The Plumb Line

And the LORD said to me, “Amos, what do you see?” And I said, “A plumb line.” Then the Lord said, “See, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel; I will never again pass them by; the high places of Isaac shall be made desolate, and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste, and I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword” [Amos 7:8-9].¹

As the prophet, Amos, records his words sometime between 785-745 BCE, the house of Israel has a significant problem; it has broadly lost its spiritual connection with Yahweh. You see, Israel had been living in what my close friend, Luke Bell, calls “the horizontal.” The people of Israel had been concentrating on their businesses, their civic responsibilities, and delights—their Rotary, Optimist, and Civilian clubs—their standing in the community. They had been active in local politics. They gave to the synagogue when their gifts—carefully measured—might be noticed. They had been careful planners. They had framed their attention on the horizon but rarely, if ever, into the heavens.

To be sure, prophets came along from time to time, telling Israel that it faced military defeat if it didn’t return to Yahweh, but Israel had always managed, somehow, to pull the proverbial rabbit from the hat. Disaster had been averted and many in Israel had begun to think that it had been so averted because of their concentration on the horizontal.

Alas, by the time of Amos, Yahweh has had enough. And so he tells his prophet, Amos (who is no priest, but rather a mere herdsman and trimmer of sycamore trees) to tell the house of Israel that it will be destroyed. In the past, Yahweh has ignored the people’s transgressions, but those times are over. Yahweh is going vertical, quite literally, on the house of Israel. In a conversation with Amos, Yahweh asks Amos, “what do you see?”

Amos responds that he sees what appears to be a plumb line. As most of you know, a plumb line is used to determine the vertical on an upright surface. Yahweh says, Amos, you’re correct. Yahweh continues that he is setting the plumb line in the midst of the people. They want to be judged according to the horizontal, but that isn’t Yahweh’s manner. The Almighty judges Israel (and anyone else, by the way) only on the vertical. Yahweh will “never again pass by them.” That’s OT talk for, “I will ignore Israel and its transgressions no more. You folks are toast. Now, Amos, go give the people of Israel the good news!”

Wow! That’s not the Yahweh most of us anticipate. That’s certainly not the Yahweh many of us want. We want to take our annual stewardship pledges—meagre as they often are—place them on the altar and pray for Yahweh’s blessing. We want to fawn over our recent high school graduates, wish them every success in the goals that they’ve sketched out for the future, and pray to Yahweh that those goals be achieved. On a more serious note, we say, “God, save us from our sin.” That the God we profess to worship might interrupt those horizontal prayers with talk about “the vertical” isn’t something that many of us have ever contemplated. Where’s the Grace in that? We’re not perfect, but we’re not as bad as those other people.

Yahweh becomes a little like some of the law school professors I had four and one-half decades ago, who taught utilizing the Socratic method. In those classes, it was usually better to remain invisible. When the professor stopped what he was doing and concentrated on you, it wasn’t necessarily good news. You often turned out to be less than half as smart as you thought you were. Similarly, now that Israel has Yahweh’s attention, is it good news or bad? The people of Israel hadn’t anticipated that their deity—so tolerant of their failures for so long—would use vertical, rather than horizontal, standards.

In this week’s Gospel reading [Luke 10:25-37], Jesus is thinking vertically in a mostly horizontal world. As we saw in the Gospel lesson two weeks ago, Jesus has set his face to go to Jerusalem [Luke 9:51]. That’s where He will be betrayed and arrested. That’s where He will be tried before Pilate and later beaten and scorned. That’s where He will die on a cross. Crosses are pretty vertical!

As he walks along the Jerusalem road, an “expert in the law stood up to test Jesus” [Luke 10:25a]. Referring to our Lord as “Teacher,” the expert asks, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

The question is presumptuous on multiple levels. It presumes that eternal life with God is owed to him if he steps through the correct hoops. The expert is self-assured that he is one of the chosen few; it’s just a matter of what sort of transactional fee is involved. It’s a question many ask today. Salvation, like every commodity, should be there for the purchase, right? Jesus is waiting for us to make up our minds about our future, right? He’ll save us from our horizontal world and sin; it’s His job, right? When it comes to forgiveness, there are never any “supply chain” issues, right?

Wrong! Alas, Jesus’ response is to drop a plumb line, to offer us a lesson in verticality. He’s done this before. You ask him a simple question and you get a parable—a story that ties you in knots. The expert in the law wants bullet points, three ways to the Kingdom of God, six keys to a vibrant church, four suggestions for a vibrant marriage. What he gets is a plumb line!

