What the Lord Requires
Micah 1:3-5, 5:2-5a, 6:6-8; Matthew 9:13
With what shall I come before the Lord? With burnt offerings, thousands of rams, rivers of oil, with my firstborn? Will that be enough for God? And the prophet replies: You have already been told what God requires – that you do justice, that you love mercy, that you walk humbly with God.
In our experiment with the Narrative Lectionary we have been reading stories from the Hebrew Bible in sequence from Genesis through Exodus through the arrival of the people in the Promised Land. We had stories of the first great kings of Israel, David and Solomon, in the 900s B.C.E. Then last Sunday we had a story about the great prophets that arose in the 800s B.C.E., Elijah and Elisha.
Prophets like Elisha stood up to the kings, who were increasingly careless about keeping the commandments and increasingly attracted to worshipping the gods of their neighbors rather than the God who delivered the people from Egypt and brought them to the Promised Land. We know the prophets of the 800s B.C.E. mostly from the stories told about them in the books of Kings. But then in the 700s B.C.E. we get some prophets about whom many of their words, and not only their deeds, are recorded and passed down to us in the Scriptures.
The best-known prophet of the 700s is Isaiah, from whom we have the largest collection of sayings and stories. We’ll hear from Isaiah in next Sunday’s reading. But there is also Hosea and Amos, and the prophet from whom we read today, Micah.
Micah lives at the end of the 700s B.C.E., in a time of great distress and upheaval. In 722 B.C.E. the Assyrians conquered and destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel, sending ten tribes into exile. Around 715 B.C.E. Hezekiah becomes king in Jerusalem, and he begins a serious attempt at reformation. He removes the idols from the Temple and closes down some of the idolatrous shrines around the countryside. He restores the annual observance of Passover, which had fallen into disuse. If the northern kingdom fell because the kings and the people had forgotten the covenant and given up the worship of God for various idols, Hezekiah thought the best way to preserve Jerusalem and the throne of David would be to get serious about enforcing the Law again. And that is what he did.
Now, the prophet Isaiah lived in Jerusalem. Isaiah spent a lot of time in the Temple and he advised Hezekiah about much of his reformation agenda. But Micah lived in the countryside, far removed from the daily give-and-take of the capital. And Micah had decidedly mixed feelings about the reformation of Hezekiah.
In our reading today, we have three selections from Micah’s sayings, including two that are very well-known – even if Micah himself is something of a mystery to the average Christian today.
We begin with Micah’s words of God’s judgment on the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah. All of the calamities that people were experiencing in Micah’s time are the result of the people’s lack of faithfulness to God, centered in the capital cities of the north and the south – “the transgression of Israel is Samaria, the idolatry of Judah is Jerusalem.” Like a lot of people who live in flyover country both then and today, Micah was quick to locate the big city as the capital of unfaithfulness.
You might think that Micah would therefore have been a fan of King Hezekiah’s reformation, of the royal crackdown to enforce the Commandments again. Law and order, that’s what we need. But Micah was skeptical that any king in Jerusalem could accomplish the real reformation of the heart, that any human ruler could by decree revive faith in the living God of Israel.
And so, in the second part of our reading today, we have one of the famous passages of Micah saying that the king we really need is not going to come from Jerusalem. Micah looked forward to another king who would come from the countryside, from the regular people. A king who like the original King David would hail from the little town of Bethlehem. This is the king who will actually bring peace, who will actually provide for the people, who will actually reflect the glory of God ruling over the nations in peace.
And as you know, according to the gospel, when King Herod asked the scribes in Jerusalem where the Messiah, the newborn king of the Jews, was to be born, the scribes pointed to the prophecy of Micah and said: In Bethlehem of Judah.
I don’t know that, at the time, Micah fully appreciated what he was saying. If you had pressed him for an explanation, I imagine he would have said he meant mainly that the king he was waiting for wasn’t Hezekiah. But Micah knew more than he realized – he knew not only that the people needed more just a king who was willing to enforce the Law for a change. Micah also promised that one day God would provide the king that we really need.
