Steadfast Love
NRSV
How marvelous is the promise given to us in Scripture: “God’s steadfast love endures forever” (the refrain in Ps. 136 is repeated twenty-six times). The NRSV translators chose the phrase “steadfast love” to represent the single Hebrew word chesed (the ch is pronounced like the ch in a Scottish loch) whenever chesed is used with reference to God. The KJV often used “mercy,” but as we shall see, this term does not convey the full richness of the Hebrew to contemporary English speakers. The word chesed is also used many times in reference to human beings, and in such cases translators choose from a variety of terms according to context, such as love, loyalty, or faithfulness; no one English term captures all the nuances of this theologically and ethically rich word. What then are some of those nuances?
Perhaps you can recall a time in your life when you were in really deep trouble, when there seemed to be no way out. Think back, if you can, to such an experience of your own or of a friend or colleague, to a time when you felt truly desperate, and particularly to an experience where there might be one possible way ahead, but it depended on someone else taking a great risk to help you. You might think about a time when your life was at physical risk or perhaps the loss of job or reputation because of a false accusation. In many such desperate situations there may be various people who could come to your aid, but try to imagine that this time there is only one other person who can help you. Everything: your future, even your very life, depends upon whether that one person takes whatever risk is required to save you. You are already in a relationship with that person, the person is typically not a stranger, but still he or she must take a significant risk, go far above and beyond what is normally expected in a relationship, even the closest of relationships such as spouse, family, or very close friends, in order to give you a future. You have no control over the situation, no control over that person’s response to your need. At that desperate time, that person reaches out to do what is needed for you. That action is what the Bible means when it speaks of “doing chesed.” Indeed, in the Bible chesed is regularly used as the object of the verb “to do,” so that it is a matter of action as well as of attitude or disposition toward another.
Two paradigmatic examples of chesed expressed in human relationships are found in the stories of Ruth and Naomi and of David and Jonathan. By extension from these we are led to understand the fullness of God’s chesed, which is “steadfast” because it is of God and thus is incomparably, superabundantly greater than the greatest human expressions.
The story of David and Jonathan (I Sam. 18–20) is one of a covenanted relationship between two friends. We cannot know how common it would be for a royal prince such as King Saul’s son Jonathan to form such a bond with a member of the king’s retinue. However that may be, the relationship is tested when Saul sets out to kill David, and Jonathan agrees to protect David rather than siding with his father. David, fearing Saul and having nowhere else to turn, asks Jonathan to “deal kindly” (Heb. “do chesed”, I Sam. 20:8) with him because of their covenant, by letting him know of Saul’s plans, while at the same time asking David to commit similarly to “show [him] the “faithful love” (again, Heb. “do chesed,” v. 14) of the LORD if Jonathan survives his risky undertaking. Here we see all the characteristics of chesed described above. The two men are in a covenant based on “love” (a different Hebrew word with both political and affectional nuances), but the test of that covenant is expressed in the commitment to “do chesed.”
Likewise the story of Ruth is filled with references to chesed, but this time of a daughter-in-law to her mother-in-law. The theme opens with Naomi’s words to Ruth and also to Orpah, “May the LORD deal kindly [Heb. “do chesed”] with you, as you have dealt with the dead and with me” (1:9). Two Moabite women united to Naomi by marriages to her now dead sons are praised by Naomi for the excellence of their chesed, as she prays that God will do as much for them as they have done for her, since she now perceives herself as unable to do anything on their behalf. Later in the story, in the nighttime threshing-floor encounter between Ruth and Boaz, he prays that the LORD will bless Ruth because “this last instance of your loyalty [chesed] is better than the first…” (3:10), here referring first to Ruth’s care for Naomi and then to her attentiveness to proper relationships within the Israelite culture to which she as a Moabite has emigrated. Between these two prayers for God’s acts of chesed and blessing in Ruth 1 and 3, we find the wonderfully multivalent words of Naomi in 2:20, spoken when Ruth reports that she has gleaned in the field of Boaz: “Blessed be he [Boaz] by the LORD, whose kindness [chesed] has not forsaken the living or the dead…. This man is a relative of ours…” Whose chesed is it that has not forsaken the living or the dead? In the Hebrew construction the antecedent can be either Boaz or the LORD; the artistic craft of the author, as well as the theological nuances of the book, suggest that indeed both antecedents are in view. God’s chesed to all the participants throughout this story is realized through their faithful, loyal, kindly interactions one with another.
Through this pair of narratives about human chesed we are given a window into and directed toward the chesed of God, steadfast love beyond all that we can ask or even imagine. In these stories God was persistently in view: Naomi asks God to do what she cannot do, even setting the actions of Ruth and Orpah as the standard she hopes God will meet; Jonathan seeks the chesed “of the LORD” from David not only for himself but for the larger family, and as David’s story unfolds in later chapters we see that David keeps that commitment after Jonathan’s death. So also, God’s chesed is asked for and shown to individual Israelites and to the people as a whole in the context of their faithful relationship to their God. The Psalms speak repeatedly of God’s steadfast love to the faithful in times of human distress, providing rescue from illness, enemies, or death (e.g. Ps. 57:3; 59:16; 143:12).
But the chesed of God goes beyond any analogy from human interaction, for in Scripture the chesed of God is associated also and especially with divine forgiveness of the people’s human failings and sin. Biblically, chesed between human beings appears only in stories where the relationships between the persons are in good repair, on a positive track. But God shows chesed to God’s people not only in rescuing them when they are living faithfully, but also and astonishingly by forgiving them when the covenant relationship would appear to have been broken by their unfaithfulness. It is this understanding of divine chesed as encompassing even forgiveness (never seen in biblical examples of human chesed) that led the NRSV translators to reserve the phrase “steadfast love” for divine chesed, as a way of indicating its depth and breadth as far beyond that of which we mortals are capable. The classic expression of this reality is found in the exposition of the meaning of God’s sacred name YHWH in Exod. 34:6–7: “…abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin…,” a creed-like portrayal of God’s essential disposition and action that is reiterated again and again in the Psalms (e.g. 103:8–12; 86:5, 15; 51:1).
The prologue of the Gospel of John describes the incarnate Word as “full of grace and truth” (Jn. 1:14). The Greek underlying this famous phrase is in turn a representation of the Hebrew “chesed we’emeth,” or “steadfast love and faithfulness,” a phrase that the Old Testament uses only of God, a phrase that functions to further underscore the steadfastness of God’s steadfast love. What a precious gift John proclaims, that God’s steadfast love became incarnate for our sakes, for our salvation, in Jesus Christ!
