Worshipping the Golden Calf

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Rosthern Mennonite Church, 1916

“When Moses approached the camp and saw the calf and the

 dancing, his anger burned and he threw the tablets out of his

 hands, breaking them to pieces at the foot of the mountain. And he

 took the calf the people had made and burned it in the fire; then

 he ground it to powder, scattered it on the water and made the

 Israelites drink it.” (Exodus 32: 19-20, NIV)

                The legend of the receipt of the Ten Commandments in Exodus illustrates in graphic imagery the perfidy of the people of that time and place. Some might argue that it also reveals Moses’ weak leadership skills; while he was conferring with God on Mount Horeb, the people feared he had gone and had left them leaderless. They talked Aaron—the deputy Moses—into presenting them a new God-leader to guide them on their journey. Aaron concocted a plan to create an idol to satisfy their thirst for such a god and crafted a statue of a calf from the gold people donated for that purpose.

                First of all, why would Moses not have given them some assurance of his return or, at least, officially deputized Aaron to take charge while he was conferring with God? Why would Aaron come up with an idol as an answer to the people’s anxieties, knowing full well that idolatry was what God most hated? Why wasn’t a search party sent up Mount Horeb to find Moses? How was Moses able to burn the golden calf and pulverize it? Why did Moses have 3,000 people massacred because they refused to support him upon his return? 

                The punishment for the people’s lack of faith in the God who’d led them safely out of slavery in Egypt may have been the inspiration for washing swearing children’s mouths out with soap. After pulverizing the calf, Moses dumped the powder into their water supply and made them drink it. It appears to have had the desired effect; the Israelites repented for their folly and Moses was once again able to re-establish a right relationship between his people and their God.

                As is true for many of the fantastic stories in the Old Testament, this one evokes doubts, primarily because of our tendency to read it as an historical record.  Poor editing? Or a convention of shaping the story to fit the lesson it hopes to convey. So much so that details are embellished, exaggerated, even invented to support the core, in this case, the folly of idolatry.

Mount Horeb

                As a faithful, factual accounting of an occurrence, the narrative in Exodus falls short. As a teaching story, it has implications even for our time, almost 3,000 years later. The calf is visible, tangible, valuable, imbued with that special reverence that gold elicits. Placing our hopes in that which can be seen, handled and heard because it is in our nature to trust only such things . . . is idolatry. That’s the whole point, I think.

                We’re just past the US transition of power, an occasion bound to become an historical anecdote no less significant than the Exodus story of the Golden Calf. If we think of the Preamble to the American Constitution as the Spirit of its founding, and if we examine the nature of the chauvinistic loyalty to the 45th president, then the lesson of the Golden Calf comes 'round again. What the president’s adherents counted on was not the spirit of America, but the hope that a golden calf would lead them onward in their journey.

                Consider the spirit of America as its founders visualized it: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure (sic) domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

                America’s golden calf apparently had little use for any of the ideals in the Preamble. He clearly marched to a different drum. Were Moses here today, I’m not sure what he would do to pulverize the paraphernalia of America’s idolatry; I’m not sure how he would manage to make them swallow the dust. But somehow or another, I think he’d do what he could to cajole America into following its founding spirit going forward.

    And we Canadians and Christians everywhere need to guard against making Aaron's fatal choice. 

 

 

               

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