So now I will expose her lewdness before the eyes of her lovers; no one will take her out of my hands. I will stop all her celebrations: her yearly festivals, her New Moons, her Sabbath days—all her appointed feasts. I will ruin her vines and her fig trees, which she said were her pay from her lover. I will make them a thicket, and wild animals will devour them. I will punish her for the days she burned incense to the Baals; she decked herself with rings and jewelry, and went after her lovers, but me she forgot," declares the Lord. (Hosea 2:10-15)
Gomer is the personification of Israel: lewd, preoccupied with the superficial, disloyal, self-indulgent, and dismissive of her relationship with God.
She - both the woman and the Northern Kingdom - has worshiped false gods. The Baals were local deities worshiped across the ancient Near East, broadly sharing common characteristics, but each particular to its locality. Most Baals were somehow associated with fertility.
The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is the great I AM, Jehovah or literally "that which exists", God as ultimate reality. We are called to be in relationship with what is fundamentally real.
The Baals offer to bend reality, magically shifting local conditions to favor some and disadvantage others. The Baals claim, "give us what we want and we will give you what you want." The Baals ritualize worship of what we want.
But what we want too often excludes what we need and the reality we share with others.
(This is not the lectionary reading assigned for Sunday. This is a passage that falls between the assigned readings for Saturday and Monday.)
No comments:
Post a Comment