We read the scriptures with our present mentality: isolated in one measure or another in our individualistic atomized world. Not only do we read them this way, but we might even pray them as just me and God and nobody anywhere nearby, maybe in other Galaxies I don’t mingle with too much. Our autonomously self-sustaining and operational world seemingly confirms that this is not only viable, but this is the way things are, even when our hearts are aching for more togetherness.
My supreme and deeply personal perspective therefore dominates as interpretive key for the Scriptures. But the ancient world was not like that and neither was the scripture world! Biblical people were corporate thinkers, an angle essential to tribal survival in a surrounding hostile world of far bigger players. Maybe we can learn anew from them how we deeply belong to each other. Let’s look this month at a sample of texts from the prophets, exploring key concepts like house and family relationships which lead us to our deepest relationship understanding with God, and thereby to our deepest mutual connections.
HOUSE
When we think of a house, we think of where the family lives. Here is the place of the spousal life-long relationship, the paternal and maternal relationships. These images interplay in this tough-talk text in Jeremiah3:19-4:4. When we reread and pray with this text at this particular moment, may I suggest that we focus on the core paternal tenderness with which God views his people as a whole, and not on the negative tones of the concrete issue at hand. God’s complaints are only further evidence of how much he longs to see his people flourishing as a whole.
“… I had thought how I should like to treat you as sons,
And give you a pleasant land, a heritage most beautiful among the nations!
You would call me, “My Father,” I thought, and never cease following me.
But like a woman faithless to her lover, even so have you been faithless to me,
O house of Israel, says the Lord.
If you wish to return, O Israel, says the Lord, return to me.
If you put your detestable things out of my sight, and do not stray, …”
While God communicates with individual persons as unique subjects, God’s word addresses the entire people as a whole: “the house of Israel”. It’s one house and all the family lives there. Family rupture, experience of marriage, dysfunctional generational bonds and the very notion of the unity of a family house convey this unique single relationship of God with the whole people of Israel as one. All together, they form one complete focus of God’s love. He longs for them as parents for their wayward child or a spouse for the partner. Let’s get some more of these cases in the various prophets
The whole house of Israel
While each person has responsibility, particularly the leadership, in this case the king, the whole people constitutes one house. The house of God represents the whole people. The temple represents the whole people as the physical house of God where all are going to worship. The house of Israel is also those who are descended from Jacob, all the 12 tribes one unit, one house. Israel indicates the single person known as Jacob but also the entirety of his descendants, the twelve tribes.
The word of the LORD came to me:
Son of man, you live in the midst of a rebellious house;
Then, in the morning, the word of the LORD came to me:
Son of man, did not the house of Israel, that rebellious house,
ask you what you were doing?
Tell them: Thus says the Lord GOD:
This oracle concerns Jerusalem
and the whole house of Israel within it.
I am a sign for you:
as I have done, so shall it be done to them;
as captives they shall go into exile.
The prince who is among them shall shoulder his burden
and set out in darkness,
going through a hole he has dug out in the wall,
and covering his face lest he be seen by anyone
As in all the prophets whose aim is to communicate God’s intent to restore a fully functioning covenantal relationship, chastising words morph into visions of restored bonds of joy and stability, as we read twenty-five chapters later:
Ez 37, 17 Join them together into one stick so that they will become one in your hand. 18 “When your people ask you, ‘Won’t you tell us what you mean by this?’ 19 say to them, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: I am going to take the stick of Joseph—which is in Ephraim’s hand—and of the Israelite tribes associated with him, and join it to Judah’s stick. I will make them into a single stick of wood, and they will become one in my hand.’ 20 Hold before their eyes the sticks you have written on 21 and say to them, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: I will take the Israelites out of the nations where they have gone. I will gather them from all around and bring them back into their own land. 22 I will make them one nation in the land, on the mountains of Israel. There will be one king over all of them and they will never again be two nations or be divided into two kingdoms. 23 They will no longer defile themselves with their idols and vile images or with any of their offenses, for I will save them from all their sinful backsliding,[b] and I will cleanse them. They will be my people, and I will be their God. 24 “‘My servant David will be king over them, and they will all have one shepherd.
This far exceeds mere political reunification of the division after Solomon and of the diaspora: one nation, one king, one shepherd, one covenant, one dwelling of God, one God, one people.
Hosea 11 opens, heart rending, culminating in v 4:
“When Israel was a child, I loved him,
and out of Egypt I called my son.
2 But the more they were called,
the more they went away from me.[a]
They sacrificed to the Baals
and they burned incense to images.
