HESED IS MY FAVORITE WORD in the Bible. I prefer it over every Hebrew or Greek word in the Scriptures. Hesed isn’t more important or more inspired than other words. I just like the word. I like the way it sounds, and I like what it means.
I like the sound of hesed. The opening consonant is like the English “h,” with its smoothness enhanced by a delicate guttural. Unlike like some gutturals that sound as if you’re hacking up phlegm, hesed’s guttural is more like the sound of distant, rushing water. To pronounce hesed, the tongue constricts a little to the back of the throat, adding some friction to the airy “h” sound. The sound moves forward over the tip of the tongue, which arches up just behind the teeth to form the “s” sound, stopping briefly as the tongue quickly touches the top of the mouth to create the “d.” The word proceeds easily with a nice rhythm.
They say that colors are hot or cold; words can be hot or cold too: Hesed is a cool word. It sounds refreshing, and it is about the ever-refreshing loving-kindness of God.
Hesed has many uses within the constellation of Hebrew words for love. You might call it a “flexi-lexi word.” Some of its meanings are straightforward. Hesed can mean “love, kindness, mercy, and loyalty.” However, just like the beginning consonant of hesed is an “h” sound augmented with a guttural, hesed is a word for love augmented with the meaning “keeping covenant.”
This adds some friction to hesed’s basic meaning. Hesed means love, but it is the kind of love we show when we keep a promise or remain loyal to a friend. It isn’t about promise-keeping in a legal or shrill way: “I’ll keep my promise but I’m going to scratch my fingernails against this chalkboard the whole time.” Hesed is about keeping our promises as a form of love, even if, perhaps, the party we are keeping covenant with has violated the letter or the spirit of the relationship. In that sense, to show hesed is to show grace.
The idea that hesed expresses grace caused the translators of the King James Version to translate hesed with words like “mercy” and “kindness,” and with the most beautiful neo-logism in the history of the English language, “lovingkindness.” No word in the English language could express more deeply what David had in mind when he prayed, “Because thy loving-kindness (hesed) is better than life, my lips shall praise thee” (Ps. 63:3, KJV).
The translators of the New International Version normally translate the word hesed with the English word love That’s accurate enough, but doing so bleeds off the word’s subtlety. It’s a little like pronouncing the word hesed without the guttural.
Mercy, kindness, and lovingkindness communicate the upshot of hesed, but they don’t really pin down its meaning. The translators of the Revised Standard Version and the New Revised Standard Version have given us the wonderful phrase steadfast love to express hesed as “promise-keeping love.”
After Moses made two new tablets of stone, as he hid in the cleft of the rock, “The Lord passed before him, and proclaimed, ‘The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness’ ” (Ex. 34:6).
The steadfast love of the Lord preserves our lives: “When I thought, ‘My foot is slipping,’ your steadfast love, O Lord, held me up” (Ps. 94:18). “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions” (Ps. 51:1).
Steadfast love is the long, stubborn love of God. In hesed God stays faithful to us long after we have forfeited our right to remain in covenant with him. The New Covenant is in the Old Covenant in God’s hesed. That God sent his Son to die for us is his loving sacrifice for us, but that sacrifice springs from his steadfast love. God did not cake pleasure in sacrificing his Son. Rather, God takes pleasure in bonding himself to a people and doing whatever it cakes to save them and keep them in his love. God loves us so much in his steadfast love that he sent his Son to die for our sins.
God loves bonding himself to a people, and he loves knowing that his steadfast love makes his people feel secure in their relationship to him. This is the kind of love God showed Abraham. It is the kind of love God showed the Israelites in redeeming them out of slavery in Egypt. It is the kind of love God shows us when Paul declares, “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38-39).
Hesed is love that will not separate. It is the love Ruth showed Naomi. God’s love may discipline us; it may withdraw from us for a while to test our faithfulness, but we are never beyond the reach of God’s hesed. Whatever else is involved in the endless debate of whether or not we can lose our salvation, our arguments are infinitely poorer by not figuring God’s hesed into the equation. The New Testament, in which God’s steadfast love is fulfilled, possesses no word that communicates the content of hesed, presumably because Greek has no such word.
Or perhaps the New Testament doesn’t possess such a word because its meaning is captured and completed in the Word made flesh, in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, our great Shepherd. To be shepherds like our great Shepherd, our lives must embody, as his did, the hesed of God.
Hesed in action
Moses is Scripture’s archetype of a servant of God showing hesed to the people of God. Moses’ example is helpful because the Scriptures provide us with a detailed look at his long ministry. Showing hesed to the people of God was the burden of his life, and it was, ultimately, the victory of his life. Nevertheless, Moses’ flesh cried out under the yoke of demonstrating the hesed of God.
Moses was raised for something better than baby-sitting 400,000 whiners. His Egyptian upbringing taught him leadership, and I cannot help but think that Moses was well acquainted with the benefits and respect that normally accompany positions of worldly power.
During his exile, tending sheep in the wilderness, Moses’ benefits were meager; so were his responsibilities. But the encounter at the burning bush changed that forever. From that point on, he had the responsibilities of a Pharaoh with the salary package of a bag lady.
