The sign and the flesh/12 - There are words and objectives that speak of the prophetic aspect of the earth
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 20/02/2022
"Love is considered perfect if it exists on both sides: on the side of judgment and on the opposite side of mercy".
The Zohar, n. 201
Chapter eleven in the Book of Hosea contains one of the most beautiful resurrections in the Bible, which will touch us (and reveal God and ourselves) once we manage to get there after going through the harshness of the chapters and even the verse that precede it.
The prophets are the door through which God communicates with human beings and men and women communicate with God: giving divine words to us, while giving God our best words, which he then uses to speak with us, in a continuous dialogue where we learn the language of God, where we become more human and God becomes more God.
Chapter eleven in the Book of Hosea contains some of the most beautiful and beloved verses in the entire Bible; it is a peak of prophecy. However, we would not be able to understand them, if we arrived at this chapter without first having gone through the many verses of condemnation, curse, disappointment and betrayal contained in the previous chapters. Without having encountered all the words that Hosea spent to tell us that the Covenant between YHWH and his people was broken forever, that the promise had vanished through the infidelity of Israel. Those chapters (4-10) are as true as chapter eleven is. As the empty tomb is true and Golgotha is true, because the truth of the first day after the Sabbath would not be true without the truth of the cross. The theological and anthropological greatness of this chapter can only be revealed to those who have travelled the way of the cross to the very end, those who have arrived on the mountain and have not found three tents, but three crosses. And there they wished to stay under the gallows, seeing that different kind of prophet truly die, and really thought to themselves that it was all over, that that stupendous hope was shattered against the “no” from the men who refused to accept the light. And then, they followed the corpse down into the ground owned by Joseph of Arimathea, watching the stone being placed at the entrance to the tomb, and feeling that that stone was also forever closing that short extraordinary season of salvation. Only then, only after this truest of truths, did they hear their name being called by a living voice: "Mary". Not a moment sooner.
However, when we skip the difficult and hard chapters of the Bible, when we dodge Golgotha and go from Palm Sunday directly on to Galilee, resurrection becomes fake and ultimately saves no one. Only those who truly die can know true resurrection: «When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son. But the more they were called, the more they went away from me. They sacrificed to the Baals and they burned incense to images. It was I who taught Ephraim to walk, taking them by the arms; but they did not realize it was I who healed them. 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» (Hosea 11,1-4).
YHWH had transformed the yoke of the idols that oppressed all other peoples into bonds of love, treating the people as his children; but the people did not want to hear anything, and continued with their prostitution: «My people are determined to turn from me. Even though they call me God Most High, I will by no means exalt them» (Hosea 11,7). The freedom gained, thanks to the loosening of the bite of the yoke, had become an opportunity to flee in search of new lovers, merely being used to get away from home. Because, we too have learned that the bonds of love remain ties, and children will grow up if they manage to break their ties, even those we created only in order to love them. Called upon to look up: we are called upon to look at the stars, only we Homo sapiens know how to do it, animals cannot look at the sky - perhaps there is no more beautiful definition of the human vocation than this.
However, while Hosea retraces this utterly sad story of pain and failure, suddenly the unexpected happens, and we find ourselves in one of the great resurrections of the Bible: «How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel? How can I treat you like Admah? How can I make you like Zeboyim? My heart is changed within me; all my compassion is aroused» (Hosea 11,8). Without a solution of continuity, without any kind of warning, Hosea rolls away the stone from the tomb and we, as well as him, realise that it is empty. That non-space between those two contiguous verses creates an infinite time that reverses the meaning of the Book of Hosea. We were truly convinced that YHWH could not help but take note of Ephraim's freedom and then abandon him to the same fate as Admah and Zeboyim (city by the Dead Sea, like Sodom and Gomorrah). But no: instead the unexpected bursts onto that non-hope, the direction of things is bent and to God the time of fidelity without reciprocity begins – our fidelity, his reciprocity. We are not simply faced with the repentance of YHWH (as after the Flood or after the punishment for the golden calf); here, we also have a conversion of God, as suggested by the Hebrew verb that speaks of an overturning of the heart. YHWH changes his gaze, reverses the path, and changes the direction of his actions: hence, he converts. And thus, he does something he shouldn't have done, the opposite of what had been said so far.
