The Bible wastes little time attempting to uncover the reason YHWH loves his renegade Israel or Christ loves his deeply flawed church. Time and again its pages stake the claim that the audacity and perseverance of such ardour defies logic. At the very least it outpaces any reason to which human beings have direct access.
It simply is, and it is in the face of so many reasons to stop being the very thing it is. The prophet Hosea’s lot is to fall into the awkward role of loving in dangerously similar fashion to the way that YHWH does: in the face of betrayal and against the cold, metallic force of indifference:
The LORD said to me again, ‘Go, love a woman who has a lover and is an adulteress, just as the LORD loves the people of Israel, though they turn to other gods and love raisin cakes.’
Few of us will ever be tasked with such a brazen defiance of human love’s logic. Yet many will come near to it.
Such love empties itself of all claims and all expectation. It is the love that it is, its origins sheathed in mystery, its ends cloaked in impenetrable light.
Canter Bridge 
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