Dry by June

I just learned that most of the watercourses in Israel are not rivers but wadis—beds cut by water that is only there part of the year. In the winter rains a wadi can run hard enough to move a car; by early summer the same bed is white stone and dust, and a traveller standing in it would never guess water had been there. So when Amos asks for righteousness "like an ever-flowing stream" (Amos 5:24), the Hebrew under it is nachal ethan—a wadi that never quits. The month just before the autumn rains was called Ethanim (1 Kings 8:2)—the month of the perennial streams, because then they were the only ones still running.¹ What Amos asks for, then, is not a downpour. It is a bed that still has water in it in June—justice that keeps running after the season has stopped supplying it.

The demand comes at the end of a refusal. God does not say the worship was sloppy; he says he hates it: "I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies" (Amos 5:21). He lists them: burnt offerings, grain offerings, "the peace offerings of your fattened animals," "the melody of your harps." The liturgy was correct, the animals were the good ones, the music was in tune. This is not a rebuke of bad worship; it is the refusal of excellent worship, brought by people who "sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals" (Amos 2:6).

Justice is not one more item to add after the harps. But neither is the cure to keep the justice and drop the feast; Amos does not offer that trade, and he has not yet said what would make either of them acceptable. The trade tempts us anyway, because from where we stand it looks as though it works. Plenty of people who left church years ago are still feeding the hungry when the season turns hard, and plenty of us who have never missed a Sunday have quietly stopped; people who want nothing to do with God often outlast us at the very work he asked for. But the ground is no wetter on that side. A justice built on being the decent one has to keep being paid — in gratitude, in results we can see, in the reflection of ourselves the work sends back — and when the need turns thankless the supply stops. That bed is fed by rain too. So the question underneath Amos is not whether we mean it. It is what feeds the bed once the rains have stopped and the work has begun to cost.

Put that question to ourselves and it does what the law always does: it takes our measure, and we come up wanting. Our justice is seasonal. It runs hard while the rains last—when the need has a face, when it costs nothing we actually wanted—and by June the bed is dry stone. And our worship runs on the same rains. The fattened animals and the seasonal charity are offerings to one idol; the reason for the songs and the reason for the giving turn out to be the same, and it is us. Worse—we sing loudest when the bed is driest, because the feast is where we go to cover the stones. That is what God will not look upon: not a liturgy done badly but a veil, worship brought as payment, which is why the hands that carry the offering can be the same hands that sold a man for a pair of sandals.

None of this is cured by resolving to do better. We are not short of good intentions; we are short of a spring.

The demand is not lowered. But there is one life in which the bed never went dry, and Scripture describes it in these very terms. Isaiah's Servant carries the setting-right of things into the world without running thin: "He will not grow faint or be discouraged till he has established justice in the earth" (Isaiah 42:4). And that man was handed over to a court that had none—tried at night, given up by a judge who said in the same hour, "I find no guilt in him" (John 19:4, 6). He took the verdict that was ours and was drained to the last; and he is alive, so the spring did not stop at the grave, and the worship God would not accept from us he now receives from us in him (Hebrews 13:15). So there is a feast God accepts after all — the same harps, the same songs, sung now by people with nothing left to settle, offered as thanks rather than as payment.

And a stream runs all year only because it is fed from somewhere that does not stop—which is what Jesus promises: "out of his heart will flow rivers of living water" (John 7:38). He does not ask the wadi to become its own spring. He does ask it to run in June. The bed is ours; the spring is his, and it reaches dry ground as a gift long before it is ever a work. If anything still runs in us in June, it rises from a heart that did not grow faint. Our justice has nothing left to earn — and a justice with nothing to earn can afford to be seen. It can stand with the man sold for a pair of sandals, in the gate where he was sold, at whatever it costs, and it does not need anyone to notice who is standing there.