AMOS VII.

THE CLASH OF PROPHET AND PRIEST.

"Amaziah the priest of Bethel said to Amos, Thou visionary! go, flee thou away into the land of Judah: eat thy bread there, and play the prophet there " (vii. 12).

AMOS now comes before us in a somewhat new capacity. Hitherto we have known him as a prophet, pleading for God with men, speaking home to the popular conscience, challenging the religious and social life of his contemporaries, proclaiming the eternal laws of God and the doom of impenitent Israel: now he appears as a seer, a man of visions as well as of words. That Amos was a man of vision in the broadest sense of the word must already be abundantly clear: never was insight profounder than his into the moral constitution of the world, or into the sweep, the majesty, the inexorableness of law. But the seer, in the older and narrower sense, was a man who had ecstatic experiences, in which special knowledge came to him or significant visions were borne in upon his soul; and in this sense, too, Amos was a seer. The vision was usually started by some familiar experience,—in Amos's case it was a plague of locusts, a fierce drought, a builder beside a wall, a basket of fruit,—but upon these simple experiences there falls that light that never was on sea or land. They become the symbols of another order, incarnate prophecies of something yet to be. The supersensible world, or it may be the future, lets itself down into the present, and shines through them before the rapt eyes of the seer.

Amos, as we know, was haunted by the idea of the destruction of Israel; and everywhere he cast his eyes, he found corroboration of his foreboding. He saw through ordinary things to that darker thing which they portended. There had been a plague of locusts, and they had come at a peculiarly inopportune time. The early spring herbage had just been cut and monopolized, as was apparently the custom, by the king for his cavalry. For the people, everything depended upon the second grass: and then, just at the critical moment, the deadly locusts appeared. All this comes to Amos in his vision: he sees them very plainly, as he had already seen them in actual experience, devouring the fig and the olive trees (iv. 9); he watches them with staring, sorrowful eyes—note the twice repeated " behold!"—as he thinks of the havoc they will work, and of the poor man whom they will ruin; and he sees through the locusts to the terrible God behind and beyond them, who can bring some yet more awful thing to pass—who can, and who will, if Israel does not repent. He shudders, as he looks; and he prays, " O Lord Jehovah, forgive, I beseech Thee."

So stern is the general bearing of Amos that we are sometimes tempted to think he spoke his message out of an unsympathetic, unrelenting heart. But this is very far from being so. Prophet of indignation as he is, his heart is full of pity, and he earnestly pleads for his sinful, deluded people. It is not often that we get a glimpse of the prophets at prayer; we see them, for the most part, only as they face the people with the word they must deliver; but their public work rested upon communion with God. They had pled with God for the people, before they ventured to plead with the people for God. They were men of intrepidity and power, because they were, first and foremost, men of prayer. So Amos prays briefly indeed (most Bible prayers are brief) but with passionate tenderness: " O Lord, forgive, I beseech Thee: how shall Jacob stand? for he is small." The people thought they were anything but small; they had just been boasting of the " horns " they had taken to themselves by their own strength (vi. 13). But Amos knows how pitifully resourceless they are in reality, and how little they can stand up to God Almighty and the terrors He can bring upon them. Amos is a seer: he sees in the locusts the symbol of impending calamity, and he prays that God in His grace may prevent it. His prayer is heard. "Jehovah repented concerning this, and said, 'It shall not be.'" This vision reveals the conflict in Amos's own soul between his sense of doom deserved and the love he bore his people.

