This blog follows the daily bible readings of the Catholic Church

Reading 1, Amos 8:4-6, 9-12

4 Listen to this, you who crush the needy and reduce the oppressed to nothing,

"we can buy the poor for the price of our sandals"

5 you who say, ‘When will New Moon be over so that we can sell our corn, and Sabbath, so that we can market our wheat? Then, we can make the bushel-measure smaller and the shekel-weight bigger, by fraudulently tampering with the scales. 6 We can buy up the weak for silver and the poor for a pair of sandals, and even get a price for the sweepings of the wheat.’

9 ‘On that Day- declares the Lord God- I shall make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth in broad daylight. 10 I shall turn your festivals into mourning and all your singing into lamentation; I shall make you all wear sacking round your waists and have all your heads shaved. I shall make it like the mourning for an only child, and it will end like the bitterest of days. 11 ‘The days are coming- declares the Lord – when I shall send a famine on the country, not hunger for food, not thirst for water, but famine for hearing the Lord’s word. 12 People will stagger from sea to sea, will wander from the north to the east, searching for Yahweh’s word, but will not find it.

A medical report out today in the U.K shows that the life expectation of richer people here is ten years longer than that of the poorer. Measures introduced in the recent budget will bear more heavily on the poor that the rich. We are talking here about relative, not absolute poverty. It is not absolute lack of the means of life which causes the difference in life expectancy but lack of justice, the experience that you are the bottom of the heap, disregarded and disposable. The only way to deal with the many problems of poverty is a more equal society.

Amos spoke in God’s name against the injustice of his own society. He spoke “The Word of the Lord.” I bet there were plenty comfy preachers talking about righteousness and whether eating rock-badgers was more unclean than having sex during menstruation; or if it was cool to accompany Psalm 55 with a drum-beat; but they ignored the word of the Lord about justice.

Amos says that they’re so used to ignoring God’s word, that when they look for it, they won’t be able to find it, it’ll be like a word-famine. Time we started listening…..

Gospel, Mt 9:9-13

9 As Jesus was walking on from there he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax office, and he said to him, ‘Follow me.’ And he got up and followed him. 10 Now while he was at table in the house it happened that a number of tax collectors and sinners came to sit at the table with Jesus and his disciples. 11 When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, ‘Why does your master eat with tax collectors and sinners?’ 12 When he heard this he replied, ‘It is not the healthy who need the doctor, but the sick. 13 Go and learn the meaning of the words: Mercy is what pleases me, not sacrifice. And indeed I came to call not the upright, but sinners.”

Who were these tax-collectors and sinners? The tax-collectors were the mobsters who farmed taxes for the

a semi -criminal underclass whom Jesus cared for

hated  foreign invaders; the sinners were those who didn’t care about the religious Law or who couldn’t afford to. Together they constituted a semi-criminal underclass in Jewish society, with the mobsters preying on the “sinners.” We would call them scruff, the feckless people who mess up heir lives yet keep breeding. Jesus, notoriously, cared for them, and called them to be disciples. Notice: he didn’t call them to repent (in our meaning of the word), but rather to change altogether, and become agents of God’s kingdom. He quotes Hosea 6:6 about God wanting mercy and not sacrifice, but maybe gives it a new interpretation. For Hosea sacrifice means the ritual killing of animals; for Jesus it may mean the casual consignment of human lives to the waste tip. Jesus is the “saviour” that is, the one who rescues us from the sin-bin of injustice and condemnation.