Moses became the instrument of God’s saving love. That sounds wonderful in theory, but it isn’t all that great in practice, because generally speaking, God’s people don’t want to be saved; they want to be fixed. They don’t want to be led, they want to be managed. The Israelites wanted Moses to fix the problem of slavery. They didn’t want to cross the Red Sea and travel to Canaan. They didn’t mind Jethro’s suggestion that Moses divide up the leadership responsibilities. What they didn’t want to do was cross the Jordan to fight the Canaanites.
As is well known, the people of God fought against Moses constantly. They threatened to stone him a couple of times, but that would have seemed a mercy to him compared with the burden of their constant grumbling. When he was at his best, Moses didn’t take it personally, he just told them, “Your complaining is not against us but against the Lord” (Ex. 16:8).
But often his burden was too much to bear. At one point he prayed to God:
Why have you treated your servant so badly? Why have I not found favor in your sight, that you lay the burden of all this people on me? Did I conceive all this people? Did I give birth to them, that you should say to me, “Carry them in your bosom, as a nurse carries a sucking child,” to the land that you promised on oath to their ancestors? Where am I to get meat to give to all this people? For they come weeping to me and say, “Give us meat to eat!” I am not able to carry all this people alone, for they are too heavy for me. If this is the way you are going to treat me, put me to death at once—if I have found favor in your sight—and do not let me see my misery” (Num. 11:11-15).
Moses’ most compelling and phenomenal execution of hesed was when he interceded with God to save the people who had made his life so utterly miserable after they had sweet-talked Aaron into making them a golden calf. In this instance of sheer pastoral love, Moses shows hesed for God’s people by using God’s hesed in his argument against God:
The Lord said to Moses, “I have seen this people, how stiff-necked they are. Now let me alone, so that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them; and of you I will make a great nation.”
But Moses implored the Lord his God, and said, “O Lord, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? Why should the Egyptians say, ‘It was with evil intent that he brought them out to kill them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth’? Turn from your fierce wrath; change your mind and do not bring disaster on your people. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, how you swore to them by your own self, saying to them, ‘I will multiply your descendants like the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it forever.’ ” And the Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people. (Ex. 32:9-14)
Of all the types of love that God demonstrates and that we emulate, hesed is probably the one love we can consistently, and boldly, use in our arguments against God as we intercede for our people. Praying to God’s hesed prays directly to the heart of God’s nature. God tells us, “I will be gracious (hanan) to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy (racham) on whom I will show mercy” (Ex. 33:19). Hesed appeals not only to God’s promise to show love to a people, it appeals to God’s love of keeping covenant. But the prayer must come from the heart of the pastor’s nature, as an expression of the Spirit’s prayer within. Though Moses spoke his prayer rather nicely, often our prayers for God’s mercy upon the very people who give us so much trouble are the Spirit’s prayers from within us that are, quite frankly, “sighs too deep for words” (Rom. 8:26).
We know that Jesus intercedes for us and for the whole church at the right hand of God (Rom. 8:34). Perhaps some of his intercession moves directly through us, for we know that “God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!'” (Gal. 4:6).
Moses showed the people of God the hesed of God by interceding for them. The result of his intercession was that he stayed with his call. The Israelites knew the hesed of God concretely in the hesed of Moses.
This display of hesed is the pastor’s call too. It stands as a truth of pastoral ministry that we are called upon to show the people we serve hesed, the steadfast love of God.
We do this by staying with our job. But in a deeper sense, we do it by uniting with a congregation spiritually and emotionally in and with the steadfast love God has for them. Moses was called upon to bind himself to the Israelites because God had bound himself to them. Moses’ bond to Israel was fixed in God’s bond to Israel.
When we enter a pastoral relationship with a congregation, whatever else is involved in the contract, we bind ourselves to that congregation in and with the bond that God has with them. Perhaps the greatest spiritual issue between a pastor and a congregation is whether a bond is formed between them or not; that is, whether they can show one another hesed.
We don’t have to like the bond. I wonder if when in our frustration we say we dislike our congregation, what we are really saying is that we dislike the bond we have with them, or more particularly, the covenant bond God has called us to. When we think we are grumbling about our church, maybe we are grumbling against God.
The bond
When a church and a pastor do not bond, the church cannot grow—in numbers, in commitment to one another and to God, to mission, to worship, and to a deeper spirituality. The simple reason is that all growth involves change and risk, which causes most individuals and all congregations profound anxiety and threatens to keep us from taking the steps to growth.
Without question, every step into the risk that change entails involves faith, but we exercise all faith—even the blindest steps of faith—in a God who is faithful to his promises, who in fact loves to keep his promises, and who loves to show his love precisely in keeping his promises after we have broken our promises to him.
But if God’s servants continually break their promises, this tacitly impugns God’s integrity. Pastors do not have to be perfect in keeping their promises; Moses was certainly not perfect, and neither was another great example of hesed, David. But we do need to keep the basic bond of our promise—and that is to stick with our job until we are done.