That is his first vision, and the second is like unto it, only more terrible. This time it is a drought. The blazing sun has dried up the springs and fountains which rise from " the great deep," the underground ocean on which the Hebrews imagined the earth to rest. The very deep itself seemed dry, and even the land was about to wither and vanish before those cruel, scorching rays. This vision of the drought, like that of the locusts, rests on an actual experience (iv. 7). God has forgiven the people once, and they are still impenitent. But the prophet loves them too well to give them up; so again he prays, " O Lord Jehovah, cease, I beseech Thee: how shall Jacob stand? for he is small." It is sadly significant that this time he does not pray for their forgiveness. Neither the seventy of God in sending the calamities, nor His goodness in withdrawing them, had led the people to repentance. Both calls were alike unheeded. Such a hardhearted, incorrigible people would seem to be beyond the reach of forgiveness; so the prophet only asks the Lord to cease. This time, too, the prayer is heard. "Jehovah repented concerning this. This also shall not be, saith Jehovah." This also—with an ominous reference back to His previous forgiveness, which had produced no effect.

The third vision rose out of a very ordinary experience, seemingly altogether devoid of the tragic suggestiveness of the two that had preceded; but the sombre imagination of Amos, playing upon it, invests it with dark and deadly significance. He is the man of one idea—the doom of Israel—which stares at him from every object he looks at, however innocent. This time it was a builder standing beside a wall, with a plumb-line in his hand. Amos watches the man with curious interest, and with a fore boding at his heart. What is he going to do? He is going to test the straightness of the wall by dropping the plumb alongside it. The plumb will fall straight; the inexorable law of gravitation will guarantee that. But what of the wall? If it does not prove straight when tried by that infallible test, it must be torn down; for there can be no place in the world of sensible men, still less in God's world, for crooked walls. And as he watches with those sadly earnest eyes of his, he begins to see another wall being subjected to the same inexorable test. Jehovah is standing beside the wall that careless Israel has been building, and has dropped His plumb beside it, to see whether it is straight or not. If not, He will tear it down—the whole fabric of their political and religious life. He is not a relentless God. He does not desire the death of a sinner, but rather that he should repent, and live. But He has already given the nation two chances, and they have been spurned. So the great Master-builder, who can tolerate no crooked or shoddy work, resolves that He " will not pass by them any more "; and lest there should be any doubt as to what this vague threat means, Amos explains it in language of startling vividness: " The high places of Isaac shall be desolate, and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste; and I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword." It often helps us to understand the vigour and intrepidity of a prophet's message, if we attempt to translate it into its modern equivalent; and this word is as if a preacher were to say to-day: " Your ancient cathedrals and your beautiful churches—Canterbury, York, Westminster, St. Paul's, and a hundred others—will be laid in ruins, and the dynasty of King George will perish by the sword."

It is easy to imagine the indignation which this threat of Amos, uttered with almost inconceivable daring, would elicit from the worshippers. Consider the scene. Crowds of enthusiastic worshippers are gathered at Bethel, the principal sanctuary in the kingdom, and particularly associated with royalty, described later as " the king's sanctuary, and the royal temple." Suddenly there comes upon the scene a figure, unauthorized and unannounced, clad in the simple garb of a shepherd, and looking almost as if he belonged to some other world. His appearance at once arrests. His eyes are fixed upon the visions that stand before his soul, and he begins to relate them in melancholy chant-like tones, till in the end he flashes forth, in words of unambiguous meaning, his dreadful certainty of the impending ruin of his country; and all in the name of the God whom they were at that very season gathered to worship. Such a speech ran right in the teeth of the most cherished convictions of his hearers. They were zealous worshippers of Jehovah: why should He destroy them and demolish their sanctuaries? They were enjoying abundant prosperity, itself the proof and symbol of Jehovah's favour: why should He annihilate it? Amos's speech would convict him at once of blasphemy and high treason: it was a dishonour to God and a menace to the reigning house; and nothing was more natural than that at this point the high priest should intervene.

