Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, 3^rd of August 2025

Hosea 11:1-11

A few weeks ago, the lectionary gave us part of the Book of Amos, in which Amos revealed that God had determined to end his people, Israel, because of the oppression of the poor by the rich. I said then that the God Amos spoke for seemed to be a frightening God, willing to destroy the whole nation, both rich and poor, for the crimes of the rich against the poor. What Amos foresaw eventually came true; half a century after Amos spoke, the Assyrian Empire invaded Israel, took many of its people into exile, and settled others from the Empire into the land where they intermarried with the remnant left behind. Today, we hear from the Prophet Hosea, whose prophetic ministry follows that of Amos, and who warns of the same forthcoming catastrophe. Unlike Amos, Hosea is a native of the northern kingdom. This does not mean that his prophecies are any kinder to it. Hosea is still certain that Israel is going to fall, that God will sow destruction for Israel without pity, because Israel no longer belongs to God. (Hosea 1:2-10) That, at least, is the message of most of the Book of Hosea.

In today’s passage, we have one of the most beautiful portrayals of God in all the Hebrew Scriptures. The Lord refers to Israel by the pet name ‘Ephraim,’ the name of one of the two sons of Moses and one of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. (Genesis 46:15-25, Numbers 1:27-37) The Lord remembers baby Ephraim’s early years, when God, as a loving parent, taught them to walk, lifted baby Israel to their cheek, and bent down to feed them. In Hosea’s portrayal of God, God is the good and caring parent who watches a beloved child become a difficult adolescent and make the wrong choices. The Lord is the God who heals the people, but the people have forgotten this and so ‘they kept sacrificing to the Baals, and offering incense to idols’. Maybe the people called out of Israel thought that the Lord was a god only for a people on the move; that now they had settled down in Canaan, they needed a new god for an agricultural age. For whatever reason, having chosen to go their own way, the people will not now turn back to the Lord, and so the Lord is determined to punish them. Assyria is going to conquer them, Hosea prophesies, and they will again live as they lived in Egypt, as strangers.

This sounds like the warnings of Amos. The people of God have turned away from God, and so God must punish them for their wrongdoing. But Hosea also gives us insight into the Lord’s heart, and we find God in anguish. Hosea is prophesying in a time and place in which parents had the right to condemn their children to death; when both parents could bring a stubborn, rebellious son before the elders of the city and have him stoned. (Deuteronomy 21:18-21) Because Ephraim has rejected God, God has the right, even the obligation, to do that. This obligation is tearing the Lord apart: ‘How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel? How can I make you like Admah? How can I treat you like Zeboiim?’ Admah and Zeboiim, incidentally, were two cities said to have been destroyed by the Lord with Sodom and Gomorrah, but whose names had not even been remembered as a byword, as the names ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’ had been. (Deuteronomy 29:23) They were both destroyed and utterly forgotten.

God cannot treat beloved Ephrain like this: ‘My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my fierce anger; I will not again destroy Ephraim; for I am God and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath.’ Human beings may act out of anger when rejected; the Holy One does not. Human beings were commanded to obey the Law that told them to stone rebellious children for the sake of the community; the Lord is above the Law.

If we could end the reading here, we would simply have another revelation that the nature of God is love and that love is the meaning of the Law. Yet today’s passage ends with God’s fierce love bringing God’s trembling children back from exile: ‘They shall go after the Lord, who roars like a lion; when he roars, his children shall come trembling from the west. They shall come trembling like birds from Egypt, and like doves from the land of Assyria; and I will return them to their homes, says the Lord.’ The Lord has determined not to destroy Israel in the way that Admah and Zeboiim were destroyed, but Israel is still to be punished. The Assyrians will defeat the nation; its population will be sent into exile. Many of them will never return; those who remain in the land will be rejected in the future as ‘Samaritans’ by the people of Judah who think they are the only true Jews. How can we reconcile the Holy One’s love and punishment?

Some commentators argue that the Lord is punishing Israel because this is the only way to save it: ‘knocking down the wayward child if that is the only way to keep it from stepping into traffic’.[1] Israel has taken the wrong path, is worshipping the wrong gods – for its own sake, it must be shocked out of wrongdoing. Others point out that, unlike Admah and Zeboiim, Ephraim is not remembered in legend alone.[2] The very fact that we are reading the prophecies of Hosea today shows that the people of God continued to exist through the millennia, down to this very place and time. This is true. The Lord did not make Israel like Admah or treat Ephraim like Zeboiim. But we know that Assyria defeated Israel. Are we to believe that the Lord still handed Israel over to the Assyrians, despite God’s warm and tender compassion?

I repeat the conclusion I drew after reading the Book of Amos: I do not believe in a God who destroys nations for their wrongdoing; I do believe in a God who cares about the behaviour of nations. The idea that entire nations can sin is a strange one for those of us who live in an individualistic culture. In one commentary[3] that I read this week the authors quote renowned sociologist of religion Robert Bellah: ‘Individualism lies at the very core of American culture…. We believe in the dignity, indeed the sacredness, of the individual. Anything that would violate our right to think for ourselves, judge for ourselves, make our own decisions, live our lives as we see fit, is not only morally wrong, it is sacrilegious.’[4] Replace ‘American’ with ‘Australian’ and that is just as true for us. The idea that individuals should be punished for crimes committed by their leaders is one that we reject. We do not agree, for instance, that civilians in Gaza can be punished because of the actions of Hamas on October 7. Whatever we are to learn from the prophets, I do not believe it is that collective punishment is acceptable.

What we are to learn from the prophets, I believe, is that we do not worship a God who looks on the sins and crimes of entire countries and remains unmoved. God does not come in wrath, but God is still the Holy One in our midst, and God’s holiness is a holiness of justice. The prophets tell us that God cares just as much about the collective actions of nations as the individual actions of human beings. When our nation collectively does wrong, we cannot excuse ourselves from responsibility on the basis that we individually were not involved. This is especially true because we live in a democracy: we have votes and voices; the right to protest and the ability to petition our representatives. Having heard God’s command that ‘justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream’ (Amos 5:24), we have a responsibility to use our votes and our voice against injustice.

Of course, the most important thing we learn from Hosea is that the God we worship can be compared to a loving mother or father who lifts their baby to their cheek, who bends down to feed a toddler. God’s compassion is overwhelming; God’s love outlasts all the times we betray and turn from God. This is as true for us as individuals today as it was for Israel as a nation in the eighth century BCE. In the words of the Apostle Paul, nothing ‘in all creation will separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.’ (Romans 8:39) Thanks be to God. Amen.

[1] Frederick J. Gaiser, ‘Preaching God: Hosea 11:1-11,’ Word and World 28(2), 2008, p. 208.

[2] Mark Brummitt, ‘1^st August: Proper 13,’ The Expository Times 121(10), 2010, p. 507.

[3] Bo H. Lim and Daniel Castelo, Hosea (2015), p. 32

[4] Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart (1996), p. 142.