Commentary on Amos 8:4-6, 9-12

Today’s reading is part of Amos’ fourth vision: “The Basket of Fruit”. Ideally, in a world of great prosperity all should be enjoying its fruits. Experience shows us again and again that that is never the case. The denunciations listed by Amos today have an unpleasantly familiar ring – sadly, little has changed.

The people asked:

When will the new moon be over
so that we may sell grain,
and the Sabbath,
so that we may offer wheat for sale?

The new moon, like the Sabbath, brought a halt to all commercial transactions. The question was asked by merchants who could not wait for the holy day (devoted to God) to be over so that they could get back to doing business.

Then they say:

We will make the ephah smaller and the shekel heavier…

The ephah was a standard of measure, a little more than our bushel. So the merchants fiddle with their measuring instruments of buying and selling. They take advantage of the poor and the lowly and shamelessly exploit them:

[We will] practice deceit with false balances,
buying the poor for silver
and the needy for a pair of sandals…

They talk about selling even the “sweepings of the wheat.” This practice reminds one of how tea merchants discovered that tea-leaf dust could be used for teabags! And only the Lord knows what goes into some of our processed foods these days.

At the same time, today in many parts of our world, even ‘ordinary’ people enjoy a level of prosperity never dreamed of by the rich in former times. Many workers in North America, Europe and parts of Asia can have their own house, a car, marvellous electronic devices and even go abroad for summer holidays. Solomon in all his glory did not enjoy such perquisites!

But we also live in a world where hundreds of millions live at appalling and totally unacceptable levels of poverty, deprivation, malnutrition and starvation. Every few seconds, someone dies of hunger, most often children.

This cannot last, Amos tells the people in the Northern Kingdom, for the Lord says through Amos:

I will make the sun go down at noon
and darken the earth in broad daylight.

The Day of Yahweh is accompanied by cosmic signs, including a solar eclipse. The later prophets enlarge on this, using conventional imagery that must not be taken literally. Darkness, in every sense of the word, will cover the earth.

Celebrations will become times of mourning and songs become lamentations:

By the rivers of Babylon—
there we sat down, and there we wept
when we remembered Zion. (Ps 137:1)

As signs of mourning and loss, people will wear sackcloth and have their heads shaved. People will be reduced to destitution and will lose their only sons. A famine is coming – but it is not a famine of food and water. It is a famine for hearing God’s word. People will have no sense of direction:

They shall wander from sea to sea
and from north to east;
they shall run to and fro, seeking the word of the Lord,
but they shall not find it.

This is just what is happening to many in our affluent world. They have lost a sense of values, a truly moral sense, a sense of integrity and solidarity as they are caught up in the consumerist world of hedonism and pleasure. “If you like it, do it!” they think. They seek pleasure and enjoyment and are surprised that they cannot find happiness.

Happiness is only for the poor in spirit, for the gentle and compassionate, for those who hunger and thirst for justice, for those who are peacemakers, for those ready to suffer for the sake of justice and what is right – for those committed to making God‘s Kingdom a reality in our world.

Until we rediscover these truths we will continue to wander from pleasure to pleasure in a search that has no end. But where are we to find the guiding lights that will point us in the right direction? Where are we to go to find him who is the Light of the World, who is the Way, who is Truth and Life? Is it possible that helping to illuminate this path might be a responsibility for me?