How can I give up on you?

Rev. Dr. Karin Ekholm, August 3, 2025 at St. George’s on Hosea II:1-11

We grow up hearing stories about ourselves from loved ones who fondly remember us from a time beyond our own earliest memories. Stories of our birth, how we were good or fussy eaters, our first words, first steps, first birthday cake, and the cute ways we pronounced and expressed things. Memories of these moments are told over and over during our childhood and throughout our lives. There is something very touching in recognizing how someone has known and cared for us so long, and to see how they take delight in recollecting these times. The very act of sharing these stories communicates affection. This lore, moreover, forms our understanding of ourselves and our relationship to the person who remembers.

The Prophet Hosea offers a poetic image of God as parent looking back with tenderness on happier days. The passage conveys God’s love and care for an infant, whom he calls “Israel” and, later in the passage, “Ephraim”. During this time, in poetry, both names were applied to the northern kingdom. 

Israel in the north and Judah in the south had once been a single realm formed from the Twelve Tribes of Israel, and after the death of Solomon, they split into two kingdoms. Hosea was a native of the north who began his prophetic activity around the middle of the 8th century, during the prosperous reign of Jeroboam II. But within a few years, the king’s death resulted in violence, struggles for the throne, and considerable social instability.

This period of internal turmoil coincided with the rise of the Assyrian Empire, which doubled in size under Tiglath-Pileser III to become the largest empire in history up to that point. At the time of Hosea’s prophecies, Assyria had launched military excursions and exacted tribute from Israel. Soon the kingdom was utterly defeated. A fifth of the population was taken captive and sent to Assyria or deported to vanquished territories far away. Those left behind came to be known as Samaritans. 

This is the context in which Hosea prophesied. Nowadays “prophesy” indicates a message that foretells the future, in Scripture the meaning is broader. In the Hebrew Bible, the term was understood as God communicating with his people through chosen individuals. While words of warning or consolation about the future are sometimes part of prophesies, their primary purpose was to point out how things really stand right now. An appropriate response to grave circumstances requires right discernment about what’s wrong. Hosea’s urgent task was to call people to see the new situation in the northern kingdom for what it really was. 

In their despair over the political crisis and fear of Assyria, people were losing hope that the God of their ancestors would save them from danger. To minimize risk, they began to worship multiple Gods. In our passage, YHWH grieves that they “kept sacrificing to the Baals, and offering incense to idols.” “Baal” means “lord” in various Semitic languages, and was used as a title for deities, especially the Canaanite storm and fertility god. In a land dependent on rain-fed agriculture, this was their pantheon’s most significant deity.

To the people of the northern kingdom, the current political upheaval and anxiety was understandably at the forefront of their attention, but the prophet locates the central crisis elsewhere: they have turned their backs on God, forsaken the covenant, and broken the first two Commandments. 

God responds through Hosea with a lament that begins with sweet recollections. The people of the northern kingdom are represented as a son who was born into slavery in Egypt and whom God led to freedom. 

“it was I who taught Ephraim to walk,” God says, evoking an image of holding out fingers for a toddler to gasp as he learns to teeter and totter.

When God recalls taking him up in my arms, we picture a tired or wriggly child comforted by an embrace.

God’s self-comparison to “those who lift infants to their cheeks” brings to mind moments of delight in the softness of a baby’s hair and the sweet scent of their skin.

And finally, this is a God who bends down to them to feed the child. 

For Hosea’s original hearers, these were the actions of a mother. Today, when fathers are as likely to be the caregiver for young children, these words are unlikely to have the same impact, but his contemporaries would have recognized the God of Israel portrayed as a loving mother. 

One of the ways we understand our relationship with God is through the lens of human relationships. Last week, I focused on Jesus identifying God as our father. Every metaphor has its limits, and when we speak of God, all of our language and imagery falls short. Masculine God-language is an incomplete articulation of who God is, and images of God as maternal are sprinkled throughout Scripture. God is a birth-giver in Deuteronomy, a comforting mother according to the Prophet Isaiah, and Jesus describes himself as a mother hen who longs to gather her little ones under her wings. Hosea’s prophesies offer multiple images of God that point at a greater reality that does not neatly fit our categories. Among them is this remarkable, extended metaphor of the motherly love of God for the northern kingdom.

But these sweet memories are pained. Ephraim, an early runaway, keeps ignoring her voice and dashing toward danger. And here God shifts from remembering her child to addressing him directly with variations on the question: “How can I give up on you?” 

Here we witness God engaged in an internal struggle, and in the end, mercy and compassion prevail. The theologian Ellen Davis astutely observes that this divine love that pains God “that might sharpen easy and bland assertions that God is love” (Davis, 241). This is a fierce love of one whose scattered children are gathered by a lion’s roar. 

Although the prophecy is very context specific, it speaks powerfully to people in every time and place of what God is like. The metaphor illuminates the tender care of God who bends down to be with us, to feed us, and to lift us up. 

God continues to call us by name and to bend down and reach out, both through the community of believers and the Holy Sacraments. Today, by baptism, Jordan Nahsima will become a child of God. This metaphor stretches back to Exodus and forward to the gospel proclamation that “to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God” (John 1:12). This child is loved by God with the tender affection Hosea describes, and today she is welcomed into God’s family. 

And as a family God calls us to the table for the meal that gives us life and strength trusting that this motherly love of God will continue to touch us, feed us, hold us, heal us, and make us whole.