Marriage is hard work. I have only been married for three months and I am already well aware of this fact. During our engagement, I gave my husband-to-be a card with one of my favorite quotes by German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. It reads: "For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation."1 These words continue to hang on our refrigerator door as a reminder to me of the commitment I have made to learn to truly love another person.

This commitment also guides my reflection on the marriage of Hosea and Gomer. Initially, I intended to take issue with some of the conclusions reached by the Sabbath School lesson writers’ insistence on a literal reading of the story. There is strong and persuasive evidence that the marriage in question was intended as a metaphorical indictment of the social, religio-political, and economic forces that shaped Israel in eighth-century BCE.

Biblical scholar Marvin Chaney, for example, equates the sexual promiscuity of Gomer with the materialistic endeavors of Israel’s ruling elite—urban male warriors, primarily—who advanced the radical transformation of a subsistence agricultural system that supported the lives of the overwhelming majority of Israelite society into a process of land consolidation and cash crop production that served the self-interests of the wealthy for luxury trade connections with other nations.2 Hosea, less directly than other Hebrew prophets, allusively identifies the injustices perpetuated by the wealthy and powerful against the vulnerable and poor (the "children of Gomer") as a leading factor in their political destruction at the hands of foreign powers.

One should read the work of biblical scholars like Chaney to understand better the available contrasting viewpoints to this week’s lesson. As for myself, I am presently and emotionally compelled to understand better the state of marriage I am now in. Thus, I will address the stated intent of this quarter’s topic by examining the idea of marriage as it relates to the life of faith.

The spiritual journey is, at its core, a commitment to loving God to the point of becoming one with, or, in other words, marrying ourselves to God. But what does this mean and how is it done? As humans, we are continually changing and evolving into a richness of detail and possibility that elude full awareness and recognition. We do not entirely know ourselves or others, and yet, in marriage, we make a commitment to share fully our life with another. How do the limits of our knowledge and power play a role in our relationship to God?

The authors of this week’s Sabbath School lesson argue that we should not place limits on God based on beliefs about how God should or should not act. For example, it is offensive to believe that God would really command a person to enter into and remain in such a troubled marriage. But the authors, by pointing out how God used other prophets to underscore divine judgments, appear to conclude that God is free to operate outside our expectations of how God should act. Yet, even in the act of demonstrating the range of God’s use of prophets’ lives, the lesson’s authors back away from characterizations of God that might be even too uncomfortable for them.

Notably, they cite the case of Ezekiel, where, according to the authors, God "foretold" the death of the prophets’ wife before commanding that he refrain from mourning her loss. But according to the text itself, God does not simply foretell the death of Ezekiel’s wife; God premeditates it. "Son of man," he says, "with one blow I am about to take away from you the delight of your eyes" (Ezek. 24:16). The authors would chastise readers who do not want to believe in a God capable of commanding a marriage to a sexually promiscuous woman when they themselves back away from a biblical text portraying God as a wife killer. In doing so, however, they are able to maintain their picture of God as loving without struggling to integrate evidence to the contrary.

Admittedly, seeing God either as holy adulterer or holy murderer does not sit well with most people. I certainly don’t want to believe in a God who is willing to go to such violent extremes just to make his point. Of course, there are all kinds of ways around these difficult and terrible conclusions. My own reading of Ezekiel allows for the historical and current realities of domestic violence. It seems more likely that Ezekiel killed his own wife and attributed the violent act to God, a scenario not unlike the more recent murders of a woman and her infant daughter by their own kin as documented in Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven.

But whatever aids our ability to rationalize "acts of God" as everyday acts of humankind and nature, we are still confronted with unsettling questions about our own relationship to God. Must we learn to accept God on God’s terms even if God’s actions do not make sense to us or otherwise conform to our expectations and hopes for our lives, the world, and God? Do our hopes and beliefs about God make them so? Or will we all be shocked and undone by what we finally meet as God? And what do these ambiguities in our relationship to God mean for our human relationships?

Learning to love God and others in spite of these ambiguities and uncertainties is, to borrow the language of Rilke, truly the most difficult task of our lives. If any of us had to absolutely know God or another human being before being able to love them, none of us would know love. The practice of love recognizes that the object of our love cannot be fully known. And just as we cannot know each other fully, we cannot know God. So we live with mystery in our intimate relationships, recognizing that it is this mystery that draws us further into an experience of the other, and it is the act of continually moving toward another that reveals to us the infinite nature of God in us.

Yet loving what cannot be fully known is a dangerous and unpredictable proposition. The object of our love may turn on us, may disappoint us, may betray us. And we them. And possibly, God us. But we can only avert the risk inherent in the practice of love by seeking to control the one(s) we love, which then, ironically, negates the intention to love. When we seek to control the objects of our love—either through force or manipulation—we lose the very thing we are trying to hold onto. The same is true of our relationship to God when we demand that God must conform to our beliefs, expectations, and hopes. As Hosea learned, love is only love if it is offered in freedom; we must relinquish the need to "lord" over others—people or God—before we can love them. Whatever the variety of interpretations of Hosea’s marriage to Gomer, the spiritual lesson in its broadest form seems to hinge on this point: how to respond in love in spite of the mysteries and dangers of doing so.

Notes and References

1. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, rev. ed., trans. M.D. Herter Norton (New York: W.W. Norton, 1934; reprint, 1993), 53–54.
2. Marvin Chaney, "Accusing Whom of What? Hosea’s Rhetoric of Promiscuity," in Distant Voices Drawing Near: Essays in Honor of Antoinette Clark Wire, ed. by Holly E. Hearon (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2004), 97–115.

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