The Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time



AMOS 7:7-17: The movement called prophecy began in the unrecoverable past with small bands of ecstatics which gathered around shrines in Canaan and other areas of the mideast but which in the towering prophets of later Israel and Judah totally transcended its primitive beginning.



As the movement developed in Israel, one prophet rose up to present his or her message to his contemporaries and to influence someone else in another generation to do the same. Over the centuries the prophets shared style and substance with one another, and addressed many common themes, but they had few face-to-face relationships with each other. The basic focus of this prophetic movement was not the private faith of individuals but the public faith of nations, and prophets directed their attention to public policy, attempting to influence it through their proclamations. In doing so, they spoke in behalf of the sacred traditions of Yahweh and called the people to be faithful to God who had been faithful to them on the mountain of Sinai and in the conquest of the land.



The prophet Elijah exemplified this process. In the name of the God of Moses, Yahweh, he challenged the ruling power of the day, King Ahab, and called all Israel to new allegiance to their God. The prophet named Amos continued this process. Neither an ecstatic prophet like Elisha nor a son of a prophet, Amos was a small-stock breeder from Tekoa in Judah who called himself a shepherd and who lived on a diet of sycamore fruit, the food of the poor. Sometime around the year 760 BCE Amos appeared at the shrine of Bethel during an Israelite festival to proclaim the curse of God upon king and people. His appearance signalled the continued transformation of prophecy in Israel.



A crisis activated by the rising power of Assyria summoned Amos to his prophetic task. During the reign of Jeroboam II, northern Israel was in a period of unusual prosperity, and it appeared to those who profited from it that the prosperity might last forever. It was even viewed by religious people as a sign of God's favor to this people. But Israel had failed to note that oppression had gone hand in hand with prosperity: the wealth of the rich was gained at the expense of the poor.



Amos understood what was happening and realized that God might be using Assyria as a means of punishing the people of Israel for their injustices. During one of the high feast days of Israel, Amos left his home in Tekoa, a few miles south of Jerusalem, and journeyed to Bethel, the ancient shrine located just a few miles north of the border between Judah and Israel. There he delivered the message God had laid upon him. He reminded the people that in the exodus Yahweh had chosen them to be God's own, but this choosing involved them in special responsibilities rather than

special privileges. Fundamental to that responsibility was the call to them to organize their national life around the justice of God put into effect on the day when the covenant was made in Sinai. Said Amos in his most famous utterance: "Let justice roll down as the waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream." (Amos 5:24)



Amos's attempt failed, of course; Israel did not change her ways. But Amos's prediction came true: Assyria did smite the tiny country and took her lands and kingdoms from her. Amos was able to articulate the basic prophetic message: God is acting in human affairs; what is the nation doing to shape its life to make an adequate response to God's action?



The text for the day, 7:7-17, contains both a vision of God that came to Amos and an incident in his life that encapsulated the message that had been given to him.



In the English translation the vision seems clear: God had set a plumb line in the midst of the people. The plumb line represents God's claim for justice on the part of the people; the people are to be as straight before God as a building, the construction of whose walls has been tested against a plumb line. Israel, on the other hand, is a building out of kilter. The nation has failed to do justly before God, and God will punish them. God will make desolate the places of worship in Israel ("the high places") and its sanctuaries will be laid waste. God will rise against Jeroboam the king and end his reign by the sword.



That metaphor seems clear, and many a sermon has been preached, and many a social ethic has been developed using the concept of "God's plumb line." The problem is that the Hebrew text is not nearly so clear as are these English translations of it. Donald Gowan, in his commentary on Amos in the New Interpreters' Bible, points out that the Hebrew word translated "plumb line" does not mean that at all (NIB4:406-407). It refers to a metal, says Gowan, probably "tin." But it makes no sense to say "God puts a wall of tin in the midst of the people." So Gowan suggests that a cognate of the Hebrew "tin" means "sighing": God sighs as he leaves the people in their sin. This suggestion is not a perfect solution to the problem, but it does remind us that we ought not use the phrase "plumb line" as we interpret the passage, and it also declares that God is about to abandon Israel to its sins.



