Sermon.
03/08/2025. St John the Evangelist, Ovington,
Trinity
7 (Year C. OT: Continuous Track)
Hosea
11:1-11
You
may remember that I said that in this long season of Green, this year the Old
Testament readings follow a cycle of their own. We make our way through some
edited highlights of some Old Testament books. So there’ s a good reason to
concentrate, at least from time to time, on the Old Testament reading. This I
shall do today.
Hosea
hears God proclaim:
“When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called
my son.”
Moving
stuff.
One
thing I have learned over the years, and all the more so over recent weeks, is
that many people struggle with that very word, “Israel”. It’s not that people
are “against”, or simply “for”. Rather it’s a word people don’t always know
what to do with. In truth, it is a word which means a whole string of things.
So I think it does make sense to pause, and spell out the range of meanings of
the very word, “Israel”. These are preliminaries, but – as I know what I am
going to say, I may as well warn you – the preliminaries will take up the
greater part of what I have to say. If you are going to lay something out, you
have to lay it all out.
1.
Israel is firstly a proper noun. It is
the name of a person. Genesis is dominated by the stories of Abraham, his son
Isaac, and his son Jacob. And another name for Jacob is Israel. “Israel” does
mean something like “he struggles with God”, which is intriguing in itself. But
that intrigue is for another time.
2.
Secondly, Israel is the name for a whole
people. When Hosea has God say: “When Israel
was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son”, the “son” in question is not the person, Jacob-Israel.
Jacob is long deceased. Here he is referring to the whole people, afflicted by
slavery in Egypt, who are led by Moses through the Red Sea into the wilderness
and freedom. They are the distant descendants of the person Jacob-Israel. We
see this especially in that they are in twelve tribes. And (with some
complications) the twelve tribes are named after the twelve sons of Joseph, and
Joseph was the son of… (who else?) Jacob-Israel.
3.
Thirdly, when the people freed from
slavery finally do settle in the Promised Land, things – we can be blunt about
it – things, by and large, do not go well. For a while, a united kingdom does
emerge, and it’s name is Israel. But it’s not too long before the united kingdom
divides into two. The Northern kingdom goes by different names. But the most
usual name is, yes, “Israel”. Israel then stands for one of the two Kingdoms of
the divided People. (The Southern Kingdom is called Judah.)
4.
Fourthly, when times are good in the
land, and when times are hard in the land, we come close to having to say that
the Land itself is a character in the story of the People Israel. In the story
as we have it, it is a land promised to Abraham and Sarah, and, once the
promise is made, it changes everything. It changes the land. So Israel can be a
shorthand for “the Land of Israel”. Think of Land with a capital L; it’s Eretz
Yisrael in Hebrew. I say again: it is a character in its own right. For
example, if the People are unfaithful, God does at times say he will send them
into exile. But at other times it is expressed differently: the Land itself will
spew them out (e.g. Leviticus 18.28).
It
isn’t hard to say why this is the case. It is because it is stressed over and
over that the Land is God’s gift to the People, a living gift as it were. It is
not the People’s natural right. God chooses to give it to them – to “gift” it
to them – so that God, People, and Land can form a virtuous circle. So every
time a member of the People of Israel plucks grain, or eats a grape, or works
the fields, or enjoys a feast, it’s as if the Land itself encourages them to
remember God and give thanks.
These
are the biblical uses of the word “Israel”. You can see that already it is
pretty complicated. Whenever we read in the Bible “Israel”, we may do well to
ask: is this the person; is this the whole people; is this the nation united;
is this the Northern kingdom over against the Southern; is this Land itself
(whatever is happening to the People)?
But
we are not done with the preliminaries yet. For, on top of all that I have
said, we know that we of course live many centuries later. And, for us ,“Israel”
has yet other meanings.
5.
So, fifthly, Israel today means a nation
state. The State of Israel (Medinat Yisrael in Hebrew; Medinat
Yisrael not Eretz Yisrael). It was founded in 1948, by decisions of
the United Nations. It was one of, well, any number of nations formed in the
second half of the 20th century – the decades when the Empires came
to an end. (For comparison, India became an independent republic in 1950;
Nigeria became independent in 1960.)
6.