It is a pinnacle of biblical theology and religions. Here indeed Hosea is the teacher of all the prophets, of Isaiah and of Jeremiah. The God in chapter eleven in the Book of Hosea fights and overcomes the God of his previous chapters. Deus versus Deum: within the same Bible, within the same book, within the pages of the same prophet. An unprecedented God emerges from this struggle. This renunciation of reciprocity, not yet known by men, now becomes possible for God: «I will not carry out my fierce anger, nor will I devastate Ephraim again. For I am God, and not a man» (Hosea 11,9).
For I am God, and not a man: how splendid that the difference between God and man lies precisely in his being capable of loving even without reciprocity. As if to tell us: "You are not capable of loving if you are not loved in return, but I cannot not love you, it is because of this inability not to love you even if you are ungrateful that I am God". Divinity emerges from the gap between love and reciprocity, a love one day we will one day call agape, because this love was not the reciprocity of philia (friendship) nor the desire for Eros. As if to tell us: only a God can love without reciprocity: you, who are bad, do not live reciprocity with me, and I do not live it with you either and thus I love you by renouncing reciprocity.
However, then he also tells us something else. On the one hand, Hosea’s God, in fact, distances himself from us telling us words that are not yet ours, but while he is telling us, he is making us become those different words, creating a greater us than we were yesterday. This in turn shows us a form of love that we do not yet have, and in showing it to us it makes us capable of the love of the not-yet. Marvellous.
This is how the word continues to create the world by speaking it, by speaking of us to ourselves. We are not the merciful Father who forgave the prodigal son even before he asked him for forgiveness, but every time we listen to that parable of Luke, we are born with the desire to be like him. We want to become like him, day by day we really do become like him, until at least once in our life we find ourselves capable of welcoming and forgiving a child, or friend of ours, exactly like that merciful father in the parable.
By believing in the existence of God, men have said and are still saying many different things. One of these things is very important: if God exists then man is not God, hence, he is not omnipotent, he is limited and mortal. The Bible has done everything to keep this distance between the Creator and us creatures alive and operative. However, then it also told us something else: that we were in fact created in the "image of God", and these words proceeded to upset the whole scroll of the world. Because if we are the image of God then every time God reveals something of himself to us, he is also revealing something about ourselves, something different, but also the same. Speaking of his justice, he is also speaking to us of our justice, speaking to us of his love he is speaking to us of our love, both different and similar, and revealing it to us increases the similarity between the two loves.
If we look closely into the folds of the world, we can still discover something exciting. We can clearly see that even the great human words share some aspect of this capacity of the biblical word. While writing our Constitution, we write that the «Republic is founded on work» knowing full well that while we are writing it, the Republic is not yet truly founded on work, because there are still too many privileges and injustices at the basis of social life. However, while writing it we are also saying, begging, praying that the Republic may truly become founded on work, we want those words much greater than us to have the performative capacity to really change our world. Then we write in our courts «The law is the same for everyone» knowing full well that the law is not yet the same for the rich and the poor, for nationals and foreigners. However, every time we inaugurate a new courtroom and rewrite that wonderful sentence at its centre, we bring the real world closer to those prophetic words. Thus, here we have a prophetic dimension to the earth, the civil, popular, citizen’s prophecy of entire communities that entrust their greatest desires and collective dreams, which are authentic prayer-words, to a few selected words.
Finally, we do not know how Hosea wrote verse number eight in chapter eleven. Perhaps he was the first to be stunned and shocked by what he was writing and realising as he wrote it. Perhaps he did not imagine it, he did not expect it, it came to him as a gift, completely gratuitous and he was resurrected by those words of his. Or, perhaps, one day watching a man or woman who had been able to love and forgive beyond the other's infidelities, or finding himself capable of faithful love for his unfaithful wife, Hosea sensed that if men and women are capable of being greater than their reciprocity the source of this capacity had to be found in God himself. Or maybe, these two experiences were really one, when a different verse blossomed, when Hosea in receiving that new word from the mouth of YHWH, at the end of verse seven recognized the life around him, and finally understood it. However, we do have one certainty: Hosea encountered and announced a resurrection because he reached the end of his own crisis and that of his community. Not an inch less: the certainty of a future was born from within the certainty of the end. Too many times, we do not rise again because we stop at the first or second station of the Via Crucis, we do not call crises by their terrible names, and we console ourselves with smaller resurrections without really touching the depths of the abyss, where our feet could attempt a new flight.
