Hesed: Love That Comes From Above

(The Hebrew word that English cannot seem to translate!)

Anyone who knows me knows I love my dog. I love my children... I love my wife. And I also love pizza. My children will tell you that I seem to love my dog more than them! And to that I say: "Well... she's obedient and listens to me!" And there's the problem right there. I love things "worthy" of love. Things that I like and prefer. The word, "love", does so much work that we've worn it smooth, and when it comes time to talk about God, we reach for the same word and wonder why it doesn't feel like enough.

I think the problem is that we see God's love as an "upgraded" version of our own love. We put God behind it and think it's more reliable now. But human love is conditional... we just don't say it out loud. It's there when things are going great and missing when circumstances are against you. And we assume God works the same way. He's there when we're doing well, backs off when we're not. I find myself doing this. Thinking God is keeping a running total that I'm not allowed to see.

Biblically we cannot simply import our meanings, thoughts, and ideas into it without considerable consideration! The love of God is quite different from human love and the bible makes that clear if we'll pay close attention. As we'll see, there is not only a struggle of ideas... ours vs. biblical, but there is a struggle of words. English doesn't have a clean equivalent for the word we're going to investigate in this article. The word is hesed. I know what you’re thinking… more Hebrew but it's important. And if you can stay with me on this, it reorients everything. How you think about God. How you think about yourself. Maybe how you treat the person you're most tired of forgiving.

The Word We Don't Have

Here's the issue with the English translation of hesed... we really don't have a single word powerful enough to capture its meaning. The English translations vary from:

"Steadfast love"

"Lovingkindness"

"Faithful love"

"Mercy"

They each catch something but not all of it. They miss in the same direction making the word sound like a feeling or even a reaction to circumstances. I admit, I am generally in a much better mood when things in life are going my way. I tend to give and receive love more freely and easily than when life seems like it's out to get me. But this is not hesed... not even close.

Hesed isn't about the depth of the feeling. It's about the fact of the commitment. It's covenant love rather than contractual love. Contracts work based on transactions... something paid for something owed, like your mechanic. Covenants work based on commitment despite the circumstances. It's loyalty that keeps moving after the emotion has already given out.

Hesed remains strictly out of covenant commitment... and this bears repeating: it remains regardless of circumstances or feelings. In fact, it flies in the face of sentiment and outcomes. There's a difference between loving someone because you feel like it and loving someone because you made a promise and the promise still stands: that's covenant love. Hesed is EXCLUSIVELY covenant love.

The closest sentence I've found is this: 

The faithful love of someone who had every reason to stop, and didn't. 

Not "I love you when you're lovable." Not "I feel warmly toward you today." More like: "I said it. I meant it. And nothing that has happened since then... not one thing... has changed what I meant."

See... this is already different from the love most of us were raised on.

The Worst Possible Moment

If you want to understand where hesed gets its weight, you have to go to Exodus 34. And you need to really feel what's happening when you get there. I believe we need to engage our imaginations when we read scripture... the bible is not merely intellectual, it's also deeply emotional.

Now get this time frame firmly in mind: Four months. That's how long it had been since God parted the Red Sea. And now here in Exodus 34, it's been forty days since Moses went up the mountain to meet with God. This is the same mountain that Israel watched the cloud of glory settle on. So picture it... forty days receiving the Law. And while Moses was still up there, the people melted their gold jewelry and built a calf to worship (Exodus 32:1-2).

Do you feel it... the audacity of that? Right there on the mountain of testimony worshiping a calf that they themselves made! They watched the sea split open and saw God destroy the most powerful army on earth. And yet, they built a calf and called it "Lord" (Exodus 32:5). Moses comes down and shatters the tablets. Not in anger exactly, but because the covenant has already been broken, and what's the point of carrying the written terms when the ink isn't even dry and it's already over? God has every legitimate reason to be done with the Israelites. Maximum betrayal.

And Moses intercedes. He says, Show me your glory (Exodus 33:18). Which is an extraordinary thing to ask at that moment. And God says yes. He passes before Moses. And what God does next, nobody expected.

He speaks his own name.

The Lord, the Lord, a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger and abounding in faithful love (hesed) and truth, maintaining faithful love (hesed) to a thousand generations, forgiving iniquity, rebellion, and sin (Exodus 34:6-7).

The golden calf is still warm. And God's response is not termination. Not a warning shot. Self-definition... this is who I am. Not this is what I do when you've earned it. Not what I'm capable of on a generous day. Who I am. This is my name.

The word translated "faithful love" there is hesed. And God is not describing a policy, He is describing Himself. I think about that a lot. He chose the worst possible moment to announce his character. Not after they cleaned up, not after the repentance tour, not after the calf had been melted back into something respectable. While the evidence of the betrayal was still sitting there, still cooling... this is who I am. Consider this... the next time someone close to you wrongs you deeply and personally, take a minute, BEFORE you react and declare your loving commitment to them. This is what the prophets did. Every psalm that starts in the pit... they're all reaching back to this moment in history... where God, against all feelings and circumstances and in the face of maximum betrayal declares his covenantal love.

The Wrong People

Here's what I find striking about hesed: it keeps showing up in the wrong places and for the wrong people. Every time you think you know who it's for, it crosses a line. In fact, I would argue that crossing boundaries is what hesed does.