This man, Amaziah by name, was the leading ecclesiastic of his day, a sort of Archbishop of Canterbury, if we may permit ourselves a modern comparison: we have to remember this in order to grasp the real significance of the conflict between these two men. Amaziah, as responsible for the worship in the royal sanctuary, would be a court official, and he could not allow Amos's allusion to the fate of the reigning house to go unchallenged. Accordingly he at once takes steps to inform the king that there is a conspiracy on foot, with Amos for its ringleader. This, of course, was anything but the truth, and Amaziah's message to Jeroboam—"Amos hath conspired against thee"—seems a deliberate distortion of Amos's words. But we must not be too severe upon Amaziah. If there were any in Amos's audience disaffected towards the government, his concluding words, " I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword," may well have stirred within them thoughts of conspiracy. Besides, there had been enough interference of prophets with politics in previous Hebrew history to justify Amaziah in his interpretation of Amos's threat. Elijah, and still more Elisha, had directly contributed to the downfall of the dynasty whose best-known members are Ahab and Jezebel. Therefore Amaziah, as ecclesiastical guardian of the royal interests, was thoroughly justified in dispatching his message to the king: " the land," as he said, " was not able to bear all his words"—so unpatriotic, so dangerous, so monstrous were they. "For this is what Amos has said, 'Jeroboam shall die by the sword,' "—he had not quite said that,—"'and Israel shall assuredly be led away into exile from his own land.

Then he turns to Amos with the stinging words, "Thou visionary! be off, flee thou away to the land of Judah, eat thy bread there and play the prophet there, but don t prophesy here at Bethel; for this is the king's sanctuary and the royal temple." Amos knew that very well: that was precisely why he had chosen Bethel of all places in the kingdom for the delivery of his message. The crowds were there upon whom he was anxious to drive that message home: above all, the leaders of society and of the Church would be there, possibly the king himself, certainly the archbishop and some court officials, who would see that the king was speedily informed. This is the most effective commentary on the lion-like courage of the man. But Amaziah treats him with contempt. "Visionary," he calls him, with reference, no doubt, to the visions he has just declared, " you with your staring eyes, we refuse to have our happy festival disturbed by eccentric and dangerous people like you. This is Israel, and you have no right here at our festival at all. Be off to Judah, where you came from. Your friends there will be only too glad to hear your dark and bitter words about Israel; they will pay you well for declaring that the throne of Israel will be drenched in blood, and our people swept into exile. But you are never again to come to Israel with messages of that kind,—least of all here, to Bethel: for this is the king's own sanctuary. Begone! " The priest's suggestion that Amos should " eat bread " in Judah is a base insinuation that he was paid, as in some form or other the ordinary prophet seems to have been, for the word he had uttered. But the great prophets were not paid, except with in difference and scorn, with persecution and sometimes with death. There is something infinitely pathetic in this clash of prophet and priest. The bravest and truest voice in Israel had spoken, and the priest attempted to stifle it. He said to the prophet, " Prophesy not" (cf. ii. 12). The priest is bound by his political connections: the prophet is free, bound by nothing but his obligation to declare the truth. Amaziah, his eyes blinded by the glitter of his rites and ceremonies, does not know a true prophet when he sees him; he cannot distinguish between Amos and a common agitator. How small the priest, how great the prophet! One of the greatest men in history stands before the priest, and the priest says to him, Begone.

Then Amos rises up like a giant, and says to Amaziah, " No prophet I, nor son of prophet I, but a shepherd, and a dresser of sycomore trees; and Jehovah took me from behind the flock and said, Go and prophesy to My people Israel. No priest can overawe this man. In all his native simplicity he faces the greatest Churchman of his day, without flinching and without fear. God is for him, and he cares not though priests and princes and people be against him. He repudiates with dignity the insinuation that he is a professional prophet, preaching as he is paid and expected to preach. Of course he is a prophet, and he is not ashamed to call himself a prophet—in the deeper sense of the word. The voice of the Lord had spoken to his inmost soul, and said, " Go and prophesy"; he is one of those who stand within the secret of the Lord, who does nothing in history without revealing that secret to His servants the prophets (iii. 7). But when he affirms that he is no " prophet's son," he is simply, in Hebrew way, disclaiming all connection with the professionals. He is not bound by their traditions or conventions or methods or aims. He is not their man, speaking as the " college " or guild prescribes; he is his own man and God's man. He preaches because he must. He is a prophet because he cannot help it. He is borne on by an irresistible impulse to utter the word which, for all he knows, may cost him his life. But when the lion roars, who can suppress his fear? and when the Lord speaks, who can help prophesying? (iii. 8). That is his defence. He has received his commission from God Almighty, he has been " licensed " by none other than the Lord Himself to preach his terrible gospel.

