[Oe List ...] Spong: 12/18/08: Amos: The Prophet Who Transformed God Into Justice

Thu Dec 18 11:26:04 EST 2008

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Thursday December 18, 2008 

Amos: The Prophet Who Transformed God Into Justice

Not every character in the Bible starts out to be a hero. Indeed, one of the great themes of biblical literature is that it is the meek and the lowly who become the channels through which God is known in new ways. Mary, the mother of Jesus, is portrayed as expressing this theme in the Magnificat when she is made to utter these words, "For he has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden," but later generations "will call me blessed." The Old Testament prophet who makes this truth powerfully real is named Amos. Today we turn to his story. 
Amos was a citizen of the Southern Kingdom of Judah in the 8th century BCE. He lived in the village of Tekoa where he was a herdsman and a keeper of sycamore trees, employment that hardly demanded high academic achievements or the credentials that produced great expectations. In those days Uzziah was king of Judah and Jeroboam II was on the throne of the Northern Kingdom. The major powers of the world were preoccupied with their own problems and with each other, which allowed these two small Jewish states to bask in an Indian summer of prosperity, peace and wealth. The distribution of that wealth was, however, hardly balanced. The worship places of the Jewish=2
0world were crowded on holy days and religion was popular among the greedy ones who dominated the social order. There thus appeared to be little relationship between the words of the popular religion and the practices of people's lives in the public arena. In many ways that is not dissimilar from the current situation in the United States, where a few have achieved fortunes by greed and manipulation of the markets, creating a situation in which the wealthy are increasingly wealthy and the poor are increasingly poor and people even now seem not to be concerned. This dichotomy, however, burned itself into the consciousness of this simple herdsman named Amos and, like the proverbial "Hound of Heaven," it allowed him no rest until he had addressed this issue overtly and publicly. Amos packed his suitcase and journeyed from Tekoa in the land of Judah to the shrine of Bethel in the Northern Kingdom to make his witness. 

When he arrived Amos entered the courtyard of this holy place, where all of his suspicions were confirmed. He saw the crowds dressed in their finery busily attending to holy things while the poor outside the city gates were largely ignored. Amos wondered how he might get the crowd's attention. He was a clever man, however, and knew how to appeal to the instincts of the people. He found a corner in the courtyard, set up a soap box and then, using one of the oldest tricks in human history, he began to solicit first the curiosity and later the full attention of the crowd. Let me try
 to re-create the story. 

"Come closer," Amos shouted from his makeshift pulpit, "Let me tell you about the sins of the people of the city of Damascus." Amos knew that everyone likes to hear gossip about the moral weaknesses of their neighbors and so as he excoriated the Damascans the crowds grew. Next he turned his judgment first on the people of Gaza and then on Tyre, condemning the sinful practices found in both cities. The crowd, loving it, grew even larger as Amos continued to appeal to their prejudices about and suspicions of their neighbors. This strange looking rube from the south said the things they wanted to hear. Then Amos moved to larger targets and his oratory rose to new heights as he focused on the nation states surrounding the Northern Kingdom. First it was the Edomites and about their sins Amos got more specific. The Edomites had pursued "their brothers with a sword, showing them no pity and they had allowed anger to tear perpetually" at the fabric of their society. The ecstatic crowd began to shout, "You tell 'em, preacher." With every loud voice of encouragement, the people gathered in ever greater numbers. Next it was the Amorites' turn. According to Amos, they had attacked Gilead and "ripped up the women with child in order to enlarge their borders." As Amos pronounced his message of doom on these nations, the people gathered around him roared their approval. When he turned to the very unpopular Moabites the frenzy of the crowd exploded. 

Next Amos, with the crowd in=2
0the palm of his hand and fully attentive, spoke in a bare whisper. "Now let me tell you about the sins of the Southern Jews," he said. These Southern Jews were the people with whom the Jews of the North were the most competitive and with whom they had the deepest rivalry. The relationship between Judah in the South and Israel in the North was like that of New Zealand and Australia today. Signs in shops in New Zealand announce that "New Zealanders have two favorite teams, the All Blacks (the name of New Zealand's national team) and anyone who is playing Australia." So to hear their Jewish rivals in the south be condemned was music to the ears of the Northern Jews. The crowd pressed closer to this strange messenger and its size continued to increase dramatically. Those Southern Jews, Amos said, "despised the Torah; they did not keep God's commandments. Their lies caused them to err constantly," but God's justice is sure, he promised, and so Jerusalem will be "devoured by the fire of God." The crowd was ecstatic with enthusiasm, clapping and cheering. No one budged as this crowd-pleasing evangelist reached his climax. Now with every ear straining to hear, this herdsman arrived at the conclusion for which he had journeyed from Tekoa to the King's chapel in Bethel. His message was ready and so Amos turned to his climax. 

