Sunday, 3 August 2025

On God the Lover's love for Israel, and on that "Israel" too.


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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