31ST SUNDAY OF THE YEAR – 2016

The prophet Amos is often referred to as the great social justice prophet of the Old Testament. In the modern world, we are inclined to split off social justice from its Jewish-Christian source. We talk about “principles for a just society.” We refer to “gospel” or “kingdom” values, as though these can be lived out in isolation from the God who makes them possible. We have, in many ways, lost the essential link between acting justly and being just, or if you will, holy, as though just actions were something external to us or our faith.

This was not so to the people of the Old Testament. For them, loving God and loving neighbour were two sides of the same coin, forming the unity we know as the Great Commandment. In Amos, how frequently God promises justice to those whom Israel mistreats, how often does he warn Israel to act justly? But it is not quite so simple, for the Old Testament emphasises the holiness of God, who calls his people to be like him. In the New Testament Jesus expresses it like this: “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

Amos is unsparing in his attack on Israel for its injustice to the poor and needy: “They have sold the upright for silver, and the poor for a pair of sandals; they have crushed the heads of the weak into the dust, and thrust the rights of the oppressed to one side!” A powerful, angry message; yet Amos’s primary interest is not social, but religious; the core of his message is not only “act justly” but especially “be just [or holy].”

In Amos’s time, Israel had been divided into two kingdoms. The Northern Kingdom had been tainted by a long period of pagan infiltration, and its worship had become corrupted. It is this that Amos attacks. Worshipping ISRAEL’S God, the one true God, the God of truth and justice, makes one just and truthful. Worshipping the other false gods, makes one become unjust and false. In the words of the Psalm, makers and worshippers of false gods “…will come to be like them, and so will all who trust in them.” For Amos, the true need is not for just-ice, so much as just-ness [or holiness]. Only just-ness leads to true just-ice, and justness can only come from true worship of God.

We become like the gods we worship. Like the people in Amos’s day, we are faced with this big question: do we worship the God who said “Let us make man in our own image,” or the one of whom man says, “Let us make god in our own image.”?

We are blessed in receiving the whole truth about God through the Lord Jesus Christ in his Church. This truth is before us whenever we need or wish to discover it. Through the Church we can remain in a relationship with God. In the terms of modern technology, our relationship with God is not a dial-up connection, but a perma­nent open line. We can be in no doubt as to whom the true God is, what we are to believe of him, and how we are consequently to live.

But every time we put brackets around some aspect of God we find difficult, or do not like, and change his teaching to suit ourselves, we are recreating God in our image. And the more we recreate God in our own – sinful – image, the further we move from his truth and his justice. We become ultimately like the god we have created out of our own desires, false and unjust. Even justice, when it becomes more important than Truth, ultimately ends by becoming unjust.

We can only serve God in justice by serving him in truth; by following him and his teachings with all our hearts. We must allow God to recreate us in his image. Only when we have been made just, or holy, by God, will we be able to act with true justice. Let us ask him today to bring us to holiness, to transform us, that we might be “perfect, as [our] heavenly Father is perfect,” that we might not merely act justly, but become people of true justice.

Fr Phillip