In these pages von Balthasar talks
of the prophet Hosea.
“Something completely new is
beginning to surface in Hosea. Israel's falling away from the God of the
covenant to the Canaanite fertility gods and their rituals was literally a
sinking down to a culticly justified fornication. When the people 'departs'
from Yahweh to 'go whoring' (4. 12; 9. 1), this ends in the drastic situation
in which sexuality becomes central, the situation that shows the depth of the
abandoned and desecrated covenant in a completely new light.… God takes hold of
the sexual dimensions of his prophet Hosea in order to portray himself therein
in his supra-sexual relationship to Israel. God embraces the sphere of male and
female gift of self in the flesh, in order to make use of it as an instrument
of revelation on the basis of
Von Balthasar, through quotations from Hosea shows how God and his
wrath first strips Israel of it's identity and shuns her. The wind of the Lord shall
come, rising from the wilderness: and his fountain shall dry up, his spring
shall be parched. Thus the fertile land, the perceptible sign of the covenant,
will be dissolved backwards into a wilderness that bears no fruit--precisely
the wilderness out of which Israel came to begin with. This is God's judgment:
I will strip her ,the unfaithful one, naked and make her as in the days she was
born and make her like a wilderness and set her like a parched land, and slay
her with thirst.
Unable to maintain his anger, despite
her unfaithfulness, he cannot abandon Israel. God recalls his first relationship
with his chosen people. From chapter 10 of Hosea, 'When Israel was a child, I
loved him and out of Egypt I called my son… It was I who taught Ephraim to walk,
I took them up in my arms; but they did not know that I healed them. I led them
with cords of compassion, with the bands of love, and I became to them as one
who lifts the child up to embrace it; and I bent down to it and fed it.
And then the God who judges woos his
people again. 'therefore, behold, I will lure and bring her into the
wilderness, and speak tenderly to her… And there she shall answer as in the
days of her youth, as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt".
Quoting von Balthasar:
“Thanks to the mediating obedience
of the prophet in the most intimate sphere of human life, there occurs in Hosea
a disclosure of the heart of God which is new and unheard-of when compared with
all that has gone before. In pure obedience, Hosea overcomes… the world of the
mythical deities which have fallen prey to sexuality, and is able precisely
through this, to bring to light the love of God which is supra-sexual. God
suffers under Israel's false love affairs, he cannot bear them, and we see him
as it were wavering between mercy on the guilty wife and the necessity of
punishing her ruthlessly. 'What shall I do with you, O Ephriam?' (Hosea 6:4).
It is love that wins the day: 'how can I give you up, O Ephriam!… My heart
recoils within me, my compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my
fierce anger, I will not again destroy Ephriam; for I am God and not man, the
Holy One in your midst' (Hosea 11:8-9). Although the word is not used, it is
the kabod [glory] of Yahweh that
reveals itself in a new, incomprehensible depth as the love that lies beyond
wrath and has to do with God's being God, with his absoluteness. But this
unattainablely transcendent element is at the same time profaned by human
beings in the world and humiliated by them, since it's love carries it to the
point of defenselessness. The adulteress is purchased for fifteen shekels of
silver…’ (3-2), so that she may sit still beside the Lord once more. And he
'allures her seductively' (2-16) so that he may speak to her heart. Hosea
is commanded to 'love' this woman: this is the word that expresses the love
between man and woman ('hb), with the
difference that in him it is selflessly helpful while in her it is lascivious
and full of desire. Hosea’s message meets with no greater acceptance than that
of the major literary prophets: 'The prophet is a fool! The man of the Spirit
is mad!' (9-7); he is expelled from the land. Even in this fate, he declares
something of the ‘foolish’ God's love as he runs after a faithless harlot. God
has begun to do something here that will not come to a stop until
Golgotha."
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