Take Ruth. She's a Moabite (Ruth 1:4). The Law specifically excluded Moabites from the congregation of Israel, out to the tenth generation (Deuteronomy 23:3). She has no claim on the covenant. No standing. And a mother-in-law who tells her plainly: go home, you have no future with me (Ruth 1:11). And Ruth stays anyway. Your people will be my people. Your God will be my God (Ruth 1:16-17). And the whole book holds her up as the clearest picture of what hesed looks like inside a human life. Not an Israelite, someone excluded. A Moabite woman with no legal claim and no obvious reason to stay. This is no coincidence or accident. I think the pattern is the point. Hesed doesn't check credentials. It shows up in the wrong places. For people the system already decided were out.

Now we come to the text at hand... John 4. The woman at the well. If you were with us Sunday, you know the setup. A Samaritan woman, alone, at noon, at Jacob's well. High noon you could say. Women came to the well in the morning when it was cool, when the whole town gathered. She was there at noon because she'd probably arranged her entire day around not being seen. She didn't come at noon because it was convenient. She came because she knew no one else would be there... that is a survival strategy.

When you've been the subject of enough whispered conversations, you learn to get what you need during the empty hour, when no one is watching. And into that empty hour, Jesus shows up. Jewish rabbi. Wrong gender to be talking to her. Wrong ethnicity. Wrong side of a four-hundred-year argument about which mountain is the real place to worship. He asks her for water. Then he starts talking. His disciples come back and they can't believe what they're seeing (John 4:27).

But Jesus sees her whole story. Five husbands, and the man she's with now, which she knows and he knows isn't right. He doesn't lecture, he stays and listens and talks. But even before the explanations and confessions he offers her something. Living water before her story is even told.

Do you see what that is? That's pure hesed walking in at noon in Samaria. The system that had already sorted and filed her away was being breached, infiltrated, and overcome.

Now, to properly set up this story we need to understand how the original readers would have interpreted this story of an encounter at a well. In the Hebrew bible every time a man and woman meet at a well a love story follows: Abraham's servant meets Rebekah (Isaac's wife) at a well, Jacob meets Rachel at a well, and Moses meets Zipporah at a well. The well signals something... this is a betrothal story. The bridegroom has arrived and he's looking for "her."

He goes to find her not because she is qualified but because that is who he is... hesed. That's not how rewards programs work. And I think that unsettles us in ways we don't always recognize.

What This Does to You

I want to slow down here because I think this is where it gets uncomfortable. If hesed comes from who God is, not from what we do, not from whether we've been consistent this month... then it doesn't depend on us at all. And we're not always sure how to feel about that. It's either the most comforting thing you've ever heard or the most disorienting, and sometimes it's both before lunch.

Disorienting because we grew up learning to earn. That is just what you do. We keep score. We track what we put in and what we get back, and we assume God is running the same spreadsheet somewhere. I catch myself doing this. Running the math on whether I've prayed enough this week. Whether God is paying attention. Whether I've got anything in the account. That's not cynicism. That's just what you pick up when you grow up watching people keep score.

Hesed says the math was never the point. The commitment came first. Before you had a track record to evaluate. God didn't look at your file, weigh the evidence, and decide you cleared the bar. He showed up at the empty well at noon when you'd built your whole life around not being seen.

And here's the part that gets me: on your worst day, the golden calf day, the noon-at-the-well day, the day you are so thoroughly disqualified that you can't imagine being worthy of love... hesed is not recalculating like a GPS that's off course. God is not updating his posture based on new information about you. There is no new information. He already knew. He knew the whole story before the conversation started. He knows what's in the jar. He's already seen it.

Most of us would rather earn it. I would rather earn it. Earning at least gives me some control. If I perform better, I feel more secure. I feel less like I'm about to be cut. Hesed takes that away. You can't earn your way in or earn your way out. The love doesn't fluctuate with your performance. It comes from who he is, not who you are. That's either a relief or it's a problem, and I think which one it is depends on how tired you are.

The Jar

The woman at the well walked away and left her water jar sitting there. John mentions it almost as an aside. She left her jar... she went back to town. But I've been thinking about that jar all week. It wasn't just a container. It was the whole arrangement. Come alone. Need only what you can carry. Get out before anyone sees how thirsty you actually are. And she left it there.

She left it because somebody finally saw all of it. The whole thing. And stayed.

Catch how she describes it to the people in town. She doesn't say: come see a man who forgave me. She doesn't say: come see a man who gave me a second chance. She says: come see a man who told me everything I ever did (John 4:29). Her testimony isn't about what Jesus overlooked. It's about what he saw. He saw all of it. And he stayed... hesed.

Hesed doesn't devalue our past... No, it sees our past, all of it and doesn't merely "overlook" it. Sometimes forgiveness for us just pretends it didn't happen. This isn't that. This is someone who looked straight at it and stayed anyway.

Hesed is Not Free

I'll tell you what it costs, because I think this matters: Jesus went to the cross as a man who was thirsty. He sat at this well and asked a woman for water. And on Friday of that same week, dying on the cross, he said I am thirsty (John 19:28). He thirsted so we wouldn't have to. He ran dry so the spring in us could run. His thirst absorbed ours. That's what hesed costs. That's why the jar can stay at the well.

Not because your story got cleaned up. Because his hesed absorbed it.

The jar is heavy. He's already seen what's in it. He came to the empty hour anyway. And he's still there.

Will you leave it?