Nobody Listens
Next, a basket of summer fruit. In the Hebrew it is a play on words with sound suggesting sense. The basic letters are QZ. Pronounce it one way, you get ‘summer fruit’. Pronounce it another and it means ‘end’. Amos has obviously not recovered from his loss of hope and we can well attribute his mood to the fact that whatever he says, and however many times, nobody seems to listen. Most readers will know how he felt.
Worse still, not only have they failed to respond to Amos, they have also failed miserably to learn from their own experience. They are still trampling on the poor with offences that have an incredibly modern ring about them. They are so keen to get back to making money they can’t wait for the end of the religious festivals. Religion must never get in the way of business. They prefer to adjust sizes, weights and measures so as to sell less, adjust exchange rates and increase prices. With no Standards Officer, scales can easily be rigged, and often were. With computers, they could have confused people even more, with frequent and rapid changes of price, contents, discounts and special offers. Unemployment figures and league tables could have been manipulated to their own advantage. Sawdust could have been turned into lucrative chipboard.
Today all the old fears — inflation, interest rates, exchange rates and a stop-go economy — are still there. Too many people still feel threatened and ‘Amos’ is still hardly the flavour of the month with the profiteers. But must some people be knocked from pillar to post yet again? Maybe one day they will wake up and rebel, but unless it is soon it may be too late.
Of course today is not exactly like yesterday. Some things have changed. The details may be slightly different. Once it was a shortage of food. People resorted to violence because they had nothing to eat. The country had no resources. But then even when there are resources, they can still be quickly grabbed by a few who will always find ways of exploiting others for their own benefit unless they are controlled. For Amos, this is not a famine of wheat and bread. It is a famine of truth and justice; that is, the Word.