Canter Bridge

The prophet Amos found himself walking the turf of No Man’s Land in a way that seems almost characteristic of the biblical prophets. In the face of indignation and hatred, he delivered a message to the northern kingdom of Israel in which he himself found no pleasure.

His work, like that of the more famous Jeremiah, disgusted him.

When Amaziah ordered him off the farm, telling him to go ply his prophetic trade in the southern kingdom of Judah, Amos just couldn’t take it any more:

And Amaziah said to Amos, ‘O seer, go, flee away to the land of Judah, earn your bread there, and prophesy there; but never again prophesy at Bethel, for it is the king’s sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom.’ Then Amos answered Amaziah, ‘I am no prophet, nor a prophet’s son; but I am a herdsman, and a dresser of sycamore trees, and the LORD took me from following the flock, and the LORD said to me, “Go, prophesy to my people Israel.”‘

Perhaps over against the careerist religious vocation of many—the priest Amaziah himself comes to mind—Amos explodes with his story of how not me this prophesying schtick is. This was no career move, no opportunistic lateral movement into the prophet’s guild in a year when, say, the rain was a little thin for really good sheep grazing.

Amos was not here and Amos was not saying these painful things because he wanted to be doing so. He’d been chosen, co-opted, picked out—Jeremiah would even say deceived—by YHWH for a task in which he had no native interest.

It is so often thus for YHWH’s prophets and, perhaps, for others who find that one’s lot in life is not well addressed by the question, ‘So, do you like your job?’

There are, from the angle of a man like Amos, purposes for which that question is the wrong one. There are larger, weightier things afoot. Things in which choice and fulfillment come only lately, if at all, into the conversation.