Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk,
I took them up in my arms;
but they did not know that I healed them.
I led them with cords of human kindness,
with bands of love.
I was to them like those
who lift infants to their cheeks.
I bent down to them and fed them.                       [Hosea 11.3-4]

The prophet offers us an image of God which we can all understand.

The picture of a parent, or grandparent, ushering the child they love from infancy into childhood. When I read Hosea’s words, I see a child with both arms at full stretch above their head, held by their mum who walks slightly behind them, to give their child the hope of independence.

The child is chortling with delight.

We all know this story, at least in part, perhaps in entirety. Which is precisely why Hosea, prophesying with the breath of God, offers it to an errant Israel and, thus, to us.

As always, with the raising of children, with families, there are good and bad days, better and worse seasons. None of this is surprising.

We have had someone hold our hands and lift us along; we have fallen down and been raised back up. We have carried and encouraged, stumbled and fallen. We have laughed and wept.

Our breath catches when God cries out after their recalcitrant, “How can I give you up?”

The novel, the poem, the movie, the homily, in which we can see our face and hear our heartbeat; these are the ones which capture us. However, we are neither Raskolnikov, nor Scout Finch, despite us feeling the depths of their struggle, or their hope’s exaltation. We are not them.

This is the rabbit hole into which we can be led, when prophet and preacher offer us a metaphor of God’s love, or anger, or blessing. We want to say that God is just like us.

Instead, we worship a spendthrift lover who tosses coins of gold across the midnight skies, as Thomas Troeger sings of God.

We attend to the beauty of the language when the prophets speak of God as a nursing mother, and a carer guarding each step, and a rock withstanding the seasons and storms, and the storm itself, and the still sound of gentle nothing. God is none of those things, and all of them.

We hold these images to help us understand, to help us embrace our faith, and to discover a way to, perhaps, grasp our God’s hand, even for a moment.

If we mistakenly imagine that God is just like us, then gradually we reshape God to dovetail with our emotions, our predilections; God is in the image of me. The wonder of imagining something of God’s nature, of God’s relationships with the creation, slides sidewards into self-involvement and we become the creators.

We become sufficient unto our task, we believe. As the farmer in Jesus’ parable remarks, “And I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’” [Luke 12.13-21]

This is an echo of what Parker Palmer refers to as “functional atheism”, the belief that ultimate responsibility for everything lies with us. It also means that if anything decent is going to happen, it is up to us to ensure its happening. It is in our hands.

The God who cries out for the woman and the man in the garden is not like us; the God who forgives, whose anger is like the wind, who steps out our life with each of us and calls us each by name, is not like us. This One who sacrifices their only child in an astonishing act of life and love and death-defiance, is not in our image.

In our lives, and because of God, in our love and our mercy and our sacrifice, we reflect something of this God.

It is only in Jesus that our hands and hearts might, with awe, grasp this One who loves us. It is on the cross when we may touch the profound wonder of God’s embrace, and when we might believe that something of that image resides in us and offers us life.

The cross is the heart of God’s creating, not metaphor, but meaning. When we choose the meaning, we find that which God hopes and intends for us – mercy, justice and life. This God, in whose arms we have been held, who will never give us up, and who will never cease to call our name.