Whatever the exact meaning of the phrase, Amos' use of it upset

Bethel's resident priest, Amaziah. Amaziah was a practitioner of the ancient heresy of Israel, the marriage of throne and altar. He believed that the altar belonged to the king and not to God, so he sent a message to King Jereboam II of Israel. In it the priest charged Amos with conspiring against the king, and doing so in the king's own sanctuary, Bethel. To conspire against the king is a treasonable act, and to do so in the king's own temple makes it doubly treasonable. Amaziah wants to get rid of this troublemaker against altar and throne. He asks Amos to leave Bethel. "O seer, go, flee away to your own land of Judah, and earn your bread there, and prophesy there; but never again prophesy at Bethel, for this is the king's sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom."

Amos did not leave without a protest. He said to Amaziah scornfully, "I am no prophet, nor a prophet's son." In other words, Amos did not earn his living by conjuring up ecstatic visions for the amazement of the people, as the temple prophets did, and he could not be ordered around by the priest as if he was one of these. "I am a herdsman," he declared proudly, "and a dresser of sycamore trees." As a herdsman he was no mere shepherd but a breeder of cattle and sheep, a man important to the pastoral economy of the day. As a "dresser of sycamore trees," he had the task of opening up the fruit of that tree and letting the insects inside it escape so that the fruit would be edible for the poorest of the poor in Israel. But the LORD had taken Amos from following the flock, and the LORD had said to him, "Go, prophesy to my people Israel." Amos said to Amaziah and to the King: "Now hear the word of the LORD. You say, `Do not prophesy against Israel, and do not preach against the house of Isaac.' The Lord says, `Your wife shall be a harlot in the city, and your sons and your daughters shall fall by the sword, and your land shall be parceled out by line; you yourself shall die in an unclean land, and Israel shall surely go into exile away from its land.'"



It happened to Israel as Amos said it would. Within three decades of the time of Amos' words, the armies of Assyria engulfed Israel's capital city of Samaria, and king and people were forever after exiled from the land. King and people had forsaken the charge that God had given them: above all else, God's people must serve the justice of the Lord!

PSALM 82: This strange and primitive psalm depicts the Great God presiding over a council of all the gods. The Great God accuses them of judging unjustly because they show partiality to the wicked (if we were to substitute the word "wealthy" for the word "wicked," we would get a much more contemporary sense of the psalm! Too often our societies are organized to give partiality to the rich, and others are left to fend for themselves.) The Great God sets his standard: "Give justice to the weak and the orphan; maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked/rich." This standard needs to be hung over all our walls of justice and halls of legislatures!



Not to do this, says the psalmist, is not an optional matter. Not doing it upsets the order of God's universe. Failing to live up to God's standards shakes all the foundations of earth, all the underpinnings of human society.



God passes judgement upon those gods of human life that fail to do this. "You shall die like mortals," God declares. This is God's sentence of doom upon all the gods and the societies they have engendered. These societies shall not live!



Hardly any psalm, indeed hardly any pronouncement by any prophet carries the direct power that this ancient psalm does. It states bluntly that each of the nations has "gods" around which they build their lives. They can be gods representing the forces of greed and power, for wealth at the expense of others, for military strength, for building societies where the rich construct their lifestyles on the backs of the poor and the voiceless. It is not hard to walk to and fro in our world today and find these very things happening. Heed then this ancient psalm: God does care about the poor and vulnerable of the world. God does care about the terms on which we build our lives. God will rescue the weak and the needy. As God acts in this manner, the foundations of our own lives may shiver and shake.



COLOSSIANS 1:1-14: This is the first of four consecutive readings that will come from Paul's Letter to the Colossians. As such, it is important briefly to introduce the city of Colossae and to say a word about its church.



Colossae is one of three small cities some 100 miles inland from Ephesus, which is on the seacoast. Laodicae was 11 miles from Colossae, 13 miles from Hieropolis; these were opposite each other and north of Colossae. Colossae was on the main road leading from Ephesus to the east. It was in the valley of the river Lycus, on its southern bank. The river passes through a narrow gorge, so the water was nauseous with an unusual degree of carbonate of lime. It was near Mount Cadmos, 7000 feet high. It followed the Meander River to the Lycus, then followed that river for a few miles to Laodicae and on to Hieropolis.



