NOTES for Amo 4:1-13

Today's reading touches on one of the "eternal questions" of religious life: the question of the moral component of religion. The situation described in the passage is quite clear: the inhabitants of the Northern, Israelite Kingdom evidently did not stint on sacrifices and therefore considered themselves devout people loved by God. Yet this in no way kept them from sinning by violating the commandments given by the God whom they worshiped and to whom they offered sacrifices (vv. 4-5). The essence of the problem is clear: God does not need the sacrifices of those who violate the commandments He has given. Sacrifice, as it was originally understood, was above all a form of communion with God, and it is clearly impossible to commune with God while not keeping His commandments.

But why is the human desire to reduce religious life to its external forms so persistent? The answer to this question may lie in the very essence of religion. In every age, human beings have had what is usually called a religious feeling. They have also always had a sense that certain higher powers are present in the world. And religion was the instrument that allowed a person to establish relationships with those powers. Understood in this way, religiosity has always been a purely human affair.

And yet God never abandoned man, even when man turned his back on Him, and therefore in every human religion there were sparks of Revelation that some managed to notice beneath the layers of human constructions. But in Yahwism, in the religion of the Old Testament, everything is different: here Revelation stands at the center, while religiosity becomes only a frame, the form that allows Revelation to exist in history. But if Revelation presupposes deeply personal and intense relationships with God, impossible without keeping the commandments and following moral norms, religion can at times get along without such relationships at all.

Religiosity is often based on ideas not very different from those characteristic of ancient magic, where contact with higher powers was usually purely instrumental and required no personal relationships. And all this pagan baggage became part of the mass Yahwist religiosity that characterized the majority of the population of the Northern Kingdom. It is no wonder that the religious life of these people began to resemble the religious life of pagans, where form, ceremony, and ritual always came to the forefront sooner or later. This is a general law; such is the downward dynamic of spiritual movement in the fallen world, where Revelation is always, over time, obscured by human religiosity, sometimes becoming almost invisible against its background. And then God sends prophets to remind people of Himself and of what is most important in every religious tradition: morality, the commandments, and Revelation.

Prophecy is often thought of as predicting the future, something like a weather forecast. God allows the prophets to look into the future and tell people about it. There is no special meaning visible in such prophecy, except to frighten people. But through Amos, God explains a very different task for prophecy. First of all He reminds them that to be the chosen people is a great honor, but an even greater responsibility. And if that responsibility has been "failed," the fall will be catastrophic. Then the task of prophecy is warning.

The questions in verses 3-6 of chapter 3 are remarkable: they suggest the interconnectedness of events. Prophecy does not appear out of nowhere, not simply from the prophet's insight, but because God has planned to do something and considers it necessary to inform people about it so that they can take part in it in some way, for God created people for cooperation with Him. This is the meaning of verse 7, and verse 8 suggests that there may be many prophets, which is what happens over the next several centuries.

The prophecies of Amos depict the King's anger at subjects who sin. People are able to see the Creator's almightiness and mercy in the beauty and ordered structure of nature; they can also discern God's disagreement with human sin in disasters. The punishment God sends sinners is frightening: He allows everything to go "its own way" - drought, famine, plague, wars... But God has prepared something far greater: "Prepare to meet your God, O Israel" (Amos 4:12)!