Wednesday, December 30, 2020

hesed: a sermon about a powerful hebrew word

Last weekend, I was so excited to preach at our home church in Salt Lake because we opened a sermon series called “Seven Hebrew Words Christians Must Know.”  (“Must” may seem like a strong word, I know—but stick with me and you’ll see why I was so jazzed about this!)  To watch the live version, please check out the FB video located HERE.
 
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Some of you may know this already, but the Bible was primarily written in two ancient languages—the Old Testament is originally in Hebrew, and the New Testament is in Greek—and scholars of these two languages have worked for years to translate them into English and other languages so that they can be read by you and me and the church around the world.  But if any of you are bilingual or have ever tried to learn another language, you also know that the problem when you translate from one language to another is that some words don’t have direct correlates between languages—meaning there isn’t any one word or phrase in the new language that means the exact same thing as a word in the original language.  This is the case with many of the Hebrew words in the Old Testament.  It takes a bit more digging to accurately or fully describe their meaning.
 
One of these is the Hebrew wordחסד  (hesed).
 
[Note: it’s not “hesed” with a soft “h.”  It has a guttural “cha-” at the beginning.  It’s not a very pretty sound to pronounce, actually.  We have to reach all the way to the back of our throat for it.  And not only does the Hebrew sound different, but:
·       The letters are different (as you can see below),
·       It’s written “backwards,” as we might say, from right to left across the page,
·       The sentence structure is different, and
·       The original Old Testament Hebrew didn’t have vowels or vowel markings. 
So just in the speaking and the grammar, much less the meaning, we can see how difficult this language is for us to translate.  But we should try because understanding the true meanings of these Hebrew terms has the potential to unlock so much depth to our faith and the way we understand these Old Testament stories—the way we see God in them, and his relationship to the people of Israel and with us.]


So, hesed.  What does it mean?
There are literally dozens of words that we have tried to use in our English Bibles to capture the meaning this one Hebrew term.  Take Psalm 145 for example.  Verse 8 says,
              “The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in hesed.
 
If you read this in the NIV, it will say, “abounding in love.” 
The NRSV and the ESV translations both say, “steadfast love.” 
The New Living Translation says, “unfailing love.”
The Common English Bible says, “faithful love.”
And the New American Standard Bible and the King James Version both say, “mercy.” 
All of these different attempts to describe the same word… and this doesn’t even exhaust half the list.
 
According to the other nearly 250 times we find this word in the Old Testament, hesed can also be translated as:
·       Kindness
·       Lovingkindness
·       Goodness
·       Faithfulness
·       Loyalty
·       Closeness
·       Solidarity
·       Covenant love
·       Graciousness
·       Devotion
·       And the list goes on…

We can see that so much more is meant by this one Hebrew word than any single word in English can describe.  How do we begin to understand a word with this much depth? 
 
Well, the Jewish people had a practice of conveying meaning through stories, so given that we’re trying to understand their language, I’m going to tell you a story about hesed.  The story begins with a woman named Naomi…
 
Naomi was a Jewish woman married to a man named Elimelech.  The two of them lived in Bethlehem in Judah during the time of the judges (many years before Israel had a king), and they had two sons.  All of a sudden, there began a long season of drought in the land. The ground dried up and there was a famine in Bethlehem.  [Naomi may have thought that that was a bit ironic, given that in Hebrew, beth means “house” and leem means “bread,” so her town was literally called the “House of Bread” and suddenly there was no bread to be found.]
 
Elimelech and Naomi were forced to leave their home to feed their family, so they traveled to the neighboring country of Moab.  But not long after they resettled, Elimelech died and Naomi was left alone to raise their two sons.  She was a single mom—this wasn’t going to be easy.  But she somehow managed, and eventually her sons grew up and took each took Moabite wives.  One was named Orpah and the other was a young woman named Ruth.
 
Having lived so long with only men, it’s no surprise that Naomi would have connected quickly with her new daughters-in-law.  They would have helped her around the house, and she would have told them all about the history of Israel—the great stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses… and Yahweh, the God who made covenants with his people to care for them.
 
Ten years passed this way before both of Naomi’s sons, Mahlon and Chilion, died.  She was now a woman completely alone in a patriarchal society—with no sons and no husband—and in a foreign country no less.  This was devastating.  Then one small piece of good news came.  Naomi heard that Yahweh, the God of Israel, had considered his people and had given them food.  The famine had ended and there was bread in Bethlehem again, so she decided to go back home. 
 
Orpah and Ruth helped her pack everything up, and the three of them started the journey back to Judah.  But not long into their walk, Naomi realized something: she loved these two girls, but there was nothing for them in Israel.  They would be the foreigners with no husbands, and she knew how hard that was.  On top of that, they didn’t have sons that they could raise who would eventually take care of them.  So, she said to the two of them,
“Go back, each of you, to your mother’s house.  May the Lord show kindness toward you, as you have shown to my sons and to me.  May He grant that each of you find security with new husbands.” 
 
Naomi asked for God to show her daughters-in-law kindness and mercy with their own families, even though it meant she would be alone.  This is hesed.
 
At first, both of the girls refused.  They cried and told Naomi they would stay with her, but she knew what waited for them if they did, so again, she said,
“Turn back, my daughters.  Why would you go with me?  I’m too old to have a husband, and I have no other sons for you to marry; and even if I had more sons tomorrow, would you remain unmarried until they grew up?  No, my daughters, it has been far more bitter for me than for you, because the hand of the Lord has turned against me.”
 