The area was volcanic and subject to earthquakes. Laodicia had been destroyed by an earthquake in 17 AD, while that earthquake seriously damaged the other two cities. The soil was very fertile. It was noted for a breed of sheep that produced a famous wool, and it was also famous for woollen manufacture.





It was in the region of Phrygia, though at its founding it had been assigned to the province of Asia. It was re-assigned to the province of Cilicia, then Asia again, and finally to Phrygia, in which it stayed for four centuries. Colossae was founded before Herodotus' time. Laodicia was founded in 261-246, BC, and this was a blow to Colossae. Hieropolis was named for its temple, "a center of native feeling and Phrygian nationalism." The population of the area was mostly Phrygian, with some Greek mixed in, mostly left over from the time that the armies of Alexander the Great had passed through the area.



The region of Phrygia was a spawning ground for enthusiastic cults and new forms of religion. Heiropolis was the home of the Stoic teacher Epictetus, a slave who may have had some knowledge of Christianity. Laodicea had numerous Jews, though they compromised easily with heathenism. A number of papyri found in the area indicate that belief in magic and fear of the demonic were important parts of folk religion in the Greco-Roman world. The "power" terminology and "cult" descriptions in the letter to the Colossians suggest that this may have been the background of the "error" in Colossae.



Heroditus (5th c. BC) tells us that Colossae was a great city of Phrygia, one of the places where King Xerxes halted his army before the invasion of Greece,480 BC. Xenophon (4th C BC) called it "a populous city, prosperous and great." But it began to lose population and influence. By the time that Ptolemy the geographer wrote of the area, he did not even mention Colossae in his enumeration of towns, though his list includes several inconsiderable places. At the time Paul wrote his letter, Colossae was in the Roman province of Asia, controlled by a Roman pro-consul, headquartered in Ephesus. It was the least important town to which Paul addressed a letter.



The church at Colossae was founded by Epaphras, an assistant of Paul's and a native of the city. Onesimus also was from this city. Philemon may have been a member of the church here, as was Onesimus. There was trouble in the church, which was a mixture of gentile and Jewish elements. Judaism stressed circumcision, sabbaths, and festivals, Gentiles emphasized philosophy and elemental spirits. Most Christians in Colossae were Gentile. No single identification of the error at Colossae is thoroughly convincing. The heresy has been assigned to Essenism, mysticism, Greek pagan cults, gnosticism, Christian gnosticism, and other forms of syncretistic religion. The most we can say is that the error was a syncretism of Jewish, Gentile, and Christian features that diminished the all-sufficiency of Christ's salvation and his personal pre-eminence.



Paul had never visited this city.



The letter itself was written in conjunction with Philemon, the Letter to the Philippians, and possibly the Letter to Ephesians. It was carried by Tychichus and Onesimus. Since Colossae was destroyed by an earthquake in 61 AD, it must have been written before or about that time.



The beginning of the Letter to the Colossians follows the usual pattern of Paul's letters. He describes himself as "an apostle of Jesus Christ." He adds that being an apostle was not of his own choosing but that he is an apostle "by the will of God." The letter is addressed to "the saints and Christian brothers in Christ in Colossae." This seems to be the self-designation of the group of Christians that had gathered around James, the brother of the Lord. They were a group that considered Jesus Christ to be the fulfillment of the Jewish way of life (someone has called them "Torah-observant Christians," and I think this is a good description of them). Their faith was built around the Old Testament and the synagogue, and their Bibles and their worship centered around the Hebrew language and Hebrew practices. As such, their positions on the faith were considerably different than Paul's, and some of the things said in this letter are directed to those differences. Paul concludes with his familiar formula: "Grace to you and peace." This combines both a Greek and a Jewish greeting. Greeks greeted each other with the word charis, "grace." It was both an hello and goodbye in the Greek language. Jewish people greeted each other with the word "shalom," "peace," "may the well-being of God be with you." Since the Christian church included both Jews and Greeks, this greeting has an inclusive "feel" to it. The greeting ends with the words "from God our Father." Is the omission of the usual "and our Lord Jesus Christ" done in deference to the monotheistic beliefs of these Torah-observant Jews who had a hard time believing that they had any other Lord than God himself?



