Gomer

 

Gomer marries Hosea and bears him three children. This along with the usual cooking, cleaning, and housekeeping he probably expects. This despite his considering her an unfaithful wife, and naming her children, morosely, Jezreel, Lo-ruhamah, and Lo-ammi. This despite his considering their marriage a fitting prophetic allegory for the relationship of Israel and Judah to their God. The God, of course, who won a bet on the patience of Job, after he endured, and his family and household suffered, numerous trials. 

What is this story doing in the Bible? Surely we are not meant to take it literally or as a model of how to behave. Is it a model of how God behaves? 

Apparently we are to take it as that, only so far as it portrays God as vengeful (Jezreel), pitiless and unforgiving (Lo-ruhamah), and abandoning (Lo-ammi), toward his “unfaithful spouse”, and yet as then forgiven and made numberless and named again "Children of the living God." This restoration - or replacement - is supposed to make everything alright, I guess.

Does retribution, revenge, or reparation, make up for punishment and abandonment? Is this God’s justice?

Go marry a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, the Lord commands Hosea when he first speaks through him, and then says why: the Land commits whoredom by forsaking the Lord. Then the offspring, first the defeat and destruction of Israel (the northern kingdom) in the valley of Jezreel, then the forsaking of that kingdom but the salvation of the southern kingdom (Judah), and third the divorce of God and the people followed by the restitution of their union.

Browsing in the public library I picked up Evelyn Waugh’s Second World War trilogy, Sword of Honour, and found in it a typically serio-comic English hero, a guy named Guy, who married then lost, to a series of lovers, a heroically promiscuous wife, Virginia, whom he (spoiler alert) finally takes back in her extremity of need. Furthermore, God through the Church takes her in as one of her own. 

Crazy story. But then, so is prayer, in its entreaty and in its hope. Listen to the Psalmist (85):

1 You have been gracious to your land, O Lord, * you have restored the good fortune of Jacob.

2 You have forgiven the iniquity of your people * and blotted out all their sins.

3 You have withdrawn all your fury * and turned yourself from your wrathful indignation.

4 Restore us then, O God our Savior; * let your anger depart from us.

9 Truly, his salvation is very near to those who fear him, * that his glory may dwell in our land.

10 Mercy and truth have met together; * righteousness and peace have kissed each other.

11 Truth shall spring up from the earth, * and righteousness shall look down from heaven.

JRL+

https://www.christiancentury.org/article/living-word/july-24-ordinary-17c-hosea-12-10