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Commentary on Matthew 10:16-23

Today’s passage clearly reflects later experiences of the Church as, for instance, described in many parts of the Acts of the Apostles and, of course, in the later history of the Church. Matthew’s Gospel was written some 50 years after the death and resurrection of Christ and naturally reflects some experiences of this period. It is both a warning and a description of what has happened and continues to happen to the messengers of the Gospel.

We are sent out like “sheep among wolves”. We are, in a way, defenceless, because we renounce any use of violence. There are wolves out there eager to destroy us because, despite our message of love, justice and peace, we are seen as a threat to their activities and ambitions.

We are to be clever as snakes and innocent as doves. We are to be as inventive and creative as we can be in dealing with the world. But we are to be innocent, not in the sense of being naive, but in the sense of being completely free of even any suspicion of wrongdoing. The end does not justify the means!

As has happened so many times and continues to happen, followers of Christ, simply because they are his followers and for no other reason, will be hauled into court, will be the victims of intimidation and torture. This is our opportunity to give witness to Christ and everything that the Gospel stands for.

“When they hand you over”—a favourite Gospel expression: John the Baptist was handed over; Jesus himself was handed over first to the leaders of his people and then to the Romans; his disciples too will be and are handed over; and in every Eucharist, we hear that Jesus in his Body is handed over to us:

This is my Body, which is given up [Latin, tradetur: handed over] for you.

When we are “handed over” we are not to be anxious about what to say:

…what you are to say will be given to you…

This has been confirmed again and again by people who have been arrested and interrogated. Not only do they know what to say, but very often their fear, too, disappears. In fact, once released, they simply go back to what they were doing when they were first arrested (we see this in the Acts of the Apostles). And he continues:

…it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you…

The enemies of the Gospel have no ultimate answer to truth, love and justice.

Jesus also warns:

…you will be hated by all because of my name…

These words of Jesus are sad because they are true. The following of Christ can break up families. Family members have betrayed each other, handed each other over. However, once baptised, we enter a new family with new obligations. Our commitment to God, to love, to truth, to justice, to freedom, transcends obligations that arise from blood. I cannot obey a father who tells me to violate the Gospel; I cannot cooperate with a brother who urges me to do evil. It involves painful choices, but the opposite would be, in the long run, worse. This is something we can sometimes find difficult to accept. It is difficult to understand that the following of the loving and loveable Jesus can create such hostility and hatred.

When they persecute you in this town, flee to the next…

We need to be clear that Jesus never tells us to go out of our way to seek persecution or to be hated. On the contrary, we are to make Christianity as attractive as possible. We want people to share our experience of knowing and being loved by Christ.

One of the reasons why the Church spread so rapidly throughout the Roman world was precisely because of Christians fleeing from persecution. There comes a time, however, when we can run no further, or when it is clear we have to take a stand and cannot compromise.

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Commentary on Hosea 14:2-10

Our last reading from Hosea is taken from the final verses of the book. It is a call for repentance and reconciliation of Israel with its God. In return, Yahweh makes his promises. The prophecy ends on a note of hope – already heard in some of the passages we read earlier in the week. It is a liturgical prayer expressing sincere repentance, corresponding to Hosea 6:1-6 (which we did not read), and is followed by a firm promise of God’s blessing. It is now time for Israel to return to its God, for it has collapsed under the weight of its guilt.

Hosea says:

Take words with you
and return to the Lord.

Not empty words, but words full of meaning and sincerity, words begging for forgiveness, words of true repentance. They will ask for their sins to be set aside and they will go back to offering sacrifices to the one, true God. They will pray:

Take away all guilt;
accept that which is good,
and we will offer
the fruit of our lips…

As well, they will no longer place their trust in Assyria nor “ride upon horses” – namely, by making expedient treaties with countries like Egypt, which can do little for them against the might of Assyria. No longer will they address the words “Our God” to something which they have made themselves. They will instead put their trust in Yahweh, for in him “the orphan finds mercy”. By alienating himself, Israel, as Yahweh’s son, had made himself an orphan.