The letter goes on to describe the kinds of prayers that the author is accustomed to make in behalf of the people of the Colossian church. There are prayers of thanksgiving for the faith and love and hope that is in them. There are prayers that these graces may continue to be extended into all the world. There are prayers that they may be filled with the knowledge of God's will. There are prayers for their growth in spiritual wisdom and understanding. There are prayers that they may lead lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing him and producing fruit in good work. There are prayers that they may become strong with the strength that comes from his glorious power. These prayers in their behalf are poured out in one long breathless sentence whose glowing Greek simply cannot be reproduced in an English translation.



There is a reason that these prayers can be asked and answered. God has rescued us from the powers of darkness; in those societies in which light came only from the sun and a few flickering candles darkness was a fearsome thing, the abode of evil, and people wanted to be delivered from that darkness. The Father has transferred us, said the author, into the kingdom of his beloved Son. Through the Son the Father has redeemed us; through the forgiveness offered through Christ he has disentangled us from the sins that have strangled us. This is why, says the author, we can live joyfully and give thanks to the Father. He has enabled us to live no longer in darkness and in sin but has caused us to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light.



LUKE 10:25-37: The man had given a correct answer to the question put to him, but somehow his answer did not satisfy him. He wanted more than that for his life, so he asked a second question: "Who is my neighbor?"



The man is called a lawyer in this passage, which means he was a student of the law. Yet his question was a strange one for a Jew to ask. "Good teacher," he said, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?" We are so accustomed to thinking of "eternal life" in connection with Jesus that we do not recall how rare the phrase is in the three Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The Gospel of John used it frequently, but these three gospels only used it in connection with their telling of this story (and, in Luke, a similar one where a ruler asks the identical question). The rarity of the question makes me wonder if the man was Jewish after all. He could have been a gentile for whom the question was not a strange one. Greeks were always seeking "eternal life." He could have been a gentile "God-fearer." That was a title given to some Greek people who were seeking answers to their questions about life by studying Jewish religion. They attended synagogues, they read the Jewish Scriptures, they worshiped the God of the Jews. They did not accept Jewish food laws, nor were they circumcised, but otherwise they were serious about the kind of religion that the Jews practiced. It would be very much in character for a God-fearer to ask Jesus this question: "What must I do to inherit eternal life?"



Jesus turned the question back on him. "What is written in the law?" he asked. "How do you read it?" He answered: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength and with all your mind." In other words, you are to put all the faculties of life - heart, soul, strength, and mind - into your quest to love God. There is a corollary to that command. "You shall love your neighbor as you love yourself." You are to put all the love and care that you normally devote to loving yourself into loving your neighbor.

This is the point at which this thoughtful man had a question: "Who is my neighbor?"



This question was under much debate at the time. The issue of the greatest commandment was not in dispute, but the definition of "friend" and "neighbor" was, and the scribes debated it at length. The original command, in Leviticus 19:17-18, to love the neighbor specified "your kin" and "any of your people." Leviticus 19:34 even extended it to "Love the alien as yourself."

"Neighbor" clearly embraced fellow Jews and proselytes, but it was widely held that the term excluded personal enemies. The man, trained in the Jewish law, presented a real question: "Just who is my neighbor, anyway?"



Jesus did not answer his question directly. Instead he told him one of the finest stories of all time.



"A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho." The 17 mile descending road through the desert from Jerusalem to Jericho has been dangerous through all history. It falls almost 1300 feet in that distance. Josephus spoke of it as "rocky and desolate." Jerome in the 4th century still spoke of it as infested with Bedouin robbers.



And he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him - never forget the violence and pain of the beating, foot and fist, stick and stone - and departed. The wounded man is unconscious and stripped. This means he could not be easily identified. You identified a person by his speech (his language or dialect) and by his clothes. There was no way to identify this man. He is just "any man," no identity, no family, no means of livelihood. They left him half dead. "Half-dead" refers to a specific situation in Jewish life. It is equivalent in rabbinic categories to "next to death." There was one step beyond: "one just expiring."



Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. The priest was undoubtedly riding an animal. The priesthood constituted the prestigious and elite class in Jewish society. The poor walk. Everyone else in general rode, and specially this was so if you belonged to the upper classes.



