Unfaithfulness

Homily for Friday of the Third Week in Lent

The only information the text provides us about the life of Hosea concerns his marriage. Even if we cannot reconstruct what happened exactly, the text as it now stands speaks of three moments in the relationship: first love, separation, reunion. This marriage is a symbol of the covenant between the Lord and Israel. Hosea speaks about the first love, the short period of Israel’s loyalty in the desert, which was then followed by a long history of unfaithfulness lasting until his day.

Hosea accuses Israel of three crimes in particular. Instead of putting their trust in the Lord alone, the people break the covenant: (1) by counting on their own military strength, (2) by making treaties with foreign powers (Assyria and Egypt), and (3) by running after the Baals, the gods of fertility. Israel thus forgets that the Lord is its strength, its covenant partner, and giver of fertility.

Today’s reading concentrates on the aspect of the unfaithfulness of Israel, particularly the tribe of Ephraim This unfaithful behavior will lead to Israel’s destruction by Assyria, but God’s love will have the last word. The back-and-forth movement from doom to salvation is typical of the Book of Hosea.

The Gospel text for today is the familiar story of the scribe who seems to understand Jesus. He asks Jesus a question about the greatest commandment, agrees with Jesus’s answer, repeats the commandments, and then hears Jesus say in return: “You are not far from the kingdom of God.”

When we put the two readings side by side, it becomes evident that the theme of covenant love is at the heart of the two commandments: love God and love your neighbor. The kingdom of God is not an intellectual exercise or an idea; it is a lived experience, much the same as a marriage between a man and a woman. It is here and now; we are living within it even as we await the time when we will dwell in its perfection and fullness. A covenant relationship is built through human acts of love, imperfect in deployment but perfect in design. The scribe gets very close even though he doesn’t seem to know Jesus.