Hosea at   Evensong 4.7.10

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? You know the problem – chickens lay eggs, but then the chicken has to come out of an egg, which came from…and so on. Now although there are no chicken flapping around in Hosea, we have a similar conundrum. Which came first, the prophecy, or the unfaithful wife?
We heard in the reading how Hosea married Gomer, a prostitute, had children by her; then she was unfaithful, he won her back and restored the marriage relationship. The story is related in retrospect as if the whole thing started off with God telling Hosea out of the blue to marry a prostitute in order to provide an illustration for  his message. But maybe it was the other way round – Hosea for some reason, maybe love, decided to marry this woman Gomer; suffered the consequences of her unfaithfulness, and saw in that a painful parallel to Israel’s unfaithfulness to God, their covenant God.
I am inclined to think that was how it happened. The prophets often acted out their message with visible parables and symbols, deliberately, but it is one thing to say Jeremiah smashed a pot to illustrate a point, and rather different to say Hosea married a common prostitute in order to prove a point.
 I think it is as much a gift of prophecy to see events as they unfold through Gods eyes and to interpret them for others as God sees them – as much as to foresee, foretell, what is going to happen. It is hard to see and fully grasp the significance of events as they unfold; it takes a prophetic mind to do that.
Anyway, however it came about, the story of Hosea is we might say a colourful one. Gomer may already have had a history of prostitution, and yet Hosea married her. The children she bears he gives symbolic names so that each becomes a  walking message from God, a reminder every time they are seen about the streets of the failure of the covenant between God and Israel: Jezreel was the site of a bloody massacre in the previous century, which Hosea condemns; Lo-ruhamah means ‘not pitied’ and Lo-Ammi ‘not my people’ – both indicate God’s rejection of his people Israel.
Hosea was disturbed by Israel’s worship of the Baals, the foreign gods which threatened the loyalty of the Israelite peoples ever since they arrived in Canaan – there were so many tempting reasons to worship the gods of corn and wine and fertility in an settled agricultural life, instead of being exclusively loyal to Yahweh. Going after these other gods, Hosea sees as like marital unfaithfulness. Being fickle, unreliable, no commitment, no staying power. As well as that, Hosea criticised the authorities for seeking political  alliances here there and everywhere to bolster up their fragile security –first with Egypt, then Assyria – like silly doves fluttering from tree to tree, or our pigeons that come into church flapping about between the pillars. ‘Your love for me is like the morning mist, like the dew that goes away early’ says God in despair that Israel will not commit properly. Is so easily distracted. Makes a promise and fails to keep it.
Hosea felt this pain of God and it’s tangible as you read his prophecy. His own marriage and the pain and grief it caused him showed him in a small way how God feels, about his people. When they wanted to worship the fertility gods, or commit adultery as it were, God wails ‘But it was I who gave them the grain, the wine, the oil’ – all the good things of life. Why can’t they see that? This is the pain that God feels all the time when we fail to recognise where our blessings come from – or even that we are blessed, sometimes.
‘She went after her lovers and forgot me, says the Lord.’  Who or what are those lovers today, that we go after? Money, success, image, popularity, instant pleasure – those things woo us successfully so often.
Despite the depth of that pain though, Hosea shows God’s forgiving heart as well. Hosea took Gomer back after her unfaithfulness, and he spoke of Israel’s return to God – he didn’t see the situation as hopeless at all, he knew Israel would return – and God would be ready to forgive and to restore them. In chapter 6 is a wonderful passage of repentance and faith:
‘Come, let us return to the Lord. For it is he who has torn, and he will heal us; he has struck down, and he will bind us up. After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up that we may live before him.’ 
this phrase after two days…on the third day… may seem to us uncannily like the resurrection of Jesus, but in Hebrew idiom it simply means ‘after a short time’, so it isn’t a prophecy about Jesus, although it can now give us a perspective on Jesus taking our sin on himself. And it’s a reminder that the forgiving God is not only found in the NT – here he is in the depths of the OT already.
I would like to have met Hosea; he breaks all the conventions which probably made him rather an interesting chap to know. Not only does he use this incredibly daring parallel between his rather dodgy marriage and God’s relationship with Israel, he also talks about God as a mother – not a father. You can find it in chapter 11; another passage where God is lamenting the blindness and forgetfulness of his people in leaving him for other gods despite all he had done for them.
‘Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk, I took them up in my arms, I led them with cords of human kindness and bands of love, I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks, I bent down to them and fed them.’
This is an incredibly tender picture of mum leading a child on reins, feeding and cuddling it.  An astonishing insight for Hosea in such a very patriarchal society, and alongside the image of God as faithful husband of a wandering wife.
Hosea is saying over and over again, any way he can put it, ‘everything you are and everything you have is from God. And all God wants in return is that you acknowledge that and thank him for it and love him back, as he loves you’.
‘I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice; the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.’ steadfast love. That’s the heart of it. Because his love for us is utterly steadfast, unmovable. Hosea saw that -  through the miseries of his own family life, he realised a little bit of what God’s heart of love is like.

‘Come, let us return to the Lord. He will come to us like the showers, like the spring rains that water the earth.’
Amen.