Yahweh will extend his love “freely” to Israel, without any force or compulsion, for his anger has now been turned away from his wayward son, in spite of the way he has behaved. Without their God, what are the people but pure orphans? Yahweh, we might say, was turning the other cheek, as Jesus, his Son, will later tell us to do.

In a lovely phrase Yahweh “will be like the dew to Israel”, not in the sense of something transitory, but as something cool and refreshing, giving life to plants so that Israel “shall blossom like the lily”.

In an image unique in the Old Testament, Hosea compares his people to a tree, to the great Lebanon cedar and the splendid olive tree. A reformed Israel will have the fragrance of the cedar. Then, Ephraim-Israel will have no more to do with idols. He will have been punished for his wrongdoing but prosperity is returning.

Again, in another tree simile:

I am like an evergreen cypress;
your fruit comes from me.

The evergreen cypress was seen as a symbol of life…words very similar to those spoken by Jesus to his disciples when he compared himself to the vine enabling its branches to bear fruit (see John 15:1-7).

With the final verse of the book, our reading ends with a reflection which is probably a later addition in the style of the Wisdom literature, but no less valuable for all that:

For the ways of the Lord are right,
and the upright walk in them,
but transgressors stumble in them.

This is a thought worth reflecting on. For the just ways of the Lord are the ways to life, the only ways to real life. It was a lesson that Israel had to learn at a high price. Later, Jesus, the Word of God, will say:

I am the way and the truth and the life. (John 14:6)

But to the sinner, the call of God, of Jesus and the Gospel is a serious stumbling block. It gets in the way of all he or she longs to have and do. It is why so often there are people who want to rid the world of God, of Jesus and the Gospel and also of those who are trying to build their lives on these truths.

Do we experience our Christian faith as a real liberation and source of joy, or is it something that seems to get in the way of what we want?

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Commentary on Matthew 10:7-15

We continue the apostolic discourse of Jesus to his disciples. Jesus now instructs them on what they are to say and do. They are to proclaim that:

The kingdom of heaven [God] has come near.

This, of course, is true because of the presence and work of Jesus. Jesus is himself the very embodiment of the Kingdom, he is the ultimate Kingdom person. The Kingship of God is fully present in him. But it will also be present in the Twelve who will do the same things that Jesus is doing: curing the sick, raising the dead, healing lepers, liberating people from evil spirits. Later, we will see the Apostles doing all these things in the Acts of the Apostles and the Church continues to do these things.

Today, all of us are called to proclaim the kingship, the lordship of God by our words, actions and lifestyle. The Church is still called to bring healing into people’s lives. We may not raise people literally from the dead, but there many who are virtually dead, though physically alive, and who need to be brought back to a fully human life.

Most of our societies today do not have lepers, but we have, in every society, people who are marginalised and pushed out to the fringes. They need to be reintegrated. There may be people in some places who are genuinely in the possession of evil spirits, but there are far more who are in the grip of more mundane demons such as nicotine, alcohol and other drugs, who are caught up in the materialism, consumerism, hedonism and sexism of our time. They too need to be liberated. Yes, there is a lot of work to be done—by each one of us in our own way and in accordance with our gifts and life situation.

Jesus also tells his disciples to travel light. They are not to charge for their service. They are not to find their security in the possession of material things, especially money. To increase their freedom, they should go around with the absolute minimum. In our lives, possessions, and our concern about them, can be very inhibiting.

Of course, what Jesus does expect is that each person working for the Kingdom has his needs looked after by those he serves. This is where his security lies: in being sure of a place to sleep and food to eat. In return, the missionary brings the Lord’s peace to any home that offers hospitality. This is a vision of a society which is hard to find in our own day, although it is lived in varying degrees of commitment by religious in the Catholic Church, and even by some followers of other religions like Hinduism and Buddhism.

