Column on image of God from Hos. 11

Many churches will be reading Hosea 11:1-11 this Sunday. I realize that the so called minor prophets (as in smaller books), or the Book of the Twelve are not on the top ten list of biblical material. I lift it up today as it gives us a different angle on how we imagine God.

I do not like to admit it, but if pushed, I have to admit that the image of god that resides in the back of the mind runs from a punitive, angry being to one that sighs constantly in disappointment with me. Now I do not want to go to the current extreme and try to lift up the self to be equated with the divine. That strikes me as either arrogance or a sad yawning pit of need to feed a depleted, dejected sense of self. One of the admirable points of the entire Bible is its wide-ranging and overflowing number of ways to approach a weak grasp fo the Holy One.

First, Hosea uses a traditional Old Testament view of God as a wounded spouse who has been hit with the infidelity of the spouse, the people. It was as close ot the prophets could get to the broken heart of god who saw a faithless people over and over again. Toward the end of the scroll, the image shifts to a parental one. Now I realize that this is a dangerous image for a few reasons. Some project their own personal parental experience on to the divine. if their experience was inadequate, they have a difficult time forming an adequate image of the divine. The most notorious matter would be the breach of trust and care that is abuse. Second, for adults, I am not sure how helpful an image that fosters dependence would be for people who carry so much on their shoulders. Adults do not need to be infantilized only in matters of religion.

Hosea’s image is a good deal more sophisticated. it portrays god with the anguish of a parent who has done everything right, who has done the absolute best one can for children and find it repaid with derision, rebellion, and a headlong rush toward destructive behavior.  Yes, god has a desire to make an end of it, to cut ties, to start again. Then memory will not permit it. God is pictured like a parent remembering playing with a child. The connections are powerful cords/bands/ropes of love. What doe sit do to your view of God to picture God playing like a grandparent with a small child, with infinite delight and patience? What memories of you do you think touch the divine heart deeply?

Then, God turns aside from thoughts of giving up and asks, “How can I give you up?” At funerals, I often speculate that one reasons for eternal life is that god cannot bear the thought of losing us to death forever. God’s compassion, God’s motherly love (as the word in Hebrew is related to the womb) grows warm and powerful, more powerful than anger.

God reminds us that the divine is not to be equated with being a mere mortal. At best, we can make analogies from our experience of God, but they will always fall short. The divine heart cannot bear the thought of losing the people. As Anne Lamott has said, when you find a god agreeing with you all of the time, that god loves those whom you love and hates those whom you hate, you know that you have constructed an idol. Allow yourself the quest to catch glimpses of the Holy One in ways deeper, more surprising than our mortal hearts and minds can ever hold. In the end, God is God, and we are humans, so we can never, ever, feel that we can capture the divine in its entirety.