Fifteen Shekels

I want to begin with a small and unflattering thing, because it is where this actually started.

I did something for someone. It was not heroic. It was ordinary and it took effort and I wanted it to be noticed, and it was not noticed, and I found that I minded. I minded more than the thing was worth. And I have watched myself mind about this often enough now to know that it is not really about the dishes or the leak or the hours. It is about a ledger I did not know I was keeping.

That is the question I brought to Hosea. What do you do when the work goes unnoticed? What do you do when the relationship is one-sided?

And Hosea has an answer, and I have preached it, and I believe it. God desires faithful love and not sacrifice. He says in chapter fourteen, I will heal their apostasy, I will love them freely. Freely. Without cost or payment. Given as a gift. No invoice.

I have preached that hard. I have said from a pulpit that the phrase I most want buried in the church is you scratch my back and I will scratch yours. It sounds like brotherly love. It sounds like unity. It is a transaction wearing the clothes of a relationship, and a transaction always has terms, and terms can always be breached, and the moment they are breached either side is free to leave or withhold or be cruel. That is not love. That is bondage with good manners.

I still think all of that is true.

But I went back to chapter three and I found something I have read a hundred times and never once let land.

· · ·

God tells Hosea to go get her. She is on the auction block. She is standing there covered in shame, surrounded by everything she chased that never loved her back, and God does not say wait for her to come home. He says go.

And then verse two.

So I bought her for fifteen shekels of silver and a homer and a lethech of barley.

He bought her.

The love that is not a transaction has a receipt in it. There is a price written down in the text, in the middle of the book that is supposed to be the great argument against purchased love, and the prophet who is standing in for God pays it out in coin.

And it gets stranger the longer you look at it.

Fifteen shekels of silver is not a round number and it is not an impressive one. In Exodus, the law sets the value of a slave at thirty shekels. That is the going rate. That is what a person costs. So Hosea walks up to that auction block with half of what a human being is worth, and he cannot even close the gap in silver. He has to make up the difference in grain. A homer and a lethech of barley, which is roughly a homer and a half, and barley was the cheap grain, the grain you fed to animals when the wheat ran out.

He scraped it together. He emptied the house. He came up short and he topped it off with feed.

I do not know how to describe how that changes the story except to say that it makes it worse, and better, at the same time. This is not a wealthy man making a grand gesture. This is a humiliated man counting out everything he has in front of a town that has been whispering about him for years, and it is not enough, so he brings barley.

He paid a price he did not have to pay. She was already his wife.

· · ·

Here is what I had missed, and it is not subtle, and I am a little embarrassed to have missed it.

Freely does not mean free.

When God says I will love them freely, he is not saying the love costs nothing. He is saying it costs you nothing. Those are not the same sentence. Every gift that is free on the receiving end was expensive on the giving end. That is what a gift is. The whole grammar of grace depends on a bill that got paid somewhere else.

We are justified freely by his grace, Paul says, and then in the same breath he says through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, and redemption is a market word. It is what you do at a counter. It means buy back.

So the argument I have been making against transactional love was never an argument against payment. It was an argument about who pays.

And that distinction is the whole thing. The love is not free of cost. It is free of terms. Nobody is holding a note over you. There is no schedule. There is no clause that lets him leave when you fall behind, because you were never a party to the agreement. The transaction happened, and it happened between the Father and the Son, and you were not in the room.

That should have settled me.

It did not settle me. It made me uneasy, and it took me a while to find out why.

· · ·

I hate the phrase you scratch my back and I will scratch yours.

I have said that from a pulpit. I meant it. And I now think I have to admit something about the heat of it, because a man does not get that worked up about a thing he is free of.

When I was somewhere between ten and twelve, I used to go to work with my mom at the Jackson Mill restaurant. While she waited tables I would walk across the street to the 4-H grounds, and in the fall I would go over to the cattle barns and watch the cows at the local shows. And I figured something out over there. I figured out that if I was kind, and if I worked hard, and if I gave people respect, those people would come over to the restaurant for a meal and they would say kind things about me to my mother.