3 It was I who taught Ephraim to walk,
taking them by the arms;
but they did not realize
it was I who healed them.
4 I led them with cords of human kindness,
with ties of love.
To them I was like one who lifts
a little child to the cheek,
and I bent down to feed them.
Notice how the singular and plural merge: apparently one person is being addressed but the whole people is intended. While Ephraim is one of Jacob-Israel’s sons, here the whole northern Kingdom of Israel is signified by his name.
BRIDE
Hosea is the prophet of the marriage bond imagery for God’s relationship with his whole people. Expressed in terms of bridal and spousal dynamics the short Hosea chapters present in rapid succession the passages from infidelity to reestablishment of fidelity:
Hos 1: 2 When the Lord began to speak through Hosea, the Lord said to him, “Go, marry a promiscuous woman and have children with her, for like an adulterous wife this land is guilty of unfaithfulness to the Lord.” 3 So he married Gomer daughter of Diblaim, and she conceived and bore him a son. …
9 Then the Lord said, “Call him Lo-Ammi (which means “not my people”), for you are not my people, and I am not your God.[b]10 “Yet the Israelites will be like the sand on the seashore, which cannot be measured or counted. In the place where it was said to them, ‘You are not my people,’ they will be called ‘children of the living God.’ 11 The people of Judah and the people of Israel will come together; they will appoint one leader and will come up out of the land, for great will be the day of Jezreel.[c]
Hos 2: 2 “Rebuke your mother, rebuke her, for she is not my wife, and I am not her husband. … 5She said, ‘I will go after my lovers, who give me my food and my water, ….
7Then she will say, ‘I will go back to my husband as at first,
for then I was better off than now.’
8 She has not acknowledged that I was the one who gave her the grain, the new wine and oil,
who lavished on her the silver and gold—which they used for Baal.
REBUKES GIVE WAY TO HOPE
Hos 3 The Lord said to me, “Go, show your love to your wife again, though she is loved by another man and is an adulteress. Love her as the Lord loves the Israelites, though they turn to other gods and love the sacred raisin cakes.”
Despite all the invective-filled chapters, unsparing words of condemnation and punishment, Hosea concludes in chapter 14 with the renewal of the people:
5 “I will be like the dew to Israel; he will blossom like a lily.
6 His splendor will be like an olive tree, his fragrance like a cedar of Lebanon.
7…Israel’s fame will be like the wine of Lebanon.
8 Ephraim, what more have I[c] to do with idols? I will answer him and care for him.
I am like a flourishing juniper; your fruitfulness comes from me.”
Almost two centuries later, through Ezekiel 16, God is speaking to Jerusalem as to one girl born and become marriageable and then unfaithful over the centuries:
1The word of the LORD came to me:
2Son of man, make known to Jerusalem her abominations.
3Thus says the Lord GOD to Jerusalem:
By origin and birth you are of the land of Canaan; … (poor beginnings)
8…I gave you my solemn oath and entered into a covenant with you, declares the Sovereign Lord, and you became mine…. (infidelities)
60 Yet I will remember the covenant I made with you when you were a girl,
and I will set up an everlasting covenant with you….
Here Ezekiel with his rich poetic skill traces God’s relationship with his people from the Patriarchs to the Covenant on Mt Sinai and until the Babylonian Exile, revealing God’s perspective of an eternal covenant and reminding them of the divine foundations to the people’s hope for definitive salvation.
In chapter 62, almost at the end of his book, Isaiah articulates this very same future in dramatic tones: your Creator will espouse you! Ecstatic joy forever!
3 You will be a crown of splendor in the Lord’s hand,
a royal diadem in the hand of your God.
4 No longer will they call you Deserted, or name your land Desolate.
But you will be called Hephzibah,[a] and your land Beulah[b];
for the Lord will take delight in you, and your land will be married.
5 As a young man marries a young woman, so will your Builder marry you;
as a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so will your God rejoice over you.
Belonging to God’s People is a gift of grace and a lifestyle of making room in our hearts. The Song of Songs might be a good address to meet next time and continue to develop this thought, stretching our hearts for growing communion with each other.
…to be continued certainly, because Sacred Scripture’s treatment of oneness is so broad and deep.
Let’s continue exploring this immense biblical treasure together as we develop www.onestepcloser.org.
Feel free to send me your observations, comments, suggestions, etc. at ekelly@magdala.org.
What God has joined, let no one put asunder (Mt 19:6; Mk 10:9).
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