Finally, Orpah gave in.  She kissed Naomi and grabbed her things and started to make her way back to her family in Moab.  But Ruth… Ruth was stubborn.  She clung to Naomi.  Naomi tried to reason with her.  She said, “See, your sister-in-law is going back to her family and her gods.  Go with her.”  But Ruth said to Naomi,
“Do no press me to leave you or turn back from following you!
Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge;
Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.
Where you die, I will die—there I will be buried.
May the Lord do thus and so to me, and more as well, if even death parts me from you!”
 
Ruth stuck by Naomi’s side even though it meant giving up her home and her hope for a stable future.  This is hesed.
 
When Naomi saw that Ruth was so determined, so she stopped pressing.  She took this foreign, unmarried, recklessly faithful young woman back to Bethlehem with her.  And in their state of grief, these two women settled into Bethlehem just as the time of the barley harvest began.
 
Now, God had given a law in Israel that when the workers harvested the fields, they were not supposed to go back and gather the crops that had been left or had fallen on the ground.  They were supposed to leave them for the widow, the orphan, and the alien who were in need.  So, Ruth, having heard these stories from Naomi, came to Naomi and suggested that she be the one to go out and gather food for them from the leftovers of some of these fields, and Naomi agreed.
 
Ruth left and she came back that night with a huge bag of sheaves of barley, and even some leftovers that had been roasted for her lunch, and Naomi was shocked.  “Where on earth did you gather this much grain?”
 
Ruth told her that, by chance, she ended up in a field that belonged to a man named Boaz; and that he had told her she could glean alongside the women who worked for him.  She also told Naomi that at lunchtime, he invited her to come eat with them and had given her roasted grain and bread and more than she could even finish, so she brought back the leftovers.  Naomi was thrilled.  She knew Boaz, and she said to Ruth,
“Blessed be he by the Lord, whose kindness has not forsaken the living or the dead! This man is a relative of ours, one of our next-of-kin.  And you should stay in his fields because other people might bother you elsewhere.”
[Remember: Ruth was a Moabite.  Not all Israelites would take kindly to her.]
 
So, Ruth gathered from Boaz’s fields through the rest of the barley and the wheat harvests, and the two women were taken care of.  But Naomi hadn’t forgotten the initial problem: Ruth wasn’t married.  She had no one to provide for her going forward… so Naomi hatched a plan.  One night she took Ruth aside and said,
“I need to find some security for you, so here’s what you need to do.  Boaz, our kinsman, will be winnowing barley at the threshing floor tonight.  Go get washed and put on your best clothes and go there, but don’t let him see you.  Then, when he falls asleep [which owners of the fields would do at their threshing floors so that no one would come steal the barley], see where he lies, go uncover his feet, and lie down.  He’ll tell you what to do from there.” 
 
So again, Ruth did just as Naomi asked.  In the middle of the night, Boaz woke up (presumably, because his feet were cold), and he found Ruth.  Ruth told him what Naomi had told her—that he was one of their next-of-kin, and she asked him to “spread his cloak over her,” which was a way of asking Boaz to marry her and be their kinsman-redeemer.  [Marriage at this time wasn’t an expression of romantic love, but a way of passing on one’s land and legacy; and for a woman it meant having security and being taken care of, since women couldn’t hold land themselves.  The kinsman-redeemer was the one who would marry into the family in order to acquire the land and carry on their family name.]
 
When Ruth asked Boaz to be their kinsman-redeemer, he praised her for her loyalty to Naomi—for not going after a younger, more eligible bachelor for herself, but for trying to carry on Naomi’s family name—and he told her,
“there is another man who is closer to your family than I am… I will offer him his right to be your kinsman-redeemer; but if he refuses, I will marry you myself.”
 
When Ruth went back to her mother-in-law the next morning and told her this story, it was incredible news for Naomi.  She and Ruth waited, and (long story short) the other next-of-kin refused the offer when he found out that gaining Elimelech’s land meant having to marry Ruth, so Boaz was able to marry her instead. 
 
Boaz took care of Ruth and honored her, even though she was both a stranger and a foreigner.  This is hesed.
 
After they were married, the Lord gave Ruth and Boaz a son, and they named him Obed.  Tears came to Naomi’s eyes when she saw that baby boy.  He was the restoration of her family.  Naomi took care of Obed, and many years later, Obed became the grandfather of a man named David, who would soon grow up to be the greatest King that the nation of Israel ever had.
 
This whole story is recorded in the Old Testament book of Ruth.  It is a story of hesed.
 
Each of the three main characters in this story—Naomi, Ruth, and Boaz—demonstrate the meaning of hesed.  Each one of them made difficult choices that showed loyalty, kindness, and faithful love for one another.
 
In the midst of that, God’s hesed is demonstrated as well.  His love, mercy, and devotion toward his people is shown in the way this story plays out… Naomi meeting Ruth in Moab, the famine ending so that they could return to Israel, Ruth happening to glean in Boaz’s field, Boaz happening to be related to them, Ruth and Boaz having a son… God is not often mentioned explicitly in this story, but he is present in every step. 
 
Naomi, Ruth, and Boaz weren’t “special” in any way.  They were ordinary people trying to live ordinary lives in a small village in Judah.  But they acted with hesed, and God rewarded their faithfulness by establishing, through them, the lineage of King David and Jesus Christ.  That is hesed.  That is steadfast, unfailing, faithful-to-the-end, covenant love.
 
My hope is that each one of us, as we reflect on this hesed of God and this story of Naomi and Ruth, that we are also encouraged to practice hesed in our own ordinary lives.
What are acts of kindness, love, and loyalty that we can show to the people around us, even when we’re struggling, and even if it costs us?  How does God want to enact or demonstrate his hesed in the world through us?
 
May God help us to discover those things and offer them to Him, knowing that He will use them to bring about His great plans of redemption and mercy in the world and in our lives.

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