He does not tell us as much as we should like to know as to how the call came to him. On the solitudes of Tekoa he had long been brooding over the wickedness and folly of the people, till one day a voice—it was the voice of God—whispered to his heart that he was the man whom God needed and must send to warn them of the coming disaster, which could only be turned by repentance and obedience and regard for the downtrodden. Instantly the shepherd was transformed into a prophet: how, we shall never completely know. In those great moments of the soul there must always be a mystery, which we cannot altogether penetrate: the veil is lifted, so far as it is lifted at all, in the simple words, "Jehovah took me from behind the flock, and said, Go and prophesy." But such an experience, mysterious though it be, is to the man who passes through it the most real thing in all the world. Amos would as soon have dreamt of doubting his own existence as of doubting his call. The Lord had said, Go, and he went, because he had heard Him and was possessed by Him, and could not help himself.

Amos and Amaziah, as they face each other, incarnate the everlasting opposition between the two great types of religion—the prophetic and the priestly. Amaziah in his resplendent sacerdotal robes, Amos in his simple shepherd dress: Amaziah, the representative and the exponent of an ancient tradition; Amos, respecting the past (ii. 9, 10), but conscious of being the servant of a living God, whose voice spoke as plainly in the present as ever it did in the past: Amaziah, bound by churchly conventions, by priestly traditions and usages, by political affiliations, as a servant of the king; Amos, standing apart, free from the dictation and the obligations of a professional order, ready to speak his mighty word untrammelled, as and when the Spirit moved him: Amaziah the servant of the government, Amos the servant of God and of the Truth: Amaziah the guardian of rites and ceremonies, the champion of the external in religion; Amos the apostle of a religion whose most essential demand was that justice should run through society like a river. It is, in its extreme form, the contrast between a religion of externals and a religion of the heart, between ceremony and morality, between display and reality, between tradition and progress, between bondage and liberty, between the God who in ancient times has expressed Himself once for all, and the living God of To-day and To-morrow:—that is the conflict incarnate in the persons of Amos and Amaziah. Doubtless the contrast can be drawn too sharply: there are men—even in the Bible—who have affiliations with both types. But it is a very real contrast, it has run through the whole history of religion, and, as we look at the opposing types, and consider what is meant by pure religion and undefiled before our God and Father, we know to whom our sympathies run out. We cannot forget that Jesus of Nazareth was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, and how it was the chief priests who delivered Him up to be condemned to death, and crucified (Luke xxiv. 19, 20).

Conscious, then, of being directly commissioned by God Almighty, and refusing to be browbeaten by the courtier priest, he repeats in his ears, in grave and solemn words and with the utmost deliberation, his former announcement of Israel's fate, this time, however, pointing the terrors of his threat by a personal allusion to the fate of Amaziah himself, his wife, his sons, and his daughters. There is a fine contrast here between what Amaziah says to Amos and what God has said to him: for the former, the prophet cares nothing at all. "You say, 'Don t prophesy any more against Israel: but this is what Jehovah says: 'The enemy will come and drag your wife away to dishonour, and they will dip their swords in the blood of your children: they will seize your land and apportion it as they please: and you—yes, you shall die in the unclean land of Assyria; and—however little you may think it, how ever much you may deny it—Israel shall assuredly be swept into exile far from her own land.

Could there be greater courage than this? Such a speech was bound to render the speaker not only unpopular, but odious. He must have incurred by it the hostility of the king, the priests, and the people the king whose dynasty he had said would go down in blood, the priests whose sanctuaries he had doomed to destruction, the people for whom he had prophesied exile. God was his friend, but he cannot have had many human friends after an utterance like that; and he left the festival at Bethel, at once vanquished and victor.