Cheating

One of the things that will come to mind first when you start to watch Maury Povich (That's Jeremy Kyle if you're British), is that you should be doing something better with your life.

After you've come to that crushing realization, then the very next thing you should be doing is to check out what happens with cheating couples.  For it is always cheating couples.  It's all paternity tests, and lie detector tests, and hidden cameras and all that noise.  And here's the thing, is that in a
marriage type situation, in which people make vows, and promise to abide by them, and then don't, the relationship can go one of two ways.  Either the couple breaks up (usually unamicably), or the couple agrees to get back together.  But here's the thing about these couples in crisis - if you're the one cheating, and you want to get back together, if you want to grovel and seek forgiveness, you don't get to make the rules anymore.  You don't get to be the one who sets conditions and insists on who can and can't do things in the relationship.  Not anymore.  That province is the province of the person who was cheated on.  They get to decide if they're going to take you back, and they get to set the conditions.  They get to be the ones who decide how the relationship is going to go from now on.

The reading that we had from the Old Testament touches on that, talking about how Israel is God's bride, and he is her husband.  And this relationship explains why the Lord our God is a Jealous God.  we entered into a covenant relationship with him, we signed up for a covenant relationship with him, and we broke that covenant.  Time and time again, we broke the covenant that God set before us.  The rules weren't unknown, the contitions weren't too hard to work out, it wasn't as though you had a Ashley Madison isn't full of people who haven't realized that they're not supposed to cheat on their spouses, it's full of people who are happy to cheat as long as they don't get caught.
hard time figuring out what to do with things, no, it's a matter of knowing what you ought to do, and then not doing it.  In the same way as people who cheat know what their marriage is all about, they just choose not to follow through with it.

Now, this is our relationship with God.  We are his spouse, and he is jealous for us like we all are for our spouses.  And our unfaithfulness is best explained to us in the story of Hosea, the prophet from the Old Testament.  Hosea lived out the life we live with God in his own life, taking for himself a wife of unfaithfulness, taking for himself a prostitute and children of unfaithfulness.  And as you watch Hosea with his wife, Gomer, you feel like screaming at him "What are you doing?  Leave that woman, she brings you nothing but heartache and hurt!"  Yes, that's true.  And looking at that, it makes sense that Hosea should leave Gomer.  But he doesn't.  Because through him, God is teaching us all a lesson about what it is like to love us.

As it frequently does, it comes back to David. It comes back to David, who found himself a new bride in Bathsheba, and to get her, had her husband killed.  And after that happened, David went back to his bedchamber with his new bride, fat and happy, and relaxed, thinking that he'd gotten away with it.  But when Nathan the prophet comes to David, he does so to explain to David the problems with what he had done.  But Nathan is smart enough to realize that everybody believes that they're a hero in their own eyes.  Nobody using Ashley Madison believes that they're a cheating dirtbag.  Everybody believes that they were pushed into it, that they didn't have a choice, that they have a right to be happy, and so on.  This is what happens to us.  And when David broke God's law, Nathan knew that David wouldn't listen to a scolding based on what he had done.  Instead, David listened to a story about a man, and a sheep, and David was able to correctly ascertain that this was a problem.  And that's when Nathan was able to tell him 'you are the man.'  In other words, you are the person who is the problem here, whether you see it or not.

When you read the story of Hosea, you look at a man who is being played for a chump by his wife, his cheating, unfaithful wife, you get angry.  You get angry at her for cheating, and you get angry at him for sticking around, the schlub.  If he had any self respect, he'd be gone.  But this is the story of

us and God.  It's the story of someone sticking around through all our unfaithfulness, the story of someone putting up with our cheating, and realizing that based on the old rules that we signed up for, that our marriage was never going to work.  So instead of that, he made new rules.  A new covenant. A new covenant was going to be set up based not on our ability to keep God's laws, but on his capacity to forgive.  The new covenant was to be based on God forgiving our iniquity and remembering our sin no more.

How is this miracle to happen?  Through the work of Christ.  As he says in the Gospel reading, that the one who is going to be the first, must be the servant to everyone.  Whoever wishes to be the first among us must be the slave of all of us.  They have to drink the cup that Christ is to drink, and be baptized with the baptism that Christ is baptized with. Can they do it?  No.  Nobody can except Christ, who takes our sin upon him, and walks it all the way to the cross.  He is going to be drink that cup that is only for him, the cup of service, the cup of suffering, the cup of sour wine at the cross.  And in doing so, he changes the relationship between us and God.  No longer about good going to heaven and bad going to hell, no longer about us keeping our covenant with God in order that we might be blessed - it's about God's sacrifice for us.  Because we aren't faithful, if we are to continue in this relationship, we must by definition play by the rules of the faithful spouse, and that faithful spouse is God, who will keep on taking us back again and again, just like Hosea to Gomer.

Because he loves us.  There's no reason to do what he does, nothing compels him to do it, objectively he shouldn't, but he does.  Because he loves us.

Blessings on your Lenten journey.