Hosea: The Weakness of God

Who Is This, So Weak and Helpless
by William Walsham How, 1823-1897

Who is this, so weak and helpless,
child of lowly Hebrew maid,
rudely in a stable shelter
coldly in a manger laid?
‘Tis the Lord of all creation,
who this wondrous path has trod;
he is Lord from everlasting
and to everlasting, God.

Who is this, a Man of Sorrows,
walking sadly life’s hard way,
homeless, weary, sighing, weeping,
over sin and Satan’s sway?
‘Tis our God, our glorious Savior,
who above the starry sky
is for us a place preparing,
where no tear can di the eye.

Who is this? Behold him shedding
drops of blood upon the ground!
Who is this, despised, rejected,
mocked, insulted, beaten, bound?
‘Tis our God, who gifts and graces
on his church is pouring down;
who shall smite in holy vengeance
all his foes beneath his throne.

Who is this that hangs there dying
while the rude world scoffs and scorns,
numbered with the malefactors,
torn with nails and crowned with thorns?
‘Ts our God who lives forever
mid the shining ones on high,
in the glorious golden city,
reigning everlastingly.

We were sitting in Bible study, talking about the passion of Jesus. What must it have been like for Jesus to be going toward Jerusalem, knowing he was going to die? We talked about the fear he must have experienced, when, as Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase puts it, Jesus said, I am storm-tossed. Some of the guys, though, weren’t sure. “I mean, Jesus was God, he must have known how this was going to turn out,” said one.

I don’t know. There is an old idea called Docetism, which comes from a Greek work meaning like. Jesus, in this story line, only seemed to be human, so he only seemed to suffer. He only seemed to die. He was divine, so how could he really feel pain? It’s only logical.

But the Scriptures come from the Hebrew culture, whose tool kit contained more than logic. They also used emotion and revelation and stories and questions to get the job done. The Scripture both the First Testament and the New, reflect that Hebrew sense of the world. They give systematic theologians fits. Anyone looking for complete consistency or total agreement among parts of the Bible, even those parts written by the same person, will go away very sad. Those writings show us a God who gets angry, sad, and even afraid. The entire book of Hosea is written from the perspective of the husband of an unfaithful wife. God’s anguish is almost palpable. It runs the gamut from remorse to anger to desire and back to anger.

In his book, Night, Eli Weisel, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, tells a tragic story from his time in the death camps. After several escape attempts, a number of prisoners from the men and boys side of the camp were selected at random to be hanged as an example. One of the victims was a young boy who was too light to die immediately – the rope merely strangled him slowly. It took him half an hour to die. As the rest of the prisoners stood watching in horror, a man behind Eli whispered, “Where’s God?” Eli says that he heard a voice inside himself say, “God is there, on the gallows.”

Here’s where the Jewish sensibility comes into play. The story is at once a story of lost faith – the death of God, as it were. But it also suggests, ever so mildly, and quite apart from the author’s intention, hope. The story is almost biblical. It is at once hopeless and sown with the seeds of hope. It offers a glimpse into human suffering, but also into the nature of a God who suffers with, in, and for his creation. Thomas Cahill noted that while the Old Testament book of Job is about the question, “Why?”, the New Testament records the only answer God gives the earth, “I will suffer with you.” It’s not a satisfying answer, at least not in a purely intellectual sense, but it replaces the question marks with quotation marks.

The death of Jesus, the core of the renewal of all creation, is the suffering of God in and for what he has made.

If God did not suffer for us, God would not love us, let alone be love, as I John so boldly asserts. Love is in part the willingness to be open to pain. God loves us, but that’s more than a mere bumper sticker sentiment. If God didn’t love us, God could simply walk away, leave us to our own ruin and destruction. But God is not that kind of being. God suffers because of us, and, in Jesus, God suffers with us.

During the strange time right before the release of “Passion of the Christ” I read an article that said, in effect, “So what if Jesus suffered? Lots of people have suffered more and longer.” The author cited several cases – AIDS patients, battered women, Palestinians hit by mortar fire.

What the writer missed, though, was not the quantitative nature of Jesus’s suffering, but the qualitative nature. Atonement theology is a debated topic in many corners of the Church, but if we could begin to see Jesus as the ultimate victim – of sin, of human frailty, of the injustice of the world – then we could get in touch with how his suffering redeems us. By suffering for us, with us, as us, Jesus took our pain onto himself. He became the AIDS patient, the battered woman, the wounded Palestinian, as well as their attackers. In his own being, Jesus unwound suffering.

Sure, we still suffer, we still experience deep pain and sorrow, but it’s been shattered by the shattering of Jesus.