Standing Under the Scriptures
July 19, 2009

Dear Fellow Voyagers,

Our readings for this Sunday are:

Isaiah 57.14b-21: The Lord proclaims healing and mercy to the humble and contrite, despite their past transgressions, but “no peace for the wicked.”

Mark 6.30-44: Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand is spiritual as well as material, and so available for us.

Our reading from Amos last Sunday, which told of the prophet’s facing down Amaziah the priest of Bethel, is a classic. We did not arrive at a connection between it and Mark’s account of Jesus’ sending out of the Twelve, our second reading. Still a connection may be found in the overcoming of insecurity by the gospel.

Before embarking on the Amos passage (7.7-17) we looked at the place of Amos among the Old Testament prophets and the place of the prophets themselves in the history of Israel. We saw the determinative background of their prophetic activity---at least I did---as the time leading up to the destruction of the nation and the exile of the people by the superpowers of the region, first Assyria and then Babylon. (My own consciousness of the effect of such a background comes from my preaching regularly in Saigon at the height of the Vietnam war.) Most people at the time averted their eyes from their impending catastrophe, as we tend to do from ours. But to the prophets it was given to look squarely at it and, having done so, to see what was really inside the people: their corruption, their idolatry, their social injustice. And thereby they were enabled to see that what was happening was not because the Lord was unwilling or unable to fulfil his covenant with his people. Instead it was because the people themselves had fallen short. The Prophets’ proclamation of what they perceived aroused no small opposition, and even to us it may seem unduly drastic. Nevertheless it maintained the validity of the covenant, overcoming a profound crisis of meaning. And thereby it preserved a framework into which the Messiah could come.

Amos’ own career followed in this pattern of perception, proclamation, and opposition. What is distinctive is that evidently he was the first or among the first, of the writing prophets: those whose messages were written down and preserved in Scripture. There had been prophets before, notably Elijah and Elisha, but they left no written record of their own. Thus Amos has a special simplicity and directness, as can be seen in the passage we considered.

The image of the Lord standing by a wall with a plumb line accords with this. The plumb line, a weight at the end of a cord used by carpenters and masons to determine the straightness of a construction, is among the simplest of instruments but no less effective for that. It is over Israel that the Lord is holding his plumb line. And it shows Israel to be like a wall that has deviated from the true. In consequence of this the Lord says.

“The high places of Isaac shall be made desolate, and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste, and I will rise against the house of [King] Jereboam with the sword.”

Amos’ proclamation of this message obviously rattles Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, the royal sanctuary in the northern kingdom (Israel now being divided between north and south). To be sure, he has a high position, perhaps comparable to that of the Dean of Westminster Abbey. But his underlying insecurity is such that he is unable to tolerate Amos. He begins by reporting what Amos is saying to the king, from whom he appears to seek moral as well as material support. “The land is not able to bear all his words.” And then he turns to Amos, urging that it will be more profitable for him to ply his trade in his native south and forbidding him, in any case, to speak any more at Bethel.

Here Amaziah is bringing psychological as well as material pressure to bear on Amos. Not only is he threatening him, at least implicitly, with physical force, he is also seeking to confront him with the panoply of the religious and political establishment. And this panoply would have been daunting, as we ourselves experience when pulled over by a police patrol car. It tempts one to draw back from voicing or even holding one’s convictions, to acknowledge one’s insufficiency in the face of accepted authority, to internalize the verdict it pronounces upon one.

What is significant here is Amos’ total rejection of these pressures. He vehemently denies the sort of motives that Amaziah has imputed to him. He even rejects the title of prophet, which perhaps had become somewhat debased. He asserts forcefully that he has been called to prophesy against Israel by the Lord. And he declares that Amaziah, for his presumption in gainsaying the Lord’s word, will be subjected to the direst of ends. His wife will become a harlot, his sons and daughters will fall by the sword, and he himself will die in an unclean land. This is in the context of what was in store for the nation itself:

“Israel shall surely go into exile, away from its land.”

Such a sentence may seem extreme. But only in these terms could Amos free himself from the burden, internal no less than external, that Amaziah laid on him. And ony in them could he maintain the integrity of the word of the Lord. We may see this passage as revolving around the element of security. Amaziah’s lack of it arose from his reliance on worldly power, political and ecclesiastical, which, though seems to confer security, by its nature inevitably undermines it, together with his use of coercion in attempting to overcome it, as in his effort to silence Amos. At the same time Amos, by possessing it, was freed to reject Amaziah’s intimidation and to throw it back at him. Jesus’ complete possession of it was manifest in his responses as he stood before the religious authorities and Pilate. The freedom of the martyrs of the early church to remain steadfast in the face all the physical and psychological pressures that the Roman state could muster against them showed that they possessed it also. But in most cases, including our own, insecurity persists. And so we are bound in our humanity both to inflict repression on others and to succumb to it when it is directed against us.

Herein we may see the connection with our second reading last Sunday (Mark 6.7-13), in which Jesus sends the Twelve out on mission. He specifies how they are to carry it out: relying for their material requirements not on their own resources or on the support of others but solely on God. But he does not make explicit the reason for their going out. We may infer it, however, from our Amos passage. The only true liberation from insecurity and the bondage it brings comes from the gospel. And the disciples, and also their successors down through the ages, have gone out on mission to proclaim it, and thus to bring liberation and release to the world and to us.

Faithfully, Fr. Ted