St Teresa of Calcutta’s (Mother Teresa) Sisters come pretty close to the Gospel vision, as do the Little Sisters/Brothers of Charles de Foucauld. And that is really the meaning of the second half of today’s passage. St Teresa once said: “I do own things, but they do not own me.” That is where she differed from so many of us.

Jesus expects the missionary to find a place to stay wherever he goes. And, once he finds one, he should stay there; he is not to be moving around looking for more desirable conditions. On the other hand, Jesus has hard words for those who refuse hospitality to his messengers. Shaking the dust from one’s feet was symbolical. The dust of any gentile country was regarded as unclean. By implication, so was the dust of an inhospitable community. Jesus tells them:

…it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town.

In the Middle East hospitality has always been important. Unfortunately, in our security-conscious urban Western world, it does not flourish. Largely, because of those unnecessary possessions which Jesus would liberate us from.

There are two things for us to reflect on today:

First, where is our security? Are we burdened down by the things we own? Are we owned by them? How free are we to live a fully Christian life as envisioned by the Gospel? How free are we to do the things that Jesus says we should be doing: bringing healing and wholeness into people’s lives?

Secondly, what kind of hospitality do we give to those—whoever they are—who are generously doing the Lord’s work? Or, if they are not Christians, who are doing the work of the Kingdom?

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Commentary on Hosea 11:1, 3-4, 8-9 Read Thursday of Week 14 of Ordinary Time – First Reading »

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Commentary on Matthew 10:1-7

We begin today the second of the five discourses of Jesus which are a unique feature of Matthew’s Gospel. It consists of instructions to Jesus’ disciples on how they are to conduct their missionary work and the reactions they can expect in carrying it out.

It begins by the summoning of the inner circle of twelve disciples. Matthew presumes we already know about their formal selection, which he does not recount (the Gospel’s of Mark and Luke clearly distinguish the selection of the Apostles from their later missioning). These twelve disciples are now called Apostles.

The two words are distinct in meaning and we should not confuse them. A disciple (Latin discipulus, from discere, to learn) is a follower, someone who learns from a teacher and assimilates that teaching into his own life. An apostle (Greek, apostolos from apostello) is someone who is sent out on a mission, someone who is deputed to disseminate the teaching of the master to others. In the New Testament a distinction is made between the two. All the Gospels, for instance, speak of the Twelve Apostles and Luke mentions 72 Disciples.

However, that does not mean the two roles are mutually exclusive. On the contrary, all of us who are called to be disciples are also expected to be apostles, actively sharing our faith with others. It is very easy for us to see ourselves, ‘ordinary’ Catholics, as disciples and to regard priests and religious as doing the apostolic work of the Church. That would be very wrong. Every one of us called to be a disciple is, by virtue of Baptism and Confirmation, also called to be an apostle.

Applied to the twelve men (yes, they were all men—and therein lies the source of many disputes!), the word ‘apostle’ does have a special sense. They would become, so to speak, the pillars or foundations on which the new Church would be built, with Peter as their leader. They would have the special role of handing on and interpreting the tradition they had received from Jesus, a role which in turn they handed on to whom we now call the bishops, with the pope, as leader and spokesperson.

Later on, Paul would be added to their number and Matthias would be chosen to replace the renegade Judas. In fact, it is interesting to see the mixed bunch of people that Jesus chose. We know next to nothing about most of them, but they were, for the most part, simple people—some of them definitely uneducated and perhaps even illiterate. Judas may well have been the most qualified among them. And yet we see the extraordinary results they produced, and the unstoppable movement they set in motion. The only explanation is that it was ultimately the work of God through the Holy Spirit.

The first instructions they are given are to confine their activities to their own people. They are not to go to pagans at this stage, or even to the Samaritans. As the heirs to the covenant and as God’s people, the Jews are to be the first to be invited to follow the Messiah and experience his saving power. And their proclamation is the same one that Jesus gave at the outset of his public preaching:

The Kingdom of Heaven [i.e. of God] has come near.

