The golden calf and the cloudy mountaintop
A number of years ago, I saw a play in New York City that told the story of a man named Tom, a British lawyer who decided to become an Anglican priest, and of the drama that ensued when he told his outspokenly atheist mother of his plans. The play, titled Grace, wrestles with all the complexities of faith in an increasingly secular world.
In one scene of the play, Tom preaches a sermon on the ascent of Moses up Mount Sinai – an event that took place in parallel to the story of the golden calf that we heard this morning.
Moses stays on the mountain for forty days, receiving the tablets of the law. And down in the valley, the people become impatient. And so Aaron collects their gold jewelry, melts it down, and makes a golden calf.
A golden calf is a nice, simple, concrete, easy-to-see representation of God. A golden calf is also a lie.
Meanwhile, Moses climbs further and further into the cloud, straining up the rock face as haze and smoke thicken around him. The nearer he gets to God, the denser the fog grows.
God, the real God, is beyond all description or definition, wrapped in fog. Or so Tom argues.
The point of the sermon in the play was to defend progressive Christianity against both secularism and fundamentalism. To say that Christians could and should be open to mystery and questions – to God within a cloud – and that the God that modern atheists object to is more like the golden calf, a thing that isn’t real.
This does track with my own intuition that God is in so many ways beyond our understanding. That much of faith is – and must remain – just a little bit hazy. As Exodus puts it, “the appearance of the glory of the Lord is like a devouring fire.” The true God is all-encompassing, compelling, and beyond description.
On the other hand, I worry that a cloud can itself become a kind of idol. That a God we can’t understand can become a God who requires nothing of us. We can become so comfortable with transcendental mystery that we never ask what God might be asking us to do.
Christianity does offer us a path that avoids the perils of the golden calf and of the mountaintop. It’s a path grounded in the person of Jesus, of a human being who was born, lived, taught, died, and rose again. A man who our faith teaches us was at once fully God and fully human. God come among us.
Jesus’s incarnation doesn’t make God easy to understand. The incarnation is itself a mystery. But Jesus’s life gives us a model to follow. And it gives us hope.
The world Jesus entered was a violent one. Today’s readings reflect that violence. We see it in Pharaoh’s oppression of the Israelites. We see it, more disturbingly, when God threatens to destroy the people who have just escaped Egypt. We see it in the strange parable we heard this morning, with its tale of murdered servants and of a guest bound and thrown into the outermost darkness. These readings are hard, and raise questions I can’t neatly resolve.
But what we can do is look at the life of Jesus. He shares meals with people who aren’t welcome at other tables. He pays attention to the poor and the suffering. He confronts those who use their power to oppress others. He loves his friends, even when they let him down. He sees all the evils of the world, and still chooses to live–and even to die–within it.
The story of Easter is, of course, the story of resurrection. Easter teaches us hope, even when we don’t know how things will turn out. It teaches us that even death is not the end.
The story of Jesus’s life before his death and resurrection teaches us that the things we do in life also matter. We don’t get to sit out the hard things. We don’t get to turn a blind eye to injustice. We don’t get to hope that the evils that surround us will just go away. If we hope to follow Jesus, we can’t put our faith in a golden calf or escape to a mountaintop. We have to live in the world, and we have to take responsibility for it.
That can be frightening. Faith doesn’t promise that everything will turn out as we hope, and it doesn’t keep us safe from suffering. What it does do is tell us that, in the final analysis, we’re not in it alone.
St. Paul knew something about that. He wrote to the Philippians from prison, with his own future uncertain. And still he sent words of encouragement and of hope.
“Rejoice in the Lord always,” he wrote. “Again I will say, Rejoice... The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”
“The Lord is near.” It was true for Paul writing from prison. It’s true for us. The God who became fully human is with us still. Not only on a mountaintop, and not confined within a golden statue. But here, in the mess and muck of life.
No matter how dark the day might seem, the Lord is near. And Paul’s promise is one we can hold to too: “The peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard our hearts and our minds in Christ Jesus.”
Cover image: Portions of Paul Landacre, Death of a Forest, 1938, and William de Brailes, The Israelites Worship the Golden Calf, c.1250, via https://thevcs.org/sinai-calling#sinai-future and https://thevcs.org/golden-calf#all-glisters .