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Being
a strong voice for God isn’t easy in any generation, in any time, or
in any place.
Take the case the
fabulously wealthy farmer and citizen of the Promised Land who owned
large herds of animals and groves of trees to feed them. The
man’s name was Amos who lived nearly 3000 years ago, during the time
following Solomon’s death when human rivalry contributed to the
division of the Promised Land into two kingdoms, that of the north
(the Kingdom of Israel) and of the south (the Kingdom of Judah).
The smaller but more prosperous and powerful territory was the
northern Kingdom of Israel. (The northern border today is the
nation of Lebanon and the southern border today is located in the
territory north of the city of Jerusalem. The eastern boundaries
consisted of the Dead Sea and Jordan River and the western boundary
was the Mediterranean Sea.) The territory was desert-like and
the capital was Samaria. Ten of the twelve tribes of Abraham
originally settled there. Ultimately, nine dynasties and
nineteen kings ruled Israel, each king’s reign lasting approximately
eleven years. All of Israel’s kings were evil; eight of them
met violent deaths.
The somewhat larger but more impoverished territory was the southern
Kingdom of Judah, where Amos lived. (The kingdom of Judah extended
in the north as far as Bethel, while in the south, its border
abutted Egypt and, in the east, its border consisted of the Dead Sea
and the area of the Negev Desert abutting Jordan. Its western
border was the Mediterranean Sea.) Judah was more mountainous
and Jerusalem was its capital. The two remaining tribes of
Abraham, Judah and Benjamin, originally settled there. Eight
of Judah’s twenty kings served God. They included: Asa, Jehoshaphat,
Joash, Amaziah, Uzziah, Jotham, Hezekiah, and Josiah. The other
twelve kings were wicked. The average reign of each was sixteen
years.
Contemplating the plight of the poor who lived in the rich, northern
kingdom, Amos grew enraged. In a kingdom that boasted of its
vast wealth and used its power for its own gain, Amos saw the poor
suffering because the citizens of Israel were divided into a
two-tiered society, the “haves” and “have nots.” Somewhere
from deep within, Amos experienced God calling Amos to be God’s
strong voice. This required Amos to condemn the people of
Israel for their failure to take care of the poor and for allowing
their thirst for prosperity to create such crass injustice for God’s
people.
Amos was a successful businessman, not a religious professional.
Yet, Amos fully believed that God was calling him to be a prophet.
So, this very busy and successful businessman decided to take time
away from his job and family to leave home in order to be that
strong voice for God in the world.
Without the appropriate credentials befitting a prophet, Amos left
everything behind sometime around 762 BC and traveled to the city of
Bethel in Israel where the kings of the north had built a rival
sanctuary to keep the people of the northern kingdom from traveling
to Jerusalem to worship at the Temple. The decision to build a
temple like this probably had as to do much with collecting tax
monies at the temple (keeping money from the northern kingdom in the
northern kingdom) as it did having the chief priests on the king’s
payroll to fulfill their important role as the king’s propagandists.
Arriving at Bethel, Amos soon denounced the temple’s chief priest,
Amaziah, charging him with idolatry for allowing his loyalty to the
king to take precedence to his obligation to serve God.
As
might be expected, Amaziah didn’t much like what Amos had to say and
projected his sinfulness upon Amos, asserting that, like all of the
prophets in the north, Amos was also on his king’s payroll and doing
his king’s bidding. Amaziah dismissed Amos, telling him to go
back home to earn his living as a servant of the king of Judah.
But, Amos told Amaziah that God—the God of Israel and not the King
of Judah—had called and sent Amos to be God’s strong voice and to
steer the Israelites away from the pathway of sin and back to the
pathway of life. Once again, Amos condemned Amaziah and his
temple in Bethel as counterfeit, reminding Amaziah that he must
serve the one and true God, not the king of Israel. It was he,
Amaziah, and not Amos, who was on the dole, seeking to feather his
nest with ill-gotten financial gain.
This story of Amos raises two important points for us to
contemplate.
One important point is Amos’ willingness to leave everything behind
and to enter into an alien territory, to denounce its religious
leadership for placing a premium on worldly things rather than on
the things of God. This raises two questions: 1) Why would any
successful person undertake what seems destined to be a losing
venture? 2) Who in their right mind would consciously choose
to confront the powerful with their hypocrisy?
Really, who among us:
·
(parents,
for example) enjoys entering into the alien territory of confronting
a child about the concerns they may have or with the actual evidence
parents do have about that child’s potential or actual involvement
in immoral and evil behavior?
·
(spouses,
for example) wants to enter into alien territory by raising for
discussion those 300-pound, stinking elephants sitting in the middle
of living room that are threatening to or actually are destroying
the sacrament of marriage?
·
(friends,
for example) relishes entering into alien territory by telling them
that their words, attitudes, or even their behavior are wrong?