And this brings us to the final saying of Micah in our reading today, which is perhaps the most well-known of all his words. At the beginning of chapter 6 of the collection of Micah’s sayings in the Hebrew Bible, Micah imagines God bringing a lawsuit against God’s people for breach of covenant. I led you out of Egypt, I gave you the Law through Moses, I led you through the wilderness, I blessed you with the gift of the promised land. But you haven’t responded the way that we agreed you would. Why not?
Our reading today picks up with what Micah imagines to be the people’s response to God’s question. OK, Lord, what do you want from us? Do you want burnt offerings in the Temple? Do you want us to sacrifice a fatted calf, is that what you want? That’s the law King Hezekiah is enforcing on us today, is that enough for you? Or do you expect more? Do you want a thousand bulls, or ten thousand rivers of oil? Do you want us to sacrifice our firstborn, how about that? Will that be enough to keep you happy, God?
And Micah responds: Don’t be ridiculous. You know the answer. You have already been told what God requires: Do justice. Love mercy. Walk humbly with your God.
Micah is living in a time when things are falling apart. One kingdom has fallen, another is under siege. The king has decided it’s time to enforce the old law, crank up those sacrifices in the Temple, make sure God is satisfied in hopes that God will give us back the peace that we used to know. People are stressed out and afraid. The word on the street is that we need law and order, we need to get a lot stricter about offering the sacrifices the law says God wants from us. But the prophets are unanimous – what God wants is not more sacrifice, more worship, more religious stuff. The prophet Amos, a generation before Micah, in words Jesus quotes in the gospel today, put it simply: I desire mercy, not sacrifice. Micah puts it simply as well: You already know what God requires of you – do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with God.
It’s so simple that it doesn’t call for much elaboration or explanation, does it? Do justice. Treat others fairly, give others what they deserve. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And don’t just think about it, do it. Love mercy. Make kindness and mercy towards your neighbor the heart of the way you live. Take joy and pleasure in being kind and compassionate.
And walk humbly with God. Unlike the rest of this verse, which uses Hebrew words used thousands of times in the Scripture – do, justice, love, mercy, walk, God – the word translated “humbly” is rare and occurs only twice in the whole Bible. It seems to mean something like “authentically,” as your real self – neither more nor less. Don’t walk with God as the person you think God wants you to be – don’t proudly recite all the sacrifices you’ve made that you want God to reward you for, and don’t think you have to crawl on your knees and beg like a worm for a forgiveness that God is predisposed to withhold from you. Instead, walk with your God simply as the person you are, the person God made you to be, neither pretending to be more or less.
Micah has a simple vision of what God asks of us, but it is profound in its simplicity. And I think Micah was afraid that too many people were understanding King Hezekiah’s crackdown as demanding both more and less than this simple vision. The king was trying to enforce the Law that had fallen into disrespect, and Micah agreed that it was unfortunate that the Law had been all but forgotten over the generations. But people were hearing it as a requirement to perform all the required sacrifices, to offer all the correct worship, to shape up or else. When what God really wants is a change in our hearts. When all God really wants is that we do justice, that we love mercy, that we walk honestly and authentically with our God.
Like Micah, we also live in a time of confusion and upheaval. There are lots of voices in our time, just as there were in Micah’s day, who will tell you that if we want God’s favor again, we need more law and order, more pushing people to get with the program, more enforcement of rules and regulations. But I think Micah was correct to see that this is not really what God wants of us. If I believed what I hear from a lot of churches in this country today, I’d think that God wants us to use political power to bully queer kids, or to harass immigrants, or to keep other people in their place. And when I hear these things I have a strong urge to go all Old Testament prophet judgmental about it all. But I remember that Micah said it better: you already know what God requires, and it’s not any of those things. Simply do justice. Love kindness and compassion. Walk humbly and honestly and with faith and trust in your God.
This is what God wants of us, because this is who God is. Because God does justice, God does what is right, God treats people with respect and dignity. Because God loves mercy and kindness and compassion and practices mercy all the time. Because God desires nothing – not our sacrifices, not our compliance with the rules, not our religious observances and devotions – God desires nothing more than to walk alongside us in a relationship of openness and honesty and mutuality. The gift of the prophet Micah was to see that the crackdown of King Hezekiah, as necessary and justified as it may have been, was never going to accomplish what God really wants. But Micah saw that God would call another king out of Bethlehem and, one day, make real God’s vision of justice and mercy and companionship along the way.