God gets upset at a statue of a cow. That’s our story for today (Exodus 32:1-14). The Israelites build a statue of a calf and God gets upset. I have to be honest with you, with everything in the world right now, I feel like there’s plenty of stuff for God to be upset about and a gold statue would rank pretty damn low on the list.
Over in Palestine, we’ve got God’s apparently chosen race declaring war on a population who have already been displaced and marginalised. Closer to home, a people with the highest rates of incarceration in the world, a people with the worst standard of living in a first world country, a people who regularly encounter bias and prejudice, were told yesterday that they shouldn’t get a voice in issues that concern them. Even closer to home, we live in a city where homelessness is a major issue, where people regularly have to choose between feeding their family or paying the utilities, where the gap between rich and poor just keeps getting bigger and bigger. Closer to home still, one of our own mob, Neville, lies in a hospital bed, struggling to breathe, struggling to speak, struggling to eat, while his wife and daughters are distraught, scared, tired, uncertain, feeling more than a bit lost. I think there’s plenty for God to get upset about right now. And yet, today I get to talk to you about a story where God gets so upset, so full of rage to the point of considering genocide, because the people made a statue.
You tell me how that makes any sense.
But the fact is, God often doesn’t make sense. How can there be a God who is all-loving and all-powerful in control of everything that happens, when the world is in the state it’s in? I have to tell you that if I hadn’t experienced God’s love for myself in my own life, if I hadn’t experienced God as part of my life, then I’d think it was all a load of bollocks. There’s no way such a God could exist.
But actually, it’s not that God doesn’t make sense; it’s that the world doesn’t make sense, and God doesn’t respond to this stupid, senseless world the way I expect God to, the way I want God to. In this non-sensical world, I want God to fix it, or at the very least, I want God to make sense of it all for me. But God doesn’t. God doesn’t do what I want or what I expect.
In fact, God constantly refuses to be nailed down. When Moses first encounters God, speaking to him from a burning bush (in Exodus 3), Moses asks what to call this god. What name does this god go by? And the voice from the flames simply says, “I am who I am.” God refuses to give Moses a name to use. God refuses to be pinned down, to be labelled, to be put in a box.
Last week, we looked at the ten commandments (in Exodus 20), and Susan told us how the first four commandments are about how we relate to God, and the last six are about how we relate to each other. Do you remember those first four? They are 1. Have no other gods before me; 2. Do not worship any graven image; 3. Do not use the name of the Lord in vain; and 4. Keep the Sabbath holy. Notice in the second of these, God doesn’t just forbid the making of statues to false gods; God says not to worship any graven image. That includes making statues of God and worshipping them.
See, the problem with making a statue of God, is that any statue or painting or artwork of God shows a particular aspect of God, and that’s all. And when you start to worship just one aspect of God, then you limit God to that. When that happens, then you start to define God in very finite terms.
Aaron wasn’t trying to be disrespectful to God when he created an image of a calf, a young bull full of vitality and strength and promise. Moses has been gone for forty days and Aaron wants to find a way for the people to honour the god that brought them out of Egypt, and they’ve gotten used to worshipping the Egyptian gods by worshipping the statues. It makes sense for Aaron to use this as a way to honour this new God who has brought them out of Egypt.
But the problem is that when all we see of God is what’s in the statue, then we miss the other aspects of God. When all we see is vitality and strength, then we might not recognise vulnerability and love as being part of who God is. We might even deny it when others speak of experiencing these aspects of God. How dare you talk of God being vulnerable? Just look at the statue of God and see for yourself.
And when we start to define God in very finite terms, then it becomes possible to know God exactly, to be able to speak on God’s behalf. We see this especially when someone takes one verse of the bible and defines God purely and solely by that verse. I know exactly what God thinks about this, and so I can tell you exactly what God wants you to do.
And that’s when things start to get really dangerous When I start presuming the will of God, then I can start committing all sorts of atrocities in the name of God. And so the second commandment leads into the third commandment: Do not use the name of the Lord in vain. Over the years, we’ve come to think of this commandment as being about using bad language: “Jesus H Christ, that hurt!” But it’s actually about using God’s name to promote your agenda. God says we should go to war! God says we should kill all Muslims! God says … and so on.
We’ve seen this happen throughout history. We saw it in 1493 when Pope Alexander VI decreed with the authority of God that a land inhabited by non-Christians was open to be discovered and settled, as if those people did not exist. Using God’s name to further your own agenda. Using God’s name in vain.
We saw the same thing happening before World War 1 and World War 