"Now," he said, "let me tell you about the worst people in the world." The crowd could hardly wait to hear who that would be. They were not prepared, however, for what was=2
0to come. "You Jews of the Northern Kingdom," he said, "are the ultimate culprits in God's world. You are the ones who worship ostentatiously in the sacred shrines, but even as you worship, you sell the righteous for silver and the poor for a pair of shoes. You trample the poor in the dust of the earth. You violate one another sexually. You worship at every altar in garments stolen from the labor of the poor. You profane holy places with heavy drinking of wine purchased with fines levied against the meek. You corrupt holy people, encouraging them to violate their sacred vows. You even silence the prophets." The crowd was suddenly silent and the smiles disappeared from their faces. Then Amos spoke of the punishment that God would send. "This judgment is inevitable," he screamed. It was a devastating message. The stunned crowd took a while to recover from shock, so Amos continued to drive home his key insights. "Worship isolated from life is of no value. Worship is nothing but justice being offered to God, and justice is nothing but worship being lived out. If worship and justice are ever separated, idolatry is the inevitable result." It was a stirring message, but suddenly it was not a popular one. 

When the members of the crowd recovered sufficiently to respond, they sent for a priest from the Shrine at Bethel named Amaziah and asked him to come to their defense, for they said, "Amos has conspired against you and the land and we are not able to bear his words." Amaziah was the voice of=2
0the established religion. He would brook no more of this interference with worship at the King's Shrine and so to Amos he said: "O, Seer, go home, flee away to your land in Judah. Prophesy there if you must, but you are never again to come again to Bethel for this is the king's sanctuary. This is the temple of our nation. Your words are not welcome here." 

Amos responded to Amaziah, "I am no prophet, nor even a prophet's son. I am a herdsman, a dresser of sycamore trees, yet the Lord took me from my flocks and called me to prophesy to the people of Israel." Once again, he repeated his charges. "The songs of your holy places will become nothing but wailing to the Lord. You cannot worship while you trample the poor. You cannot wring money from the poor to line your pockets with greed. God will turn your sacred feasts into mourning and your pious songs into lamentations." The preaching of Amos was now more than the people were willing to tolerate and so Amos was physically driven from the shrine. Rejected and defeated he returned to his humble life in Tekoa. In this newly imposed exile he wrote out his prophetic message, and that message became known as the words of Amos the Prophet. In time people heard transcendent truth in his words and finally these words were added to the sacred text of the Jewish people and were thus read in worship settings in the temples, synagogues and holy places. That was when people began to recognize that in the words of Amos, they were beginning
 to hear the "Word of the Lord." That is how the words of Amos came to echo through the centuries. In that process, God was inevitably redefined as justice. Worship and justice could never again be separated in true Judaism and worship came to be viewed, as Amos had suggested, as human justice offered to God while justice was seen as divine worship being acted out. In this context justice became another name for God. 

It was through the work of the prophets primarily that God was redefined in Jewish history. Love became the name for God through the writings of Hosea. Justice became the name for God through the writings of Amos. The prophets really do matter, not because they were the predictors of the future as so many of us were once taught, but because they were able to see more deeply into the meaning of God. The prophets more than anyone else made it possible some eight hundred years later for people to see and to hear the presence of God in the life of a crucified one named Jesus of Nazareth. The life of Jesus pointed to a divine nature marked by the dimension of love that Hosea had added to the meaning of God and the dimension of justice that Amos had added to the meaning of God. That resulted in a new understanding of consciousness in which divinity and humanity seemed to flow together as one. 

The biblical story was never static, nor is the human understanding of God. It is idolatry and an act of faithlessness that is being expressed when any one thinks that 
all truth has finally been revealed and that someone or some institution actually possesses it. 

– John Shelby Spong

Question and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong

William from Newmarket, Ontario, writes: 
If the roots of the Christ story are indeed in Egyptian mythology (according to Tom Harpur's book The Pagan Christ) or the continuation of Jewish Epic History (according to your Jesus for the Non-Religious) then who were the writers of the gospels? How did they acquire the expertise to make such a complex adaptation and what drove them, in spite of the risk of persecution, to adapt these myths to the person of Jesus of Nazareth, either as if this person was an historical figure, or if he never existed?

Dear William,

The writers of the gospels were Jewish people who represented the second or third Christian generation. They wrote in Greek, not Aramaic, which was the language Jesus and his disciples spoke. The gospels — at least the first three: Mark, Matthew and Luke — are the products of the Synagogue, which had shaped the Jesus story dramatically over the 40-70 year period that transpired between the crucifixion and the gospel writing tradition.

I disagree with Tom Harpur's thesis, for I do not think Egyptian mythology can shape the Jesus story in as short a period of time as existed. I note that Paul writes in Galatians, a book that is usually dated in the early 50's, that he had conversed with Peter and other "pillars" of the=2
0Christian movement within four to nine years of his conversion, which scholars date one to six years after the crucifixion. Mythology needs more time than that to develop. 

People need to embrace the fact that the Jesus story was kept alive, recalled and celebrated in the Synagogue, for that is where the followers of Jesus worshiped every Sabbath. The Synagogue and the Christian Church did not separate until 88 C.E. 

I am quite sure Jesus of Nazareth was a person of history in whom and through whom Jewish people believed that they had experienced the presence of the holy God. It was in that experience that Christianity was born. The earliest articulation of that faith came from Paul who wrote, "God was in Christ, reconciling the world to God."

How we tell the world of the meaning of that experience is still what Christianity is all about.

– John Shelby Spong

Send your questions to support at johnshelbyspong.com 

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