Jesus gives the expert a parable, one that is rather straight-forward. A man is attacked by robbers. He’s beaten and stripped, left for dead in the ditch beside the road “going down from Jerusalem” [the opposite direction in which Jesus is walking toward the Cross]. Separately, a priest and a Levite pass the victim by without stopping. Technically speaking, only the priest must avoid a dead man tossed in a ditch—you won’t know he’s dead unless you turn him over, and once you touch him, if he’s dead, the damage is done. There is no Jewish prohibition against the Levite’s touching the dead [see commentary on this point in The Jewish Annotated New Testament, p. 136].

You see, it isn’t so much that the priest and the Levite can’t touch/help the victim in the ditch; they just don’t want to help him. Initially, Jesus has named two of three basic categories of Jews in his parable, i.e., priests who descend from Aaron, and Levites, descended from Levi—Aaron’s ancestor. The expert and/or the listeners nearby might reasonably expect Jesus to describe the third person who comes along the path as an “Israelite,” a descendant from the children of Jacob, other than Levi. This would close the loop of available persons and make for a tidy story. Only Jesus isn’t into the tidy. The horizontal is tidy; the vertical is disruptive. Here’s where the twist in Jesus’ parable surfaces. Jesus almost always includes an unexpected twist.

The twist: Instead of an Israelite, the third person to encounter the poor, naked, violated man in the ditch is a Samaritan, one of the true enemies of all Israelites. And whereas, the man in the ditch should now be doomed—his true enemy has appeared—instead he’s saved! The lowly Samaritan stoops to help, to bind up the man’s wounds, to carry the man (on the Samaritan’s own animal) to an inn, where the Samaritan gives his own money to care for the man, along with a promise to stand for any additional expenses that might come due.

With his twist, Jesus shows us that all too often those who have been trained to help, those who have been educated to respond to need, fail to do so. And better or worse, depending upon one’s viewpoint, those whom we look down upon, those we scorn as being less erudite, less caring, less giving than us turn out to be the souls who reach out to their neighbor.

Jesus’ little parable thus operates as a plumb line, a reminder that we who profess to follow Christ will find ourselves judged by His standards of verticality. How does one deal with a Savior who not only is present for us as Emmanuel—God with us—but who also holds us to a standard that exceeds that which we would set for ourselves?

There is a lot of talk these days about choice, about the autonomy that one should have over one’s own body. Fair enough. That sort of autonomy is exactly the concern of the priest and the Levite in Jesus’ parable. It isn’t the concern of the Samaritan. You see, if the priest and the Levite are forced to do what they don’t want to do—to touch the helpless one at the edge of their sight—they may be compromised. Definitely, they will be inconvenienced. They will have to alter their schedules and their plans. There might also be heavy financial implications if they stop.

In the parable, the priest and the Levite aren’t told what to do with their bodies. The choice is theirs. After all, they’re thinking horizontally. Yet Jesus shows them that there is a higher/better standard—the standard of Yahweh’s plumb line. It’s the standard that is freely followed by the Samaritan whom they despise.

Through the herdsman, Amos, Yahweh told His people that He would never again pass them by. Was that assurance good news or bad?

Whom do we pass by? Does the searing heat from Yahweh’s plumb line eat into us, as members of the mainline Protestant church, when we profess to care for the helpless, the ignored, the unwanted strangers of the world, and then turn our backs on those in that category who are not-yet-born?

1. Most OT scholars agree that the book of Amos is the earliest of the prophetic books. As such, Amos marks the beginning of an important time within Israel’s religion. Amos is the first of a line who prophesy what amounts to an end to Yahweh’s people based upon their disobedience. That end will come in Israel’s exile. Scholars say Amos, therefore, is a turning point in Israel’s history and religion. The NT quotes Amos but twice [Acts 7:42-43 and Acts 15-16-17]. Many of the other prophets’ writings are filled with Yahweh’s promises. Not so with Amos. The central point of the book—“The end has come upon my people of Israel” [8:2 NRSV]—is far from the soothing sort of text that most congregations (and preachers) favor. When Amos speaks of the death of the people, he does not know of the coming resurrection, about which the last of the line of judgment prophets speak [Ezekiel 37:1-14]. Amos’ announcement of death, therefore, is also an unwitting announcement of a second act, of sorts, in the OT’s story of redemption. Life follows death. ↩︎