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Commentary on Hosea 10:1-3,7-8,12

Israel under Jeroboam II (793-753) “never had it so good”. The Northern Kingdom is called ‘Israel’ after the name of its ancestor and it is described as a “luxuriant vine”, which was a frequent metaphor for Israel.

But as we so often see happening in our own world, the good life does not result in moral living. Quite the opposite, in fact, is common. We have only to look around in our present time to see this. The prophet says:

The more his [i.e. Israel’s] fruit increased,
the more altars he built;
as his country improved,
he improved his pillars.

How true! The greater the prosperity, the higher the standard of living, the more idols are erected, things which people use all their energies in worshipping and pursuing.

But the people’s “heart is false”, their “hearts” are in the wrong place. Their heart is divided between worship of Yahweh and the Baals, or hesitating between Egypt and Assyria for their alliances. Israel formally calls on God, but it dishonours him through its worship of idols. But God:

…will break down their altars
and destroy their pillars.

The principles of truth, love and justice do not fit in the face of unlimited materialism, consumerism, hedonism, uninhibited sexual indulgence, fashion, status, success, power and all such worldly values.

In fact, in so far as worldly values are denials of truth and love and justice, they will ultimately collapse because of their inbuilt contradictions. These false ‘values’ are essentially opposed to people’s deepest aspirations – aspirations planted in our very being by our Creator.

Referring to the idol they have set up to worship, the prophet says:

For now they will say:
“We have no king,
for we do not fear the Lord,
and a king — what could he do for us?

The prophet’s question is rhetorical and requires no answer.

Little do they realise, in the midst of their prosperity, that the king of Samaria, namely the calf-idol, is doomed to disappear “like a chip on the face of the waters”. Similarly, the “high places of Aven”, that is, the idolatrous shrine at Bethel, the “sin of Israel”, will meet with destruction and “thistle shall grow up on their altars”, i.e. weeds will cover them up.

They will be terrible days indeed when the people will call out for the hills to cover them and fall on them. Cries of utter despair quoted by Jesus when speaking to the women who sympathised with him as he carried his cross to Calvary (and referring to the coming destruction of Jerusalem):

Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For the days are surely coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never nursed.’ Then they will begin to say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us,’ and to the hills, ‘Cover us.’ (Luke 23:28-30)

The last verse in our reading today from Hosea is also cited in Revelation (6:16) in the context of the cosmic upheaval accompanying the coming of the ‘Day of the Lord’.

But there is a way out, if the people change their ways and begin to plant justice – a justice where all share equitably in the resources available – and reap the fruits that come from deeply loving and compassionate hearts. It is time now to plough new furrows in what has up to now been fallow and unproductive ground and go in search of God, becoming instead productive and fruitful. We remember what Jesus said would happen to the vine tree whose branches did not bear fruit.

It is for us to ask ourselves today to what extent we have been carried away by the affluence of our societies and the prevailing values (or lack thereof). Let us think about ‘ploughing a new field’ in our own lives and work to produce the fruit that matters, the fruit that lasts – fruit that not only we ourselves can enjoy, but which can be shared with others.

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Commentary on Matthew 9:32-37

We come today to the end of the section recounting ten miracles of Jesus (chaps 8-9). The last miracle described is that of a man whose deafness arises from his being possessed by a demon. It follows immediately the cure of two blind men, a story which we did not read and which is told again by Matthew in chapter 20. It seems to correspond to the healing of the blind man Bartimaeus in Mark (chap 10), although there are significant differences.

The man is brought to Jesus by the people. Jesus drives out the demon and the man immediately is able to speak. There is a double reaction. The people are astounded:

Never has anything like this been seen in Israel.

The implications of Jesus’ divine origins are very clear. On the other hand, Pharisees were saying:

By the ruler of the demons he casts out the demons.

