…and Abounding in Steadfast Love

The Lord is merciful and gracious,
    slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
He will not always accuse,
    nor will he keep his anger forever.
He does not deal with us according to our sins
    nor repay us according to our iniquities.
For as the heavens are high above the earth,
    so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him;
as far as the east is from the west,
    so far he removes our transgressions from us.
(Psalm 103:8-12, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

We’ve talked about God’s “steadfast love” before.

Translators handle the Hebrew word hesed in a variety of ways. The first complete English-language edition of the Bible, published by Myles Coverdale in 1535, had this verse from the 103rd Psalm describing the Lord as “of greate goodnesse.” The first generations of Quakers would know God as “of great kindness” or “plenteous in mercy,” depending on whether they’d encountered the Geneva Bible or the King James. Other translations speak of love: great love, loyal love, gracious love, constant love, unfailing love, faithful love. Some might frame it as “loving devotion” or “loving kindness,” sometimes rendering the latter as a single word.

I have a soft spot for “lovingkindness,” but the more time I spend thinking about hesed, the more I come to appreciate the simple practicality of “steadfast love.” For me, it gets at the heart of the relationship between God and humanity—between God and all of creation, really. I believe in… well, I very much want to believe in a God filled with a steadfast love for us, a God who desires that we should return that steadfast love sincerely, rather than obeying God out of compulsion or terror.

But doesn’t God reserve steadfast love for “those who fear [God],” you ask? Most English-language translations of the 103rd Psalm say something like that, yes. Like hesed, however, the Hebrew words yare and yirah have layers of meaning. We can translate them simply as “to feel fear” or “a state of fear,” but those readings flatten the language, leaving out nuances of “honor” and “respect” and “worship.” We can’t deny the vast imbalance of power between God and humanity, but we can trust that God does not and will not exploit the advantage, nor “deal with us according to our sins.”

People claiming to speak for God, though, don’t always show such scruples.

Many people in Quaker meetings today, perhaps especially in the United States, came to the Religious Society of Friends from highly controlling religious communities—often, but not exclusively, Christian in nature. The leaders in those churches tell their followers what to believe and how to behave, with severe condemnation (at a minimum) for anyone stepping out of line. The power structures they create replicate those of the secular world—in some cases, they choose to openly align themselves with the secular world, embracing one or another form of “Christian nationalism.”

We can easily understand why people who have escaped such environments develop a suspicion not only of institutionalized religion, but the liturgy it deploys. If the church used these words to control us, the logic runs, we should reject these words entirely, refuse to kneel before any authority… even, some would say, God. A God that demands fear, one might argue, must lack the ability to inspire our genuine love—and, furthermore, must lack the ability to genuinely love us.

Such reasoning regards God’s essence as little more than a human personality with ramped-up magical powers. When men and women have even a tiny bit of power over one another, they abuse it; surely a god with power at a far greater scale would enact far greater abuses? Men and women frequently break their promises, especially when they tell us they love us; surely we cannot trust God’s promises of steadfast love?

I believe this line of thought fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the holy.* I don’t think it helps us much to think of God as a bigger, badder bossman—not least of all because I believe the holy stands outside all our human frameworks of power and knowledge. And, I believe, it loves us as it loves itself.

Reducing yirah to “fear” serves the agenda of those who want to keep men and women in a subservient state.

We would do better to approach the holy in a state of awe—a recognition of the vast difference in scale, and a sense of… maybe “gratitude” doesn’t exactly convey how we should feel about the existence of “that of God within us,” as the Quaker phrasing has it. Maybe “amazement” better describes how we might react to realizing that we exist in relationship to every other part of the universe, that the energy in us permeates all of existence. Perhaps we should feel gratitude and amazement together, and perhaps they should lead us to regard the world around us—and especially our neighbors—with the kind of steadfast love that leaves all our transgressions in the rearview mirror.

* In The Idea of the Holy, the early twentieth-century theologian Rudolf Otto describes the experience of encountering a mysterium tremendum et fascinans, “a Mystery inexpressible and above all creatures.” So the holy points to the thing beyond the labels, like God, we attempt to assign to it.