From Our Archives

Dan Clendenin, Growing Strong By Destroying Others (2007), Amos: From Personal Piety to Social Justice (2010), Choosing the Better Part (2013); Debie Thomas "Only One Thing" (2019).

Whenever I read the ancient prophet Amos, I'm reminded of the modern prophet Daniel Berrigan. Both were troublers of the conscience who protested against national delusions. Both of them exemplify how Biblical "prophecy" is more about forth-telling God's word to contemporary society than about fore-telling our future in heaven.

When Berrigan died on April 30, 2016 at the age of ninety-four, the church lost a singular witness to the gospel.  His niece Frida was with him when he died, and observed that Berrigan owned almost nothing — he still wore the same black shirt that he did at her wedding fifteen years earlier.

"Deeds, not things, made Father Berrigan one of the best-known Roman Catholic priests of the 20th century," observed Jim Dwyer in his NYT obituary.  "He departed indifferently penniless from a world that often seems to keep score in gilded ink."

Berrigan was a Jesuit priest, poet (15 volumes), playwright, author of over fifty books, university professor, and peace activist. He spent a long life celebrating the good news of Jesus rather than the bad news of caesar.   

Then there is Amos, who wrote 2,800 years ago, but who reads like today's newspaper. He lived during the reign of king Jeroboam II, who forged a political dynasty characterized by territorial expansion, aggressive militarism, and unprecedented national prosperity. The citizens of his day took pride in their misguided religiosity, their history as God's elect people, their military conquests, their economic affluence, and their political security.

Amos, column painting, Serbian monastery, 14th century.

Amos preached from the unpatriotic fringe. He was blue collar rather than blue blooded. He was a farmer from little Tekoa, about twelve miles southeast of Jerusalem and five miles south of Bethlehem. In today's parlance, we would call him a layman.

The cultured elites despised Amos as a redneck. He was also an unwelcome outsider. Born in the southern kingdom of Judah, God called him to thunder a prophetic word to the northern kingdom of Israel: "Will not the land tremble?" (8:8).

Amos delivered a withering cultural critique.  He describes how the rich trampled the poor. He says the affluent flaunted their expensive lotions, elaborate music, and vacation homes with beds of inlaid ivory. Fathers and sons abused the same temple prostitute. Corrupt judges sold justice to the highest bidder, predatory lenders exploited vulnerable families.  And then religious leaders pronounced God's blessing on it all.

Does this not sound strangely familiar?

With Israel at the peak of its power, Amos preached a counter-intuitive and culturally subversive message. To the country's disbelief, he said that Israel was just like the pagan nations with their war crimes. Damascus "threshed Gilead with sledges of iron teeth." Gaza "took captive whole communities and sold them to Edom." Tyre sold their prisoners of war into slavery and flaunted international treaties. Edom "stifled all compassion" and pursued its enemies with "unchecked rage." Ammon "ripped open the pregnant women of Gilead in order to extend his borders." Moab "burned, as if to lime, the bones of Edom's king."

Amos's audience would have smugly cheered and jeered at his denunciation of these atrocities — mutilation, scorched earth campaigns, slavery, depopulation, ethnic cleansing, global treachery, torture, and the flagrant degradation of your victims. But he insisted that the elect Israel was no different than their pagan enemies. Before God they were equals.

Amos with shepherd's staff and horn, 12th century Park Abbey Bible.

Amos spoke to the entire nation, but especially to its leaders — priests, judges, financiers, and state bureaucrats, "the notable men of the foremost nation" (6:1). In this week's reading he compared Israel to a basket of rotten fruit (8:1).

I doubt that many people listened to Amos. Who wants to hear such a negative message? In fact, Amaziah the priest defended Jeroboam the king, and ran Amos out of town — a classic example of the religious legitimation of the cultural status quo. And does that not also sound familiar?

But Amos persevered.  He announced the end of Israel's empire — an end that came swiftly. In 725 BC the Assyrian king Shalmaneser occupied Israel for three years, crushed the opposition holdouts, and then deported its population (2 Kings 17). In twenty-five short years Israel went from being a regional power under Jeroboam to a failed federation under Shalmaneser.

Amidst the church's checkered history in its relationship to power, politics, privilege, and wealth,  Berrigan was a modern day Amos.