Sixthly, it has to be said that when newsreaders
and commentators today say “Israel”, they typically don’t exactly mean “the
State of Israel”. They really mean more concretely: “the current government of
the State of Israel”. The State of Israel is a democracy. Some would want to
qualify that. But the point is that its government changes. (In fact,
governments change an awful lot in Israel; they have more elections than most
other nations.) This confusion - this conflation - between the fifth and the
sixth meanings of Israel (the State of Israel, and the current government of
the State of Israel) is a common one. To be honest, it is the kind of thing
that happens all the time in commentary. If we say “the UK has improved its
relations with Japan, but China has become more critical of Belgium” (I’m
deliberately inventing an example, so that we don’t get distracted), each time
we don’t really mean the sovereign states in question, in all their glorious and
pristine abstraction, we mean the current governments of the UK, Japan, China,
and France. So really a handful of powerful people. There is nothing suspicious
or dishonourable about conflating these two meanings. But it can lead to
misunderstandings, and mis-steps in conversations and debates.
The
State of Israel is of course the national home of the Jewish People, though/and
it has always had a substantial minority who are not Jewish. The United Nations
planned it that way, based on earlier understandings emanating from our
governments in the UK. In that sense, then, there is a link between the modern
meanings of Israel and the biblical meanings. And that link is the Jewish
People. But! But the links are at each point very complicated, multisided, and
disputed.
This
is important. If someone says: “I defend the right of the State of Israel to
exist”, it is vital that we don’t hear that in itself as saying: “God promised
this Land to the Jews as descendants of Abraham, and that is all there is to
it”. That’s collapsing almost all the meanings of “Israel” into one. Now, such
people do exist – people that will say they defend the right of the State of
Israel to exist because of promises in the Bible. But many and most people who
want to defend that right of Israel’s existence don’t believe that in that
simple way, if they believe it at all. By the way, the name for someone who
defends the right of the State of Israel to exist, because of a belief in the
right of the Jewish people to self-determination, is “Zionist”. That is what a “Zionist”
is. That is all that “Zionism” means. It does not mean someone who supports the
current policies of the government of the State of Israel.
Another
thing is just as important. It is this: criticism of the current government if
the State of Israel is allowed, and can be timely and necessary. Many of us say
it is timely and necessary. Such criticism is not anti-Jewish or antisemitic.
It’s just better to be clear that you are criticising the current government,
and not the State as such. And there would be an exception: if you use unequal
scales. If, for example, you say that the nations of the world have to get
involved in messy compromises and even militarism as they protect their people
(as that is how life is), and you also say that the regime of the State of
Israel must be perfect, or it forfeits the right to exist, then you are using
unequal scales, and that would be anti-Jewish. But if you criticise the current
government of the State of Israel as you would and do criticise other nations,
then you need have no anxiety that you are being anti-Jewish.
We
are nearly done with the preliminaries(!) To sum up: if you read “Israel” in
the Bible, ask which meaning applies on this occasion (person, People, united
kingdom, Northern kingdom, Land itself), and if you speak of “Israel”, the
modern nation, be clear if you really mean the current government of the modern
nation (and don’t be afraid to repeat that phrase ad nauseum to avoid
misunderstanding).
“When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called
my son.”
I
hope we can now both understand, and be even more moved by these words.
Hosea
is prophesying against the Northern Kingdom (which is “Israel” of course!). He
says that God says that they have gone after other gods. They have lost
themselves to idolatry. And for this Hosea has God speak words of judgement,
and (we may as well say it) of condemnation. The Kingdom of Israel is like an
unfaithful spouse. The Kingdom of Israel has failed. The message of Hosea is of
divorce. It’s over between God and God’s People.
Except
of course it isn’t.
In
truth, this claim – this judgement, this condemnation – is also part of the
preliminaries. It is a preliminary that the People have gone after other gods
dead gods, who are not the Living God, and that some sort of lust for dead gods
has taken over. It’s a preliminary that, because of this, God would be within
God’s rights to disown them. Preliminary, because… it turns out… that is not
God’s will. God says – and it’s there in the text; it is not hidden –
“I can’t help myself. I still love my People. I am still going
to stick with them, and help them, and guide them.”
Just
listen to God. This is God speaking to the people of the covenant in the 8th
century before Christ, and this is God speaking to the Church in 2025, and this
is God speaking to you:
“How can I give you up…?
How can I hand you over…?...
My heart recoils within me;
my compassion grows warm and tender.
I will not execute my fierce anger…
for I am God and no mortal,
the Holy One in your midst,
and I will not come in wrath.”
In
other words:
“I can’t help myself.
I love you.
I am devoted to you.
I stick with you.
I can’t help myself.”
Now,
this – this - is the Word of the Lord.
Amen.
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