I want to be careful about how I say this, because I am not describing a wound. I am describing a discovery. An eleven year old boy learned a mechanism, and the mechanism worked, and it has never stopped working, and I have run it every day since.

Effort buys regard. That is the whole system. It is efficient and it is reliable and it made me into somebody useful.

And then years later I sat in a review in Colorado, and I received a great deal of praise, and one criticism, and the one criticism made everything else worthless. All of it. The whole file. A hundred good words could not survive a single bad one, and I remember the feeling exactly, which is the feeling of a debt being called in.

That is not a man who has been freed from the ledger. That is a man who has become very good at the ledger and has started calling it ministry.

So when I stand up and say that transactional love is bondage, I am not speaking as a man who is out of prison. I am speaking as a man who knows the exact dimensions of the cell.

· · ·

Someone will read all of that and hear an excuse, and they will be right to, and I want to get there before they do.

If the ledger is the problem, then the obvious move is to stop keeping one, and that is precisely what I cannot do by wanting to. You do not un-learn a mechanism that has run since boyhood by disapproving of it. I have tried. It just relocates. It moves into the prayer. It moves into the serving. It moves into the sermon about not being transactional, which I preach very well, and which people thank me for.

And more than that, the sermon has a landing that I no longer trust in myself.

I told the church that Hosea ate crow. That is a phrase I got from an old pastor friend and mentor, Pastor Bob, who told me once that sometimes you just have to learn to eat crow, and I did not understand him until life had humbled me a few times. Eating crow means you do the right thing even when you did not cause the wrong thing. You make the first move even when it was not your fault. You swallow your pride and you go.

And I said, sometimes the most Christlike thing you can do is eat crow. Go first. Pay what you do not owe.

Look at that landing.

It is a good landing. It is also, for a man like me, the most comfortable possible place to be put. You are asking the one who has organized his entire life around paying to go and pay some more. There is no cost to that instruction. That is my native tongue. Tell me to settle a debt I did not create and I will be at the counter before you finish the sentence, because standing at the counter is where I feel safest in the world.

Go first. Pay what you do not owe. I can do that all day.

· · ·

Here is what I cannot do.

Gomer is not asked to do anything.

Read that scene again and look for her contribution. There is none. She does not repent. There is no scene in the book where she comes to her senses. She does not apologize, she does not explain, she does not offer to work it off, she does not promise to be better. She stands on an auction block, and a man she wronged walks up in front of everyone who ever laughed at him, and empties his pockets, and pays half a slave's price plus barley, and she has to just stand there and let him.

That is the posture. Standing still while somebody pays.

And I have never once done it. Not once. Not cleanly. Somebody buys my lunch and I am already calculating the return. Somebody covers for me and I am uneasy until I have covered for them twice. Somebody forgives me and I get to work becoming the kind of man who deserved it, retroactively, which is not repentance. It is repayment. It is a man on the auction block trying to buy himself.

I know how to be Hosea. I have made a career of being Hosea. I know how to go, and how to pay, and how to eat crow, and how to make the first move, and how to absorb a cost I did not create, and I have been quietly proud of that for a long time, and I never noticed that it is the one role in this story that keeps me on my feet.

Gomer is the one being loved.

And I do not know how to be Gomer.

· · ·

I keep casting myself as the one who pays. Every time. In every story, in every sermon, I find the character who is bearing a cost and I climb into him, because a man who is bearing a cost is a man who is still worth something.

But this is not a story about a man who pays.

It is a story about a woman who is standing in the open, with nothing, in front of a crowd, while somebody counts out silver on her behalf.

And I have been preaching Hosea for years, and I have never once let myself stand where she is standing.

The fifteen shekels were not for him to feel good about.

They were for her to receive.

I do not yet know how to receive them.