Elsewhere Jesus will show the absurd illogicality of that charge.

Stories of the blind, deaf, and mute in the Gospel always have a deeper meaning. Far more serious than physical blindness, deafness and an inability to speak are being spiritually blind, deaf and mute. The Pharisees in the Gospel represent such people, and we see it happening in this story. They are blind because they cannot see or do not want to see God at work in Jesus. They are deaf because they do not hear or do not want to understand what he says. And they are also mute because they cannot speak the words of life that Jesus gives them.

The very same can happen to each one of us. Let us pray today to be able to see clearly, to understand what God says to us and to be able to share it with others.

This section of Matthew concludes with a general description or summary of what Jesus was doing. He was going through all the towns and villages of Galilee; he was teaching in synagogues; he was proclaiming the Good News of the Kingdom; and he was healing all kinds of diseases and sickness.

But behind all that he does, is his deep compassion for the needs of the people. He sees them harassed and dejected, wandering and aimless, like sheep without a guiding shepherd—a familiar image in the Old Testament (see Ezekiel 34). Then, looking at his disciples, he says:

The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few…

Jesus cannot do it all on his own. In fact, he will hardly step outside the boundaries of Palestine. He needs many helpers.

Today, the situation has not changed. The harvest is as big as ever; people are as lost and rudderless as they have ever been in spite of the great strides in knowledge we have made. Where are the labourers? They are not just the bishops, the priests, the religious brothers and sisters. That is a very narrow concept of labourers.

Every single baptised person is called, in some way, to be a harvester, to help people find and experience the truth and love that God gives in Jesus. Every single person, in that sense (and it is a very real sense) has a vocation, a call to serve and to build the Kingdom. What and where and with whom is my vocation?

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Commentary on Hosea 8:4-7,11-13

Hosea is in a very different mood today from yesterday. He makes a scathing attack on the idolatrous practices of the Northern Kingdom (referred to here also as “Israel,” “Samaria” and “Ephraim”) when they set up kings without the Lord’s approval.

This passage refers to the dynastic upheavals of Israel’s declining days. Between the death of Jeroboam II and the fall of Samaria to the Assyrians, a matter of some 25 years, there were four separate dynasties on the throne and as many murdered kings. In fact, after Jeroboam II there were five kings in 13 years, and three of them took power violently. They were certainly not God’s choice.

Worse still, they melted down their silver and gold to make false gods, a move that could only bring the downfall of the people. The Lord said:

Your calf is rejected, O Samaria.

Jeroboam I (930-909 BC) had set up golden calves in the shrines of Bethel and Dan and told the people, “These are your gods”. But says Hosea:

…it is not God.

And the Lord commands:

The calf of Samaria
shall be broken to pieces.

The prophet then quotes a proverb that we still hear today:

When they sow the wind, they will reap the whirlwind.

One evil leads to something much worse. And another saying:

The stalk of grain that forms no ear can yield no flour.

This is another familiar proverb about the results of doing evil. In the Hebrew, there is a play on the similar-sounding words for ‘stalk’ and ‘flour’.

Israel sowed the wind of idolatry and reaped the whirlwind of Assyria. And, even if it did produce flour, it would be devoured by the stranger, namely, the Assyrians. Israel will be swallowed up and, among the nations, become of no value. The idolatry of the people, their turning their backs to their God in favour of idols, will lead to the disaster of the Assyrian invasion and their deportation into exile.

Meanwhile the very ordinances of God are seen now as something foreign. They go through the motions of offering sacrifices and eating the sacrifice as a sign of participation and unity, but God knows their hearts are far from him:

When Ephraim multiplied altars to expiate sin,
they became to him altars for sinning.

Some of the sacrifices were partly eaten by the offerer and priests as a sign of the sacrifice’s union with the god. There was no such union, of course, nor could there be with man-made idols.

