The sign and the flesh/15 - The prophets name the idols and call upon us to choose the right side.
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 13/03/2022
«It is not up to you to do the work, but you are not free to withdraw from it» (Rabbi Tarfon). The unfinished part of my work is actually the inheritance and the gift I offer those who come after me.
Paolo de Benedetti, And their cry went up to God. Commentary on the Exodus (E il loro grido salì a Dio. Commento all’Esodo)
Chapter thirteen in the Book of Hosea contains valuable teachings on exile, the nature of promises and on the mysterious value of poverty.
The prophets are the great unmaskers of our illusions. It is their first job, which lasts their entire life; because they know that we are tireless creators of illusions. Hence, the demolition work continues, tenaciously. Their fight against idols is also a fight against illusions, and as they speak the words of God to us, they cry out with the same force as all the other things that we put on the same level as god - people, ideologies, rulers, communities, religion, vocations... they are just vanitas and deceit. One of the great illusions that biblical prophets fight is the one associated with monarchy and political power, with the vain idea that kings have the pursuit of the common good, good governance and perhaps public happiness as their objective. There is a part of the soul in the Bible, a deep part, which is very hard on the monarchy, because nothing and no one has a greater tendency to turn into an idol than a king does. The more absolute the power, the more absolute idolatry becomes. In the history of Israel the people wished for a king (Saul) and obtained him, but the Bible came to us because together with the kings, almost all of them corrupt, the people also had the gift of the prophets who limited and corrected monarchical power (1 Samuel 8,9). However, when kings silence and kill the prophets, or put them on their payroll, power becomes a ferocious idol that devours everything and everyone: «Their little ones will be dashed to the ground, their pregnant women ripped open» (Hosea 13,16). No further comment is needed now, as the tragedy of open conflict and war in Ukraine unfolds.
Hosea therefore follows in the footsteps of the prophet Samuel (1 Samuel 8,10-18) and radicalizes the criticism of the monarchy: «Where is your king, that he may save you? Where are your rulers in all your towns, of whom you said, ‘Give me a king and princes’?» (Hosea 13,10). For Hosea, the destruction of the Northern Kingdom (Israel or Ephraim, with Samaria as its capital) at the hands of the Assyrian superpower is a direct consequence of a deluded people who trusted their kings, and deluded kings who trusted in the help of another superpower (Egypt). Thus, he writes: «Therefore they will be like the morning mist, like the early dew that disappears, like chaff swirling from a threshing floor, like smoke escaping through a window» (Hosea 13,3). Starting from 724 BC the Northern Kingdom was almost entirely occupied by the Assyrians. Its last king, Hosea, contemporary and namesake of the prophet, was imprisoned, Samaria fell. A large part of the population was deported, many tribes of Israel never returned and were absorbed by the Assyrians - this is the origin of the tradition, between history and myth, of the ten lost tribes of Israel. Another part of the people migrated south to the kingdom of Judah. Unlike the second exile of the Jews in Babylon, which took place a century and a half later (587 BC) and from which a "remnant" returned to their homeland, rebuilt the temple in Jerusalem and continued the story of the promise, there was no going back from that first Assyrian exile: «When Ephraim spoke, people trembled; he was exalted in Israel. But he became guilty of Baal worship and died» (Hosea 13,1). From crown prince to idolater, from life to death.
There are exiles from which there is no returning remnant. You simply get lost, that is all. The prince dies, and does not rise again. When we begin an exile, we do not know whether it will be the exile in Babylon or the one in Assyria, if a remnant will return or if we will never go back home. The Bible tells us that both outcomes are possible, and life certifies this for us every day. It is this possibility of a non-return that makes the way home so beautiful and the many children who are lost, that make the return of the prodigal son so extraordinary. Because life is not a TV-show, because the Bible does not deceive us, because God does not play with us and respects the freedom of the children who do not "get up" and remain in the sties, because if he did not, no return would surprise the angels, and no return would move God.
Hosea witnessed the first Assyrian destruction and the first exile. Unlike Jeremiah and Ezekiel, who are the prophets of the second exile in Babylon and of the theology of the "remnant", Hosea is the prophet of the first exile with no return. Moreover, he has no theology because no remnant returned from his exile. The Bible knows and accepts both of these prophecies, those that herald a return after the end and those that herald an end with no return. When we read the Bible today and use it as a map to live within our own exiles, we must not make the fatal mistake of choosing the wrong prophet. Using the prophecies of the remnant to deceive ourselves in our deportations without a remnant, where there actually is salvation but must be grasped on a different level. However, the error of those who while finding themselves in an exile that could generate a remnant, instead turn to the prophets of no return, only to spiritually find an infinite night that could instead have blossomed one morning, is equally serious.