Isn’t it much easier to stand back and go about our own business
than it is to be God’s strong voice in the world today by
confronting immoral and evil behavior? Doesn’t
the aphorism “Don’t poke a stick at a snake!” have something
important to teach in this regard?
The
answer is a resounding “No!”
What
Amos did was to confront issues like these head on by telling sinful
people precisely what their sin was. His mission was to get
these people to turn away from their false idols, to be attentive to
and obedient to God’s law, and to seek their true security and peace
in God not in the worldly success and pleasure that was
slowly but surely destroying not only their souls but also their
nation.
That Amos was willing to leave everything behind and to enter into
an alien territory, to denounce its religious leadership for placing
a premium on worldly things rather than on the things of God
challenges us—just as Amos challenged Amaziah, the chief priest of
the temple at Bethel—to realize that if our lives are not right with
God—and no matter how good things might seem today—our lives are not
good at all. The downfall awaiting us is just around the
corner. It’s
not a question of “if” but “when.”
The important second point this story raises has to do with our
expectations about what we believe should happen when we are God’s
strong voice in the world, whether that is speaking with a child, a
spouse, or a friend. When Amos denounced Amaziah, the chief
priest didn’t recognize that this was God was speaking to him
through Amos. Instead, Amaziah told Amos to “get a real job”
and to “stop playing the prophet.”
Let’s examine Amaziah’s blindness. After all, he is the chief
priest who should have been quite familiar with these things:
·
Amaziah does not see that Amos is a wealthy and successful
businessman who has a real job. Unlike Amaziah, Amos doesn’t
live off the largesse of his congregation or king, beholden to man
not God. Amos is beholden to God not man.
·
Amaziah berates Amos for speaking ill of the “king’s temple,”
unaware that his own words betray Amaziah’s corruption because,
after all, the temple belongs not to the king or the chief priest
but to God. How easy it is to believe that we are lords and
masters of our lives and no one has anything substantive to say to
us about the quality of our lives.
Amaziah is nothing but a hypocrite. He has things backwards
because Amaziah serves the king, not God. Amaziah speaks for
the king, not God. And, Amaziah’s
own
words betray him. Blind to his hypocrisy, Amaziah chooses to
attack Amos by charging him with being a false prophet rather than
taking God’s
word
to
heart and turning his back on his sinful ways.
So, what should we—as parents, spouses, and friends—expect of others
when we see them for who they really are and name them for it?
Unfortunately, most of us—and I include myself in this group—would
hope that these people would listen politely, realize the truth of
what we state, and thank us genuinely and sincerely for expressing
our heartfelt concern for their moral and spiritual welfare.
But, using Amos’ experience as an indicator, and as Jesus tells his
disciples in today’s gospel, we should be prepared for rejection.
What we should expect when we are God’s strong voice in the world
that we will be made the problem, our motives and intentions will be
distorted and twisted to resemble exactly the opposite of what we
intend, and malice and ill-will will be ascribed to us.
In
the end, Amaziah threw Amos out of the temple and banished him from
the kingdom of Israel. Likewise, the people of Jerusalem
demanded that Jesus be crucified on the cross. And, his
disciples met the same end. Why should we expect anything
different when God calls us to leave everything behind and to be
God’s strong voice in the world today?
St. Paul reminds us that God has elected us to be prophets to the
nations. We are to preach the good news that liberates people
from sin. We are to rely on God and not on ourselves when we
are rejected. And, in today’s gospel, Jesus adds that we are
“to shake the dust” from our feet.
Some believe that this is a gesture indicating a curse, that Jesus
would have his disciples curse those who do not listen to God’s
strong voice and convert to it. That is to misunderstand what
Jesus was teaching. In the ancient world, shaking the dust
from one’s feet was a ritual action by which a person symbolically
indicated that one was beginning all over again by ridding oneself
of all the dirt that has been stirred up and has accumulated on
one’s feet because one has been walking along God’s pathway and
being God’s strong voice in the world. Shaking the dust from
one’s feet was not “the final straw,” that of writing someone out of
the Book of Life. No, it is the ritual action of cleansing
oneself in order to start anew.
Is
this not what God calls each of us to do for our children, our
spouses, and our friends? Are we not to love them so much that
we will be God’s strong voice, even if and especially when they
reject us because they are in the grip of evil? Are we not to
cleanse ourselves of sin, anger, and hurt so that we can resolve to
begin anew to be God’s strong voice in the world without counting
the cost because our reward is to be found in the resurrection of
the dead?
God the Father has chosen us in Christ “before the foundation of the
world” (Ephesians 1:3), authorizing us to be God’s strong voice in
the world today. Amos, Jesus, and St. Paul have shown us the
way to fulfill this mission. The question today’s scripture
asks is: Do we love our children, spouses, and friends enough to be
God’s strong voice to them?
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HOMILY
