I Desire Steadfast Love and Not Sacrifice

What shall I do with you, O Ephraim?
    What shall I do with you, O Judah?
Your love is like a morning cloud,
    like the dew that goes away early.
Therefore I have hewn them by the prophets;
    I have killed them by the words of my mouth,
    and my judgment goes forth as the light. 
For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice,
    the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.
(Hosea 6:4-6, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

God’s disdain for empty ritual echoes throughout the Hebrew Bible.

“For the prophet, life, worship, and justice are intertwined,” a marginal note in the Anabaptist Community Bible explains. “When they are separated or in opposition, ritual becomes abhorrent to God.” The note appears near a warning delivered through Isaiah (1:14): “I hate your new moons and your festivals. They’ve become a burden I’m tired of bearing.” (Though I generally quote from the updated edition of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, I like the Common English Bible’s particularly blunt rendering of this verse.)

Amos passes on a similar message (5:23-24): “Take away from me the noise of your songs,” the Lord tells the people of Israel. Instead, God advises, they should “let justice roll down like water and righteousness like an overflowing stream.” Similarly, Micah asks (6:8), “What does the LORD require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?” 

If you do these things, God promised, your community will thrive—but, as the Hebrew Bible recounts, the people of ancient Israel had frequent difficulties holding up their end of the covenant, with disastrous consequences. (Not that we have any room today to judge them on that front, based on the evidence of the world around us.) “The LORD has an indictment against the inhabitants of the land,” Hosea declares (4:1). “There is no faithfulness or loyalty and no knowledge of God in the land.”

Interestingly, the “loyalty” of Hosea 4:1 and “steadfast love” of 6:6 both refer to the same Hebrew word. 

Hesed describes the condition of a relationship—sometimes between two people, but more often between God and humanity. It has layers of meaning that don’t translate neatly into a single word; when one says “loyalty,” or “trust” as Robert Alter does in his recent translation, one loses the nuances of love that shape this relationship. As he was completing the first English-language translation of the Bible in the sixteenth century, Myles Coverdale coined the term “lovingkindness” in an attempt to convey hesed’s complexity. That neologism remains popular today, although “steadfast love” has become a common colloquial alternative.

God had endless hesed for the people of Israel, no matter how many times they fell short of reciprocating. They tried, but their hesed had the quality of a morning cloud, quick to evaporate. Look at how differently that admonition from Hosea reads when we say “trust” or “loyalty” instead of “love.” And yet each version gets at some aspect of why people throughout history have faltered in their adherence to the sacred covenant. We find it difficult to believe in the reality of God’s promise, too impatient for the blessed community to emerge into being, and abandon God to embrace this world’s offers of easy comfort and security—sometimes making little compromises here and there, sometimes rushing in for the quick score. But we don’t just stop showing God our hesed; we stop showing it to each other as well. And as we do, society unwinds, giving way to depravity and ruin.

Jesus echoed Hosea’s message in a key moment of his ministry.

During one of his public sermons, a scribe asked Jesus to identify the greatest of the commandments, and he replied, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. But beyond that, Jesus added, you should also “love your neighbor as yourself.” The scribe affirmed this response, and described the commandments Jesus had named as “much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” (Mark 12:29-33)

Loving with all your heart and soul, your mind and strength: now that unpacks the richness of hesed, to my mind. The Greek verb for “love” in this passage, agapan, reflects the intensity of this love; the New Testament uses the same verb to describe Jesus’s self-sacrificing love for humanity. Jesus called on us to show God the same steadfast devotion God showed us. God would give everything for you; you should give everything for God. But God would also give everything for your neighbor; therefore, you should give everything for your neighbor as well.

And God wants this from us, more than the rote performance of ceremonial tributes. When they sought to reestablish “primitive Christianity,” and the covenant that gives it life, Quakers took that advice to an extreme, eliminating virtually all outward ritual from their meetings for worship. Instead, they strove for their lives to give testimony to the strength of their hesed, as we ourselves strive today.

(Jennifer M. Matheny’s Hesed, the Seed of the Biblical Story helped clarify this message in my own mind. If you have a somewhat academic bent for theology, I highly recommend it.)