Trinity 2

The reading from Hosea reminds me of a verse from Proverbs, “To every thing there is a season, to every thing there is a purpose under heaven.” The first verses tell of the time for tearing and injury, and a time for healing and the binding up of wounds. This, I admit, is not the usual starting point for this verse from Hosea because the healing and injury describe what God does to humanity. We say that the time for each is not determined by our wishes, but by the will of God. I wonder if we are right about that.

God sends events to try us, we say – essentially we see that God challenges our faith, our love, and our moral courage. That God tries us is a simple sentence but let us imagine what this requires of us and of God. It requires that we know how we stand toward God, that is, our faith; it requires that we know how we stand toward our neighbours (taken in the sense Jesus used the word), our love; it requires that we know how we stand toward ourselves, our moral courage. Each of these aspects of the trial of faith (as we call it to mind in the Lord’s Prayer, “lead us not into temptation”), each of these aspects of the trial of our selves should lead us into prolonged meditation about ourselves and about God – but, happily, this is only a short homily based on our OT lesson.

The lesson from Hosea contains a great deal we must consider, so let us consider the curses and the blessings which come from God’s hand – the tearing of us to pieces and the healing of us, the injuring of us and the binding up of our wounds. Humanity shall be revived by God’s hand shortly, in three days, the three days of the tomb at Easter. Humanity must know that we are smashed to pieces because it is only proper before humanity is made up again in the image of God through Jesus Christ. There is a tremendous tension in this dynamic relationship with God. Perhaps this tension can be explained by God’s word of promise – the revival and restoration so that all believers will live in the Kingdom. When we acknowledge the Lord, his appearance will be as sure as the rising of the sun. Like the winter rains, the prophet says, God will come to revive us, like the spring rains that water the earth. These pairs of blessing and curse are in a tremendous tension. It is the tension in which we find ourselves over against God, as we long for God. It is a tension which yields the best and the worst in all of us.

We all know that humanity is nothing without God, and vice versa, at least as regards the relationship. What God is without humanity is a question humanity will never be able to answer. When this tension is released, what is humanity? When the pairs of blessing and curse are themselves torn asunder, what then? Is humanity torn apart and injured with no hope for healing? Does humanity wait for death alone?

The questions, “What can I do with you, Ephraim? What can I do with you, Judah?” ask this same question. What is to happen to humanity apart from God? Do the seasons go round and round without God? Is there a time for every purpose without heaven?

“I cut you in pieces with my prophets, I killed you with the words of my mouth: my judgements flashed like lightning upon you.” Again, God tells us through the prophet that we are intimately bound to God. The prophets completely destroy the ephemeral, they speak to the heart of the human condition. The prophets tell us that humanity is bound to that ineffable mystery of the source of life of which we speak in the Creed week by week. The lightning of God’s judgement flashes in our souls and brings us to a state of high anxiety, the Angst of Kierkegaard and the modern philosophers, where only the leap of faith, the relationship between man and God exists. That heightened understanding makes us realise just how we need God as the basis of life, those pairs of blessings and curses which are the human condition.

In my reading this week, I read Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, a novel that many read back in the 1970s when we were searching for truth and the way, when we were looking to find our selves. The whole of the novel boils down to the times for everything, and all the purposes under heaven, but all of it in the gentlest of language which brought the spiritual dimension to the foreground, rather than remaining forgotten in very busy lives. There were points which corresponded with the reading from Hosea and how I began my thoughts today, such points from the novel may carry us on at another time.

But the image of water plays an essential part in the novel, for Siddhartha becomes a ferryman and lives by the river which talks to him. Water is also a part of our reading from Hosea, the water which comes in its due time, which promises the arrival of the Messiah, the coming of God into his Kingdom and our baptism. The moisture of the rain and the mist can be likened to God and humanity. The rain is real, the mist ephemeral; the rain gives needed moisture, the mist covers things up like people cover up what they really are. But the rain and the mist partake of the same essence, that moisture which is the heart of life. In the novel, Siddhartha finally understands his life when his boyhood friend meets him on his way across the river. That tension of the pairs in Hosea which seem to be the point of the novel are resolved in its last few pages, that tension speaks of love as the unity of life and death, the cycle of human time and its inner working, and I would say, the necessary relationship of Hosea’s blessings and curses between humanity and divinity. The human heart ultimately overcomes all things and is the essence of all life as we know it. The human heart alone concerns God, that is why Hosea proclaims in the name of God, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgement of God rather than burnt offerings.” As Siddhartha finally realises, it is not the doctrine or teachings of this or another master that matters, but only the pure heart as it is released between one and another, ultimately between God and humanity. The human heart alone concerns God, not the chimerical appearances of life style, the beggar, the student, the priest, the householder, the poor worker, the rich merchant, the eccentric ferryman living in isolation by the river. All these appearances change and through them the heart beats, the heart which God calls to himself, the heart which hears the call in that moment of anxiety when the lightning flashes to the depths of one’s very being.

AMEN