In 1968, he and eight other activists stole 378 draft files of men who were about to be sent to Vietnam, dumped them into two garbage cans, poured homemade napalm on them, and burned them in the parking lot of the Catonsville, Maryland, draft board.

As the photographers clicked away, Berrigan spoke: "Apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children… our hearts give us no rest for thinking of the Land of Burning Children."

Amos preaching, 13th-century Prayerbook of Elizabeth of York.

In 1980, he trespassed into General Electric's nuclear missile plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, poured blood on some warhead nose cones, then hammered away — enacting the prophecy of Isaiah 2:4 about beating weapons of war into plowshares of peace.

For these and similar activities, he and his brother Philip spent time on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list, not to mention significant time in prison.

Berrigan bore witness on a broad range of issues — racism (he marched in Selma), nuclear arms (he founded the Plowshares Movement), the death penalty, and most famously Vietnam (partnering with the likes of Howard Zinn and Thomas Merton).  He also lamented what he called "the abortion mills."

In her memoir Things Seen and Unseen, Nora Gallagher recalls meeting Berrigan in the spring of 1986. When she asked him how many times he had been jailed for the gospel, he responded, "Apparently, not enough." For his 80th birthday he remarked, “The day after I’m embalmed, that’s when I’ll give it up.”

But as with Amos, being a prophet wasn't easy.  Jim O'Grady once asked Berrigan "if it was tiring to constantly work on the fringes — of the Catholic church, of American politics, of polite discourse. He referred me to his old friend Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker, a volunteer community devoted to pacifism and serving the poor. 'She’s always thought of herself and her work as residing at the center of the Gospels,' Berrigan said. 'It was up to everyone else to move toward her.'" For Berrigan, living at the center of the gospel marginalized you to the fringes of culture.

Berrigan was also a realist.  I was interested to read in his May 2 NYT obituary by Daniel Lewis about his deep discouragements.

Lewis writes, "While he was known for his wry wit, there was a darkness in much of what Father Berrigan wrote and said, the burden of which was that one had to keep trying to do the right thing regardless of the near certainty that it would make no difference. In the withering of the pacifist movement and the country’s general support for the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, he saw proof that it was folly to expect lasting results."

“This is the worst time of my long life,” Berrigan said in an interview with The Nation in 2008. “I have never had such meager expectations of the system.” What made it bearable, he wrote elsewhere, was a disciplined, implicitly difficult belief in God as the key to sanity and survival.

Amos, Cologne Cathedral, 12th century.

Marginalization, realism, futility, and discouragement were Berrigan's penultimate words, but they were not his final word. 

In his book No Gods But One (2009), a chapter-and-verse study of Deuteronomy, he wrote: "Nor is the fall the final judgment, as though we were bereft of all hope. No, there has occurred an intervention of God, for healing and reconciliation. An intervention named Jesus." At the end of that book he calls us to "behave as though the truth were true."

Similarly, in his meditation on 1–2 Kings, The Kings and Their Gods (2008), he leaves us with this prophetic last word on his final page:

"One must urge (to his own soul first) a firm rebutting midrash; bring Christ to bear. Read the gospel closely, obediently. Welcome no enticements, no other claims on conscience. Mourn the preachers and priests whose silence and collusion signal plain revolt against the gospel. Enter the maelstrom, the wilderness; flee the claim that would possess your soul. Earn the blessing; pay up. Blessed — and lonely and powerless and intent on the Master — and, if must be, despised, scorned, locked up — blessed are the makers of peace."

Weekly Prayer 

Daniel Berrigan (1921-2016)

A Prayer to the Blessed Trinity

I'm locked into the sins of General Motors
My guts are in revolt at the culinary equivocations of General Foods
Hang over me like an evil shekinah, the missiles of General Electric.
Now we shall go from the Generals to the Particulars.
Father, Son, Holy Ghost
Let me shake your right hands in the above mentioned order
Unmoved Motor, Food for Thought, Electric One.
I like you better than your earthly idols.
You seem honest and clear-minded and reasonably resolved
To make good on your promise.
Please: owe it to yourselves not less than to us,
Warn your people: beware of adulterations.

From Daniel Berrigan, And the Risen Bread; Selected Poems, 1957–1997 (1998).

Dan Clendenin: dan@journeywithjesus.net

Image credits: (1–4) Bibelwissenschaft.de.