Here, we find ourselves in chapter thirteen in the Book of Hosea, the penultimate chapter in the book, which also contains new teachings on idolatry and a message on the nature of the Promised Land. First, it reveals one of the many faces of Baal, the Canaanite god of fertility, who is the maximum expression of the icon of an idol in many books. There are many Baals in Semitic populations (baalim), a name linked to places, cities, even buildings. Here, Hosea tells us something important, giving voice to the “I” in YHWH, the prerogative of the prophets: «I cared for you in the wilderness, in the land of burning heat. When I fed them, they were satisfied; when they were satisfied, they became proud; then they forgot me» (Hosea 13,5-6). A message of great anthropological wisdom. Baal is an image of the wealth and opulence offered by the Promised Land. It is not the statue of a bull that men and women revered and offered kisses – «It is said of these people, “They offer human sacrifices! They kiss calf-idols!”» (Hosea 13,2) – the prophets know that the kisses offered to the statues present in (almost) all religious and secular cults are not what constitutes the sin of the people. The true sin is different: believing you can be saved, not by God, but by well-being, by wealth, by the security given by goods. This Baal is the one that scares the prophets the most, because it is intertwined with the good gifts of God, and since there is no statue of this idol, people adore it, sacrifice their life to it, without ever really calling it Baal. Hence, the prophets name our idols, and call upon us to choose on which side we want to be.
Perhaps the theological and anthropological operation that Hosea performs in these verses is even more interesting, turning the relationship between the desert and the Promised Land upside down: the Promised Land is where the final betrayal of the people towards God begins. As long as they were in the desert, nomads and poor, the people were in a condition of vulnerability and therefore of dependence. Of course, there was no lack of infidelities, but their experience of providence was stronger and therefore it was evident that their hope was only in their Lord, who had freed them and continued to save them every day. Salvation was not an abstract or solely religious experience: it was manna, water, quail. It was the end of a condition of dependence, poverty and vulnerability, which ended up extinguishing the promise. Once they reached the land of Canaan, instead of becoming the fulfillment of the promise made to Abraham, the patriarchs and Moses became the beginning to the end. That abundance and fertility of the earth, that "milk and honey" became the goods in which to wrap the sacrifices to the Baal of fertility and abundance. The Promised Land thus was walking free and poor following a voice, it was alive as long as they saw it in front of them, as long as it fed their greatest desires. The arrival in the Promised Land instead extinguished the life of the promise.
Many charismatic communities begin their decline as soon as the desert ends and they cross the Jordan. They live for decades under a dictatorship, in the midst of a thousand poverties, in an authentic exodus and desert. Everything is missing without anything missing at all, because that nomadic voice bridges and fills every void. Then the dictatorship ends, sometimes also thanks to the work and faith of those small prophetic communities, and the day of freedom becomes the first day of their decline and crisis. The arrival in the much-desired Promised Land, the end of poverty and provisionality and the beginning of the blessing of abundance, create the conditions for the failure of that experience of trust that had blessed the community. Here, we also find one of the main reasons for the value of poverty, so loved by the Gospels and by Francis: poverty is that desert where, thanks to vulnerability, dependence and fragility, one can truly experience being children, evangelical children, and thus feel loved by a love greater than all the fertile lands of the world. The beautiful poverty of the Gospel is not only that choice: it is also that of the deserts, where we did not want to go.
This desert paradox also contains a beautiful metaphor for life. When an existence works and flourishes, we must be very attentive to the goals, the objectives achieved, the Jordan River. If we wish to prevent the most beautiful achievements from becoming a collection of disappointments and the beginnings of decline, it is necessary to experience these objectives as stages on an infinite and unfinished journey that will stop only between the wings of the angel of death, and perhaps not even there. Then, while crossing the deserts (life harbours many of them), do not think that the most beautiful things will come at the end of the crossing. No, in fact it is in the desert where we will see the angels, the miracles, the prophets, and the manna; let us not miss this wonder while running too fast towards the Promised Land, because the Promised Land is the one found under our feet, even when it burns and is dry. That land is that of the promise because we have not yet reached it and because we never will.
It is within this desert-promise that we can truly understand the meaning of the mysterious death of Moses, a prophet whom Hosea loved. The Bible tells us that Moses, the liberator and guide of the people in the exodus, died without ever reaching the Promised Land, alone on Mount Nebo (Deuteronomy 34). He saw the Jordan Valley from afar, but never entered it. Hosea suggests that dying between the desert and the Jordan was neither a curse nor a punishment; but in fact God's last gift for Moses. Hence, the incompleteness that accompanies our works and the work of our life is neither a failure nor a betrayal, it is merely the most human and true thing that can happen to us.
