Amos 8:4-7 (8-12)

The prophet Amos is perhaps the earliest of the so-called writing prophets, and the date 750 BCE is conventionally given as the approximate time of his prophesying. We are told that he was a southerner, from Tekoa, but most of his oracles are directed against the situation in the Northern Kingdom, not long before its conquest by the Assyrians in 721 BCE.

Amos is pre-eminently a prophet of doom. He foresees no redemption for Israel - nor, for that matter, for Judah, the Southern Kingdom. (Amos 7:2-3 is an exception, and probably a later interpolation.) He is certain that, because of her egregious sins, Israel will be conquered, and sent into Exile and will never return. And, indeed, this is precisely what happened historically.

It is interesting that the great bulk of the sins which Amos sees and so thunderingly denounces, are social sins, or what we would think of as offenses against morality in the broad sense - sins against justice. Amos is scarcely interested at all in "religious" or "cultic" sin- the temptation to worship other gods, or at any rate syncretism, which so pre-occupies some of the other prophets of the period.

So, in today's passage, one of his best known, he vehemently accuses the ruling classes of Israel of cheating and exploiting the poorer people, and he sees this as ample grounds for the doom and destruction which Israel's God will shortly bring upon the people.

It is a timeless message, and applies to many other - perhaps all- periods in history, though it has seldom enough been so explicitly recognized as a gross offense against God and his righteousness.

Unusually, today's rather enigmatic Gospel lesson from Luke 16, Jesus's so-called Parable of the Unjust Steward, teaches - or seems to teach - the more "primitive" lesson of the two. For a change, we are invited to consider whether Amos's morality is not more exalted than what Jesus suggests.