1.- We sang it many times. We now go from the song to the catechesis to listen more and better God´s word that implies prophet Amos message: I shall restore the tent. His message is announcement and also denounce. It implies a rupture with the established social, political and religious system: the system is corrupted, the house of David is ruined, the tent of David is fallen (Am 9,11), What does all this mean in Amos times? What does it mean for the newly born Church? What does it mean for us to day? Is the church in ruins? Will the temple stand the earthquake shake? Which earthquake? Saint Francis (1182-1226) vocation is born from a similar experience. Pope Innocence the III may be Europe’s emperor, but the Church is in ruins: Go and repair my house that menaces ruins.
2.- Let us see the context in which Amos lives. The kingdom of the north (Israel), separated from the south (Judah) at Salomon´s death (931), suffers the syrian invasion at the end of the ninth century. Things change in the eight-century. An unknown prosperity is reached with Jeroboam the second (783-743), but contrast between rich and poor people is scandalous. Religious and social corruptions go side by side. The big sanctuaries are full, but the religion is heathenised, perverted, prostituted.
3.- Amos is born in Tekoa, south of Jerusalem. He is a jew, shepherd and figs grower. He is not a religious professional, or a thankful stomach. Economically he is independent, free. Mount Zion, it is to say, God´s home and temple, is the starting point of his mission,. The denouncement is made from inside. God himself makes it. Two years before the earthquake, that took place at the middle of the eighth century, Amos announces: Yahweh roars from Zion, his voice thunders from Jerusalem (Am 1,2). Before it is listened by men, nature listens it. Yasol, Cedron affluent, in the high Galilee, excavations, testifies the earthquake. Consequence of it was the split in two of the mount of Olives (Zec 14,4). The earthquake was considered like a signal confirming Amos message: The earth totters, all who dwell in it tremble; but it is I who hold its pillars firm (Ps 75,4).
4.- Amos defends the peoples right, he denounces the injustice there where it takes place, he proclaims nations judgement. For instance, about Damascus: Because they have threshed Gilead with threshing sledges of iron (Am 1,3); about Gaza and Philistia: Because they carried a whole people into captivity to deliver them to Edom (Am 1,6); about Tyre and Phoenicia, by the same reason (Am 1,9); about Edom: Because he pursued his brother (Israel) with the sword, and cast off all pity (Am 1,11); about Amon: Because the Amonites have ripped open pregnant women in Gilead, so that they might enlarge their border (Am 1,13); about Moab: Because they burned to a cinder the bones of the king of Edom (Am 2,1).
5.- Also Judah is brought to judgement: Because they rejected the law of Yahweh and they did not keep his statutes (Am 2,4). And about Israel, that does not expect it: Because they sell they just for money and the needy for a pair of sandals; they tread on the head of the poor and trample them upon the dust, while they silence the right of the afflicted; a man and his father go to the same woman to profane my holy name; they stretch out upon garments taken in pledge, beside every altar; the take the wine of those they swindle and are drunk in the house of their God (Am 2, 6-8).
6.- But, why does Amos speak? Why does he not keep silent? Because the prophetic vocation is irresistible, because it is God himself the one who speaks, since God has elected him like confident and herald: Yet Yahweh does noting without revealing his plans to his servants the prophets. If the lion roars, who will be afraid? If Yahweh speaks, who will not prophesy?
7.- The prophet claims against the powerful: They store in strongholds what they have taken through violence and extortion (Am 3,10). They mix luxury and devotion, they are rich and devote: On the day that I call Israel to account for his crimes, I will punish as well the altars of Bethel. The horns of the altar will be broken off and fall to the ground. Then I will strike the winter house and the summer house. The palaces of ivory shall be ruined, and the great house destroyed (Am 3, 13-15). The denounce reaches also to the women: Listen to this word, you cows of Bashan… you oppress the weak and abuse the needy, you order your husbands: Bring us something to drink quickly (Am 4,1). The rich people likes to peregrinate to the large sanctuaries, but this is not a sane devotion: Come sinners to the Sanctuary in Bethel, go down to Gilgal and sin even more!. Each morning bring your sacrifices and on the third day your tithes. Burn leavened food for thanks giving, proclaim in public your freewill offering, for this is what makes you happy, o men of Israel (Am 4,4). The sanctuaries bless the injustice and it feeds them (Sir 35), they quiet and drowse the conscience. Like it will be said much later on, the religion is the opium of the people.
8.- The Lord requests a personal relationship, which is translated into the practice of justice. Nevertheless, God´s commandments are rejected: they have been led astray by the falsehood (Am 2,4); they tread on the head of the poor and trample them upon the dust of the earth (Am 2,7); woe to you who turn judgment into bitterness and do no justice to the land! (Am 5,7); woe to you who long for Yahweh´s day!; why should you long for that day?. It is a day of darkness, not of dawn (Am 5,18); the cult offered to the Lord is repugnant; I hate your feasts (Am 5,21); the confidence placed on the temple is false: woe to those who live at ease in Zion, overconfident on the hill of Samaria! (Am 6,1); the luxury hurts and has no entrails: you lie on ivory beds,… drink wine by the bowlful, and anoint yourselves with the finest oils, but you do not grieve over the ruins of Joseph (Am 6, 4-7)
9.- Bethel´s priest, a functionary of the royal sanctuary, is not able to shut up the prophet (Am 7, 12-13). The mistake of the priest, when he tries, is that he considers the prophet like a professional, who folds before the established injustice in order to get his bread. The sanctuary is an important peregrination place: the royal sanctuary and the country´s temple (Am 7,13). God is adored in it, but it is confused with national theology (the bull) and with the go of the prosperity (Baal). The splendour of the cult conceals the social injustice. The power and the richness adulterate everything. A society like this cannot last. It is a tipsy wall that menaces ruin (Am 7, 7-9), a basket of ripe fruit ready for destruction (Am 8, 1-3), a temple that does not resist the shake of the earthquake (Am 9,1).
10.- Regardless everything, there is hope. The future rises in the middle of ruins: On that day I shall restore the fallen hut of David and wall up its breaches and raise its ruined walls and so build it as in the old days (Am 9,11). The first Christian community feels this passage accomplished in the experience of the Gospel lived in community, free of the jewish legalism and announced to the gentiles (Acts 15,16). In the council of Jerusalem, everybody, with Peter and James ahead, acknowledge that God first showed his care by taking a people for himself (Act 15,14). Everybody knows what happened in Cornelius home (Acts 11,1-18).
11. Somehow the problem may appear far from us. Nevertheless, taking into account that the canonical law has 1752 canons, the following questions come imposed: is it necessary such a council in today´s Church? Is the gospel accepted free from the law? Do we have today a Christian legalism? Are we under an excessive number of laws and, at the same time, missing living communities? Is violence and injustice denounced? Are the gentiles evangelised? Is the unity of the Church menaced?
12.- Regardless everything, we today see accomplished Amos passage in the communitarian renewal of the Church, in the return to the experience of the first Christian communities, in the liberation from the Christian legalism, in the denounce of the violence and the injustice, in the recovery of the lost unity. The second Vatican Council was convoked for this purpose: in order to: “return all its splendour to the face of the Church of Christ, revealing the simplest and purest features of its origin” (John XXII, preparatory speech, 13th Nov 1960).
* Dialogue: what does it mean for us to restore the fallen tent of David?
- To live the experiences of the first communities
- To denounce the violence and the injustice
- To announce the Gospel free from the law (the Christian legalism)
- To shelter today´s gentiles
- To recover the lost unity