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Amos, the 8th century prophet from whom our first lesson today is taken, has been called “the prophet of God’s justice.” He condemns the terrible injustice found in the northern kingdom of Israel and connects this injustice to a society bent on wealth and prosperity, a society not unlike our own.

They sell the just person for money and the poor for a pair of shoes
and trample the heads of the impoverished into the ground.
2:6-7

Amos condemns the selfish luxury of the women of the nobility and lashes out at the merchants who use false weights to cheat the people.

Our second lesson, “The Woman Caught in Adultery” (John 7:53-8:11), has to do with another kind of sin, namely, sexual sin. Archbishop Robin Eames, the author of the Windsor Report, refers to “the Anglican obsession with sexuality.” Ought not the church founded by Henry VIII to have learned by this time that it had better stay out of the bedroom!

Jesus challenged the woman’s accusers: “Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone” (v. 7). When no one takes up the challenge, he says to the woman, “Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more” (v. 11).

It has often been pointed out in connection with the bitter controversy over homosexuality which is presently dividing our communion that there is not a single saying of Jesus which is concerned with this issue, whereas there are many sayings concerned with social justice, the issue who so exercised the prophet Amos.

In a paper I wrote some years ago on “Biblical Imagery and the Experience of Evil” I noted that although the Bible says a great deal about sin, it does not have a coherent doctrine of sin. Its message does not include an unambiguous identification of evil; rather, it reflects the shifting experience of evil throughout Biblical history.

It is important to keep in mind the primacy of imagery when we interpret the contemporary experience of evil. Certain archaic images of sin can help us interpret this experience: the connection in the Hebrew Bible between sin and ritual uncleanness, contracted through normal biological processes such as menstruation or seminal ejaculation, or through diseases such as leprosy, corresponds to our experience of being “stained” by our complicity in the oppression brought about through the unjust structures of society. The doctrinal of original sin, which poses an insoluble problem for the rational mind and which my teacher Avery Dulles declared to be “closed for repairs,” helps us realize that evil includes not only what we do but also what we undergo, apart from any act of our own will.

The experience of evil can be “explained” in terms of quite different theologies, but, in the words of Gabriel Marcel:

God did not send his Son into the world to remove suffering,
or even to explain it.
He sent his Son to fill our suffering with his divine presence.

Our task is to bring the rich heritage of Biblical imagery to bear on our world’s experience of evil, so that all men and women may perceive the divine love at work in our suffering world and share in the agony and the ecstasy of redemption.

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