to be taken by Babylon there would be survivors to return to a restored land. Jeremiah wore a yoke to demonstrate how God was going to lead the people into Babylon. And Ezekiel was told to make a model of the city of Jerusalem and to build a siege-work against it, and to lie down on his side, acting out the end of Jerusalem, eating the kind of bread the people will have to eat while their supplies dwindle.
This kind of acting-out is foreign to us, but it is also strange to the people of Hosea's time. The audacious nature of his actions does, however, remind us that God wants to be involved in every part of our lives. The willingness of the prophet to enter into this sort of thing is extreme in any society, and is intended to attract the attention of the general public so that they can hear the prophet's warnings.
When Jesus came, he attracted the attention of the people by his healing acts. That is because Jesus' message is completely the opposite of Hosea's. It is a message of salvation, or wholeness, a message of belonging, a message of the invitation of God to come close. They are both speaking on behalf of God, but in a very different time and place. When we preach, we can use either approach, but what do we want to accomplish? That is what we need to ask ourselves and God as we approach this week's lectionary readings.
