Hesed | Not Kindness. Stubborn Covenant Love.

Hesed: Not Kindness. Stubborn Covenant Love.

Your Bible probably says kindness. Or mercy. Or lovingkindness. None of them quite get there.

Hesed is the Hebrew word that shows up roughly 250 times in the Old Testament, and no single English translation has ever fully captured it. It's not a feeling that might produce a kind act. It's covenant loyalty in motion: the love that doesn't quit even when people blow it, the willingness to show up for the weaker party, not because you feel like it but because the covenant holds.

This week, we use the Book of Ruth as our classroom where hesed appears exactly three times, at the beginning, middle, and end, and turns out to be the entire arc of a story most of us were taught to read as a romance or a waiting story. We also trace how hesed crosses into the New Testament through the Greek words agapē and eleos, and why Methodist pastor Lisa Barker's piece "Tired of Being Nice" gets at exactly what's at stake when the church settles for niceness rather than covenant love.

Key texts: Ruth 1:8, 2:20, 3:10. Micah 6:8. Matthew 9:13 / Hosea 6:6.

Related episodes: 

Season 1 Episode 8 | Justice Embodied: Mercy Matters with Luke's Gospel. 

Season 3 Episode 10 | Back Porch Mercy: What Faithful Looks Like on a Tuesday.

Lisa Barker, "Tired of Being Nice"

Theology Unleashed is a summer series of short Greek and Hebrew word studies from Jesus, Justice + Mercy. Justice-rooted, seminary-informed, and considerably less scripted than usual. Dogs present.

See the full series at kristenabrock.com/theology-unleashed

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Transcript

Welcome to Theology Unleashed, a summer series from Jesus, Justice, and Mercy. I'm Kristen, and this summer we're doing short Greek and Hebrew word studies, justice-rooted and seminary-informed, with my very theologically gifted dogs. Together, let's go unleash something.

Hey friend, welcome to week three from Northern California, where the dogs and I are enjoying our 77-degree day. I know many of you are sweltering in different parts of the country and the world, so this is my virtual invitation to hang out with us here. Today I'm focusing on a word that makes the words from week one, tzedekah, and two, Mishpat, possible. This week, let me introduce you to Hesed. I want to start by sharing what it's not, because again, most of us have been handed a really thin version of this word. 

Your Bible might say kindness, and that's not wrong. It's just too small for this word. So in Hebrew, it can be spelled with an H or sometimes with a CH. But this word shows up roughly 250 times in the Old Testament. As is a lot of Hebrew words, no single English word quite captures it, which is why translators have been fighting over it for centuries.

 Depending on which Bible you're reading, it's probably landed on 'mercy' or 'kindness'. The Old King James uses loving kindness. NIV tends to go unfailing love. ESV goes steadfast love. All of these are reaching for Hesed, but none of them quite grasp it. In English, when we think of kindness, that thought leads to a generous act. It's warm, usually voluntary. Even agape, that big New Testament love word, doesn't fully capture Hesed because Hesed has a very specific home. And that home is in the word covenant. 

A quick pause on covenant so I make sure we're talking about the same thing. A contract is transactional. I give you this, you give me that, and we're done. A covenant is different. It's a binding commitment based on relationship, not on what you've earned or what you can produce. The covenant doesn't say I'll love you as long as you perform. It says, I'm bound to you. And here's what I find compelling about that, because we talk about covenant mostly in the context of marriage. But the Hebrew Bible is full of covenants that have nothing to do with romantic love. God covenants with Noah, with Abraham, with the entire nation of Israel. The covenant is less about whom you choose and more about who you are responsible for. 

One of the things I love about Hesed is that it holds all of that responsibility at once. It's loyalty that doesn't quit even when people blow it. It's love that goes beyond what's required, the willingness to show up for the weaker party, not because you feel like it, but because the covenant holds. 

A great example of this is in the book of Ruth. Most of us have heard that book a hundred times, and a lot of us got handed the same version. Wait patiently, be a good woman, God will send you your Boaz. But if we go back and actually read it, Ruth never really waits for anything. She makes move after move after move. And here's what I find intriguing. The word Hesed appears three times in that short book, at the beginning, the middle, and the end, as if the unknown writer is telling you exactly what this story is about. 

So here's a quick recap.

When Naomi releases her daughters-in-law, she asks God to show them the Hesed love they've already shown her. And she includes the men they each had buried. That's in Ruth 1.8. It is Hesed love that keeps going even when the person it was directed at is no longer there to receive it. Then Ruth comes home from her first day in the field and tells Naomi whose field she ended up in. Naomi lights up because Boaz is family. And what she says in Ruth 2:20 is powerful. His Hesed love has not forsaken the living or the dead. His kindness to Ruth reaches back to people already gone. And then at the end, Boaz tells Ruth, You have made this last Hesed love greater than the first. That's in Ruth 3:10. Even her choice of a husband was covenant love for Naomi, not just herself. 

Hesed is the arc. It's not the backdrop; it is the whole story. Ruth stayed when she could have gone home. She works the fields to feed both of them. Naomi orchestrates the whole threshing floor plan for Ruth's sake. Boaz goes way beyond what the law required. He could have done the minimum, but he does everything. Three ordinary people in a brutal world choosing covenant love over self-protection. And that chain of choices runs all the way to the genealogy of Jesus. 

Meaning Hesed doesn't stay in the Old Testament. It crosses into the new, just under different names. Agape, that big love word evangelicals know well, picks up Hesed's relational, self-giving dimension. But the more direct landing spot is Eleos, usually translated as mercy. When Jesus quotes Hosea in Matthew 9:13, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice,” the Greek Eleos corresponds to Hesed in Hebrew. Same thing, different languages. God wants the embodied, costly relational love. Once again, he doesn't want the performance. 

There's a Methodist pastor named Lisa Barker who wrote a piece in 2022 called Tired of Being Nice. I'll put the link in the notes because it is definitely worth your time to read.

But she writes of being tired of Midwestern niceness while her siblings of color lived in fear. She writes that the word in Micah 6:8 is Hesed, completely different from niceness. Hesed is God's fierce covenant loyalty, even when his people rebel. 

And that might just be the problem. Niceness can tend to be about us. Hesed is about the other person. When the church settles for niceness instead of Hesed, we get a community that smiles at people on Sunday and does nothing about their suffering on Monday. 

And this is why this matters for justice, because tzedekah and Mishpat, the words we've already covered, need Hesed underneath them. You can do the right thing without Hesed. You can follow all the rules without Hesed. But you can't sustain justice work without it. Justice without covenant love burns out.

Hesed is what keeps us showing up. And I think that's exactly what is missing right now. Not kindness. We seem to have plenty of kindness, but the willingness to be genuinely bound to people whose suffering doesn't touch our daily lives. Hesed says your needs matter because we are in a relationship, and this relationship creates responsibility. We are bound to each other to say, your need is my concern. Not because I feel moved today, but because we are in this together. It certainly seems to me like the world could use a whole lot more of that. 

So that's hesed, not kindness, but a stubborn, costly covenant love that doesn't quit. I'm dropping some related episodes in the show notes if you want to go deeper. 

Next week we're gonna talk about shalom. Your Bible probably says peace, but shalom isn't the absence of conflict. It's the presence of wholeness, the restoration of what was broken for everyone, including those the church pushed out and those it stayed silent about. Hope to see you there. The dogs and I will get into it. 

That is Theology Unleashed. All thirteen episodes live at Kristenabrock.com. Get on the email list while you're there. Season four drops in the fall and you don't want to miss it. Thanks for listening. Jesus, justice, No apologies.