If we put Amos’ critique in more contemporary language, the “trampling” and “levies of grain” decried in 5:11 are the twin burdens of rents and fees, which often led to cycles of impoverishment and debt slavery. The lifestyles of the rich are financed by extracting from the poor.
Divine Wisdom calls. It is publicly accessible. We may not recognize the voice because we might not be listening for it. But it is there beckoning to us.
The political theology emerging from this narrative calls for a redefinition of authority and leadership. It emphasises qualities like service, compassion, and the capacity to heal and liberate over traditional markers of power like wealth, status, or lineage.
Any power we might feel we gain through the power over dynamic is illusory and fleeting, and will always eventually result in our death/defeat, with our illusions of power lying dead around us.
The question I would like to pose this week is whether a theophany of the kind that we find in Job 38 would satisfy people—the aggrieved, the hurting, the oppressed, the battered—as a response to political tragedy.
Wisdom’s words of judgement are not for others; they are for us. Wisdom has called and we have refused. She has stretched out her hand, and we have not heeded.
Nowadays, people often measure the authenticity of religious practice by how much it flies in the face of broader society. In Deuteronomy, Moses offers a different vision for how religion might relate to the public realm.
I believe the recognition that wisdom and love go hand in hand cannot simply be abstracted as some general and vague love for the world and its persons. It is, in fact, a general and abstract love that often becomes complicit in ways of death.
Psalm 1 presents the reader with two, mutually exclusive categories of human existence: righteousness and wickedness. However, experience tells us that to be human is far more complex. Rather than simply embracing the psalm’s presentation of life, we might enter a dialogue instead, one wherein we consider what it might mean to be formed by attending to others rather than reifying our existing in-groups.
Wisdom is available to the entirety of creation, regardless of gender, class, race, or any boundary established by humanity.