Faith Formation: Micah - Justice, Kindness and humility

Hear, you peoples, all of you; listen, O earth, and all that is in it, and let the LORD be a witness against you, the LORD from his holy temple.

For the LORD is coming out of his place and will come down and tread upon the high places of the earth.

Then the mountains will melt under him, and the valleys will burst open like wax near fire, like waters poured down a slope.

All this is for the transgression of Jacob and for the sin of the house of Israel.

What is the transgression of Jacob? Is it not Samaria? And what is the high place of Judah? Is it not Jerusalem?

Therefore I will make Samaria a heap in the open country, a place for planting vineyards.

I will pour down her stones into the valley and uncover her foundations.

All her images shall be beaten to pieces, all her wages shall be burned with fire, and all her idols I will lay waste; for as the wages of a prostitute she gathered them, and as the wages of a prostitute they shall again be used.

Micah 1:2-7

The prophets were clever about bringing their accusations to Israel and Judah. By one of their tricks they brought the people to righteous indignation against their enemies and then slammed the hammer down on their real target, the people of God. Micah employed this tool in these opening words .

Micah called all peoples to hear God's witness against them. In the hearts and minds of his audience in Jerusalem, all people of the earth might have been heard as "our enemies," them, particularly the nations that harassed Judah's borders and besieged their cities. They might imagine that God's coming with devastating power that melted mountains and made valleys fill up with the landslides was in defense of Israel against these foreign invasions. Even as Micah began to shift and identify the accused in this trial scene, he first mentioned Samaria. "What is the transgression of Jacob? Is it not Samaria?" At first the leadership in Jerusalem might have responded, "Yes, Samaria, and their kings who 'did what was evil in the sight of the LORD.' Who rebelled against Jerusalem and the Temple. Who set up the high places to sacrifice to idols and other gods. Yes, the sin of Jacob is Samaria. Let God's wrath melt the mountains up north and besiege them with wrath."

But then Micah said, "And what is the high place of Judah? Is it not Jerusalem?" Micah went on to put the focus back on Samaria, but he had already raised the accusation that Jerusalem might not be as righteous and pure as it wanted to think of itself. Might the sins of Samaria of making images and idols, the sins of unfaithfulness, also apply to an unfaithfulness in Jerusalem? Micah's mention of Jerusalem did not go unnoticed by the king, prophets or priests of the capital and Temple city. Micah used this trick of shifting the focus to shift the conversation, raise the question and shock his opponents. Amos, before the time of Micah, used this trick more explicitly to speak against the Israel, the northern Kingdom led by King Jeroboam. His sayings opened with a series of indictments, "For the three transgressions of Damascus ... Gaza ... Tyre ... Edom ... the Ammonites ... Moab ...." These were Judah's neighbors and enemies. Amos approached the end of this series by speaking of "three transgressions of Judah." Israel had no great love for Judah, the southern kingdom, or Jerusalem and its leadership, so OK. But then he let the hammer fall. "For three transgressions of Israel..." The rest of Amos called Israel to account for unfaithfulness. Micah brought up Samaria's unfaithfulness and idolatry only this once. For the rest of his writing he focused on the sins of Judah and Jerusalem, on issues of injustice, how the vulnerable were treated by the elite of the capital.

The language of God's coming was earth shattering. Mountains torn down, and particularly the Mount of Samaria, the northern capital becoming a heap of rubble down to its foundations. The means of Samaria's destruction was not the direct cosmic coming of God raining fire down from heaven, but rather God's employment of Sargon and Assyria to besiege and end the rule of Israel's sovereigns. Sargon and Assyria did not raze the capital of Samaria physically, but utterly destroyed it politically. The time came during Micah's prophesying that Israel was no more.

The last lines of this oracle are again graphic and metaphorical. "... as the wages of a prostitute she gathered them, and as the wages of a prostitute they shall be used." Capital cities were often referred to with feminine pronouns. The "prostitute she" was Samaria's capital where the kings dwelt and where they turned to the gods of the nations. Their prostitution was a matter of unfaithfulness to God, rather than a sexual sin. While we read words like "prostitute" and "adultery" in terms of illicit sex, they were metaphors for unfaithfulness between the people of God and their husband, the LORD. To violate the first commandment, "You shall have no other gods," was an act of adultery, unfaithfulness. The reason for doing so, and so "the wages of a prostitute" seems to have referred to selling oneself to another god or another nation to receive a gain or a benefit greater than the one received from being faithful. Samaria believed and practiced its politics and economics in relation to its faith, trusting that more powerful and prosperous nations who worshipped other gods were worth following and emulating. The lure of power and wealth led to unfaithfulness and idolatry with tragic consequences.

Do Justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly with God.

Pastor Tim Bauer