God is mindful of their guilt because of their idolatrous practices and recourse to impotent gods. They shall be punished by “return to Egypt”. To go back to ‘Egypt’ was to go back into foreign bondage, as was the case before the Exodus. Now the slavery and bondage is under the Assyrian ruler who will carry them off into exile.

We might ask ourselves two questions today, arising out of these readings:

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Commentary on Matthew 9:18-26

There is a great contrast in the way Matthew tells this double story compared to that told by Mark (Mark 5:21-43). Matthew strips it down to the bare details. The twenty-three verses that Mark needs are reduced here to nine. He makes no mention of the large crowd that was following Jesus, only that his disciples are present. Matthew concentrates on Jesus and on what Jesus does and says.

A synagogue official approaches Jesus and says that his daughter has just died. He is in fact the head of the synagogue, and in Mark and Luke we learn that his name is Jairus. In Mark’s version, the girl is seriously ill and dies only later in the story. The man says to Jesus:

…come and lay your hand on her, and she will live.

It is an extraordinary act of faith in the power of Jesus. Up to this he had not brought anyone back from the dead.

As Jesus and his disciples were on the way to the house, a woman who had suffered from a bleeding problem for twelve years unobtrusively touched the hem of Jesus’ garment.

If I only touch his cloak, I will be made well.

Again, we are presented with a deep faith and trust in Jesus’ power.

This was really the only way this unfortunate woman could approach Jesus with other people around. Her bleeding was not only a physical ailment. It also involved ritual uncleanness, and she was not supposed to be in close contact with people. If they had known, they might have done something terrible to her. Nor, for the same reason, could she approach Jesus openly about her problem, so she quietly touched the hem of his robe. She trusted that that would be enough and she was right.

Jesus, realising she had touched his garment, turned and said kindly:

Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.

And the bleeding stopped instantly.

We now go back to the original story. As Jesus and his disciples approach the house, they find a large crowd of mourners, many of them wailing and weeping in the fashion still common in West, South and East Asia. Jesus tells them all to:

Go away, for the girl is not dead but sleeping.

Hearing this, the crowd laughed at him. Whether the girl was actually dead or was simply in some kind of death-like coma does not really matter. As far as everyone there was concerned, she was dead.

Jesus went into the house, took the girl by the hand and she “got up”. There are overtones of resurrection in the words “got up”.

In both these stories, using the literary device of ‘inclusion’ (one story wrapped inside another), we have a common theme of Jesus as Lord of life. It is Matthew’s way of saying what we read in John:

I am the resurrection and the life. (John 11:25)

That life is to be understood in the fullest possible sense, involving the physical, social, intellectual and spiritual aspects.

In one story, the girl is not only given back her physical life, but is restored to the bosom of her family and all that means. In the other story, not only is the woman’s haemorrhage stopped, but she can be fully reinstated into normal relationships with the people around her. She is in a very real sense made whole again. Let us today pray for Jesus to heal us and make us whole—the wholeness that is holiness, the holiness that is wholeness.

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Commentary on Hosea 2:16,17-18,21-22

Today we begin reading from the prophet Hosea. Hosea belonged to Israel, the Northern Kingdom, and began his prophetic career in the last years of Jeroboam II (786-746 BC). Some believe that he was a priest, others that he was a cult prophet, but the only information on his life comes from this book.

He was a man of great feeling and could go from anger to extreme tenderness. The prophecy is built around his difficult marriage to Gomer, and this affected and deepened his teaching. Gomer was guilty of adultery (very humiliating to any anyone but, especially in those times, to the husband) and comes to symbolise the sinful Israel. And just as Hosea could not give up his wife in spite of her infidelity, so neither could Yahweh abandon Israel, who was betrothed to him, in spite of her faithlessness and treatment of the poor. There would be punishment, but its purpose was to heal and restore the first love. In fact, it was Hosea who began the tradition of describing the relations between Yahweh and Israel in terms of marriage, and this is taken up in the New Testament by Paul and John.

