Amos 9:1-10
The Daily Office
For eight chapters, Amos has prophesied the complete and total destruction of Israel. But today, at the tail end of his book, comes this contradictory promise: "I will not utterly destroy the house of Jacob…I will command, and shake the house of Israel among all the nations as one shakes with a sieve, but no pebble shall fall to the earth." What gives? Many scholars believe that later writers added these last verses when they saw that not all the people of Israel had been wiped out.
David's kingdom of Judah, which contained two of the 12 tribes, survives to this day. And genetic traces of the Israelites have been found in such far away places as Southern Africa. So, in ways that not even Amos could have imagined, God has preserved his chosen people. Holy Scripture is not a fixed text, dictated on this day, chiseled into granite and never to be changed. We are given glimpses of God's truth, we record what we have heard, and pass it on to the next generation, which hears our inspired words in the light of their circumstances, which we could not have imagined.
So, when our children revise the story we have handed down to them, they acknowledge that God is truly the author of that story, not human beings masquerading as God's mouthpieces. Amos saw no hope for his people, lost in their arrogance, injustice and pretense of piety. What Amos's survivors saw was that with God, there is always room for hope. But Amos's words remain as a warning for all time against our arrogance, our injustice and our pretense of piety.
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