The Lord who is our Shepherd leads us beside still waters. He is present with us as we pass through the valley of the shadow of death. But maybe pastors are his rod and his staff, living instruments of his hesed. If we cannot be instruments of God’s hesed to our congregations, if we cannot bond with them, then our people will have a distorted view of God’s steadfast love to the point of doubting it completely.
I shall not forget my first meeting with a high school youth group I was called to work with. I sat next to a girl as the group was gathering—she was obviously one of the leaders of the group—and I started a conversation with her. She ignored my inquiries and simply said to me, “I’m waiting for you to quit like all the rest.”
I decided I needed to see the group through the pain of losing so many leaders.
Sure I had to do good work, but more than anything, I had to stay. I had to show them that someone loved them enough to stay with them. In this case, the time wasn’t long. I worked with that youth group three-and-a-half years before I was called to Montana to serve two country churches.
But my three-and-a-half years there was 300 percent longer than previous ministries, and it was enough. The church has had an effective youth ministry ever since. That it does is due to the church’s commitment to ministry. But for that commitment to have a chance, someone had to break through the group’s cycle of failure.
My two new churches in Montana were ninety-nine and ninety-seven years old. I studied the little histories they produced as they prepared for their 100-year anniversaries. The history of the pastorates in both churches reads like grocery-store gossip rags. The pastorates normed at two and three years. The two churches shared a fine pastor in the 1950s. His ministry lasted eight years, and he and his wife were remembered with great fondness. After he left, however, the cycle returned.
By the time I reached the churches, the parishioners felt a great deal of ambivalence toward pastors. They had been burned so many times they couldn’t embrace a pastor. Early on a local smart-alec confronted me in front of the bank: “Preacher, you won’t last here; you’ll be gone soon like all the rest.”
He and his wife went to another church in town. They’d left ours years before during one of its tough times. I answered him quick as a whip, “Jack, you’ll be dead and gone before I leave this church.”
By the time I left, he wasn’t dead, but he and his wife had moved out of town. Neither church has any idea how many times during that nine-and-a-half years that I wanted to quit; I wonder if the reason I didn’t quit was because of Jack’s comment.
The ministry in both churches went along fine until the fifth year. Then things began to slowly unravel. Some people said my sermons were boring. Even some close friends began questioning how I spent my time. I felt the people begin to distance themselves from me. The church peppered my leadership initiatives with pseudo-tough questions, with reticence that bordered on annoyance. I began to hear things like: “People are saying this and that about such and such.” The people, I have since learned, were phantoms with less substance than an Elvis sighting.
I compared my situation with other pastors I’d known who’d struggled with churches with histories like mine. Most had bailed. Others stuck it out and broke through to good times. I began to think about my church’s “leadership envelope,” which is roughly the age of the church divided by the number of its pastors. If the average tenure is three years or less—and the previous twenty years have not contradicted the cycle—that portends trouble. By staying four years, and showing no signs of leaving, I caused the church dissonance, something like the turbulence a jet hits just before it breaks the sound barrier.
The churches experienced dissonance on at least two fronts. First, the churches may have wanted to ditch me before I ditched them. Conventional wisdom suggests those dumped out of too many romances defend themselves by making sure they become the dump-er instead of the dumpee. As soon as a relationship becomes dicey, they begin to look at their tattered list of fifty ways to leave their lover. As I thought through the history of the churches, my compassion grew. Except for the one pastor in the ’50s, the churches had no reason to doubt that bad pastors have to be edged out, and good pastors leave.
A curious phenomenon clinched this insight for me. Even the people who began questioning my time and my sermons and my calling and my leadership judgment found ways to let my wife and I know how devastated they would be if we left!
Second, the two undeniable, historical facts for both churches were (1) they had survived for one hundred years, and (2) their survival was not due to stable pastoral leadership. Both of these churches knew how to survive without a pastor, and they were proud of it: “Pastors come and go, but we hold the church together.” They had every right to feel this way. But I was staying longer than they were accustomed to.
They were good people, devout, tough Christians. Most liked me and respected me, but corporately they didn’t know how to deal with a pastor staying longer than three years. Would my tenure threaten the existence of the church? They trusted me to preach and call, and do weddings and funerals, but could they trust me to exercise leadership?
Since I had more stubbornness than good sense, and the churches had more good sense than stubbornness, it all worked out. The older members in both churches saved the day. Though the churches had bonded with only one pastor in 100 years, that was enough. They eventually defaulted in their feelings back thirty years to the pastor in the fifties and realized I was like him, and not like the ones since. That church memory led us through to victory, along with a whole lot of prayer (and the fact that I remained determined to outlast Jack).
One result of my long stay surprised me: I discovered that many parishioners with deep, humble faiths were insecure in their standing with God. During my nine years in these churches, I heard more questions about that subject than in any church I’d served. I have my own theological views on these matters, and I have pastoral strategies to help people. But not much seemed to help. As I look back, with one exception, by the time I left, most of their questions seemed to have answered themselves. I don’t think much of it was due to my preaching or teaching. I believe a lot of their personal anguish got solved just because I showed them the hesed of God by staying.
Both churches accomplished a lot during my tenure. But what I am most proud of—because it was the hardest and the most important thing I did—was that I stayed.
Copyright © 1998 David Hansen