We can envision a bit of what is going through the priest's mind as he passed by on the other side. To begin with, said the priest to himself, I cannot approach closer than four cubits to a dead man without being defiled, and to find out if he were dead or alive, I would have to overstep this boundary. If he is dead, then I will contract ritual impurity. And I have just come from two weeks' service in the Temple. It would be humiliating to me to have to return to the Temple to purify myself. This purification would also be costly and expensive. I would have to find a red heifer, buy it and reduce it to ashes, and purify myself with the ashes, and doing all that would take a full week of my time. Furthermore, if I were to become defiled, my family could not eat the tithes I am carrying with me from the Temple, for they would be unclean also. My family would not want me to do that. Furthermore, I have no legal obligation to help him. Sirach 12:1-7 tells me to help a devout man, but it also tells me I do not have to go to the aid of a sinner. I will stop a moment and look at him, but then I am perfectly justified in riding on.



So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. The Levite, who was probably walking because he was of a lower social class, would have seen the priest ahead of him. Travelers in the Mideast always know who is in front of them and are very sensitive to people around them. The Levite was not bound by the same rules that bound the priest. He was required to observe ritual purity only in connection with his acts in the temple, so he could render aid to the man without being bound by the restrictions that bound the priest. But he probably said, "If the priest ahead of me did nothing, why should I do anything?" So he too saw the victim and then passed by on the other side of the road.



At this point in the story, Jesus' hearers probably expected Jesus to introduce a Jewish layman, or a Jewish peasant, and contrast his actions with those of the professional religious men, but Jesus did not. The next person in Jesus' story was a Samaritan, a member of that despised and mongrel race that lived between the Jews of Judea and the Jews of Galilee, heretics and schismatics, much hated by Jews. They were cursed in synagogues, who also prayed that they would not be partakers of eternal life. But, said Jesus, a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was; and when he saw him, he had compassion, and went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine;



The Samaritan's first action is that of binding the wounds. Jeremiah 30:17 and Hosea 6 inform us that "this is imagery used of God as God acts to save people." Oil and wine were not only implements of first aid. They were also the sacrificial elements used in temple worship. The priest and Levite had used them in the temple. Here they fail to use them. It is the hated Samaritan who pours them out on the altar of the man's wounds.



But the Samaritan is not done. Then he set him on his own beast and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, 'Take care of him; and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.'"





The Samaritan took him to the inn. Since there was no inn on the road, this means he probably took the man back to Jericho. Either he took him up on his donkey or else he put the man on the beast and led the donkey; the Greek can read either way. If the latter, he was acting as the servant who led the beast. Inns in those days were not nice places. Innkeepers were suspect for their honesty and their behavior; the word "prostitute" was a synonym for "women who keep an inn." The wounded man had no money. He had been robbed of all his possessions, and he could be thrown into debtor's prison for staying in the inn without money. The Samaritan took out two denarii to pay the bill. This was a considerable outlay of money on the Samaritan's part. Two denarii at that time would have bought one person's food for three weeks. The two denarii would probably cover the man's bill during the time that he was recuperating at the inn.



By allowing himself to be identified by the innkeeper, the Samaritan was also putting himself into real jeopardy. Since any stranger who involves himself in an accident is considered partially, if not totally, responsible for it, the Samaritan might have been killed by the wounded man's family in an act of blood vengeance. The Samaritan was willing to pay any price - either in outlay of money or in personal peril - for his act of compassion. (Much of the above can be found in Bailey, Kenneth, Through Peasant eyes, 33-56)



Then Jesus said to the man, "Which of these three, do you think, proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?" He said, "The one who showed mercy on him." And Jesus said to him, "Go and do likewise."

We cannot leave this magnificent story without commenting on the person who told it. Jesus put much of himself into the story. Like the Samaritan, Jesus was a persecuted man, but like him, he is able to love others even though he is persecuted. In his own person Jesus shows us what it is to love the Lord our God with heart, soul, strength, and mind. He shows us what it means to love our neighbor as ourselves. Jesus' love is great enough to care for all our needs, to repay all our debts, to heal our deepest wounds. Jesus brings us that which the lawyer sought most of all. Jesus brings us the life eternal.