Today’s passage is full of tenderness and a spirit of reconciliation. In the verses just prior to today’s reading, God speaks to Israel, his chosen people saying:

I will now allure her
and bring her into the wilderness
and speak tenderly to her… (Hosea 2:14)

He wants to lead his people into the desert for, in the eyes of Hosea, like Amos before him, the years the Israelites spent in the desert were idyllic times when the people had a particularly close relationship with their Lord. Israel was then childlike, knowing nothing of pagan gods, loyal to Yahweh whose presence was manifest in the cloud. (In fact, it was not quite as idyllic as all that, but we know how nostalgia can romanticise the past.)

Then, says the prophet, Israel:

…shall respond
as in the days of her youth,
as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt.
(Hosea 2:15)

Just as Gomer had treated her husband Hosea, so Israel has behaved like an unfaithful wife, but now she will come back to Yahweh, her spouse, who, of course, has always been faithful to her.

Picking up on today’s reading, Hosea says:

On that day, says the Lord, you will call me “my husband,” and no longer will you call me “my Baal.”

There is an ironic play on words here. For a long time, the word ‘baal’ which means ‘master’ was applied to husbands and also to God. It had been from ancient times an element in certain proper names, without any idolatrous significance. Yahweh was the ‘master’ to whom the bearer of the name was thus dedicated.

But after the corrupting influences of the Canaanites, the word ‘Baal’ came to be identified in people’s minds with the Canaanite gods. There was such a vigorous reaction against that worship that this Hebrew word for “master” was no longer used of the Lord. He says:

For I will remove the names of the Baals from her mouth, and they shall be mentioned by name no more.

And then the Lord will take Israel back:

And I will take you for my wife forever; I will take you for my wife in righteousness and in justice…

Yahweh takes back his unfaithful wife with the fervour of first love and showers her with spiritual gifts – with right and justice, with love and mercy.

‘Righteousness’ and ‘justice’ are two terms dear to Hosea and are used by him especially to condemn the popular social injustice and corruption of the legal processes. Here they mean right conduct in general.

The primary meaning of the word ‘love’ (Hebrew, hesed) is that of a bond, or contract. When used of human relationships it comes to mean friendship, union, loyalty, especially when these are the outcome of a treaty or formal agreement.

Used of God, the term refers to his faithfulness to his covenant and the kindness he therefore shows his chosen people (Exod 34:6). Used by Hosea in the context of married love, the word assumes and from then on retains a still warmer significance: it means the tender love God has for his people and the benefits deriving from it.

But this divine hesed calls for corresponding hesed in man towards Yahweh, consisting of self-giving, loving trust, abandonment, deep affection, ‘piety’, a love (in short) which is a joyful submission to the will of God and an active charity to fellow men. This ideal, expressed in many of the Psalms, will later be that of the Hasidim, or Hasidaeans where, however, it takes rather extreme forms (see verses beginning with 1 Macc 2:42).

Hosea continues:

I will take you for my wife in faithfulness, and you shall know the Lord.

‘Know’ here means much more than an intellectual knowing. It implies a deep and intimate relationship of love and unity. God ‘makes himself known’ to man when he engages himself to him by covenant, and shows his hesed-love for him by the benefits he confers. The word ‘know’ is used in the Bible sometimes to express sexual unity as when Mary (in some translations) told the angel that she “did not ‘know’ a man”, but it also refers to active acknowledgement of a covenant partner.

Similarly, man ‘knows God’ when he loyally observes God’s covenant, shows gratitude for God’s gifts, and returns love for love. In the wisdom literature ‘knowledge’ in this sense and ‘wisdom’ are practically synonymous. The two words ‘know’ and hesed are closely interlinked.

Passages like this, of course, are laying the ground for the love of God for us, which was shown in such a dramatic fashion by Jesus, the Incarnate love of God. The whole of the Gospel is suffused with this love, and we are called to be filled with that love which is extended to God, to every single person without exception and also to ourselves.