Amos and God's call to Justice

Reverend Sue
16 hours ago
4 min read

Reflecting on the parable of the good Samaritan through the lens of the prophet Amos places the challenge in sharper focus. No longer is it a story just about encouraging personal charity and compassion – although it is that too – but it is a critique of injustice and asks the question about why is there so much suffering and what are we, God's people, doing about it. (Fifth Sunday after Pentecost. Proper 10 (15). Amos 7:7-17; Psalm 82; Colossians 1:1-14; Luke 10:25-37.)

You may like to read what I wrote three years ago when reflecting on this gospel and Deuteronomy.

No wonder we don’t always know what to do with the Prophets! They are a curious group of characters and their words are often like the barbs of prickles that are not easy to dislodge. No wonder we tend to only cherry-pick those lines that seem to point to Jesus as Messiah and ignore the rest.

So how do we respond to Amos and God’s plumb-line? I am deeply grateful that I am reading Richard Rohr’s latest, and maybe last, book at the moment: “The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage.” In the chapter on Amos Father Richard points out two important characteristics of Amos that help us understand him in general and this passage in particular.

Amos is not a part of the elite and powerful in society – the priests or the royal court – but by his own description a peasant or more specifically “a herdsman and dresser of sycamore trees”. The perspective of Amos is from the bottom up, or as we are maybe more used to it, from a place of preference for the poor. This way of looking at justice and judging the people of God did not begin with Jesus but is a reoccurring theme in the Hebrew Bible, particularly among the prophets.

And the judgements of God, via the voice of Amos, are against the collective not only individuals. Even those individuals named are representative figures for whole groups in society such as the priests and the royals – that is the powerful who squeezed plenty for themselves out of the too little that the poor and ordinary had for their livelihood.

The image of the plumb line is very simply that of a piece of string weighted with a plum or bob that was used to measure the vertical straightness of a building wall or the depth of something such as water. In the prophet’s mouth it is a measure of the just, or unjust, nature of society and of how accurately the people were or were not living according to God’s standards. The judgment was that the people in power were not living according to God’s guidelines of justice and mercy.

The words of the prophet Amos are to remind us to look at issues of justice from the perspective of the poor and the least not from the position of the wealthy and the ruling classes. Secondly, we should be challenged to look at collective issues, at how whole groups benefit or suffer. The tradition of focusing on individuals who break the rules, or are wonderfully charitable, protect the powerful from having to address unjust advantage, and keep the poor and powerless forever vulnerable to further injury and suffering. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer said we should not only bandage the wounds of the victims beneath the wheels of injustice but drive a spoke into the wheel itself.

Likewise, while it is kind to continue to go to the aid of those who are set upon and left for dead on the side of the road, such as the traveler in this week's parable, we are surely to also seek to understand why so many are injured and untreated (or homeless or unemployed or in some way left behind) and make collective changes! In times of transition, we often must do both. Both respond as did the Samaritan to the individual who is in need and also to work to change the way we do life as a society, or drive a spoke into the wheels that crush the poor and the vulnerable. Or as St Paul puts it, our faith should bear fruits in every good work and in living in the light. We are called to bear fruit wherever we are and our presence should enrich whatever community we are a part of.

When we look at our newsfeed, we know this to be true and yet it can seem like an overwhelming task. And for individuals it surely is. But just as collectives will be judged so collectives are called to act. We, as church, should be collections of persons challenged and encouraged by the gospel to see clearly where our society is “out of plumb” or out of alignment with the requirements of justice and to act as a group (which is both safer and more effective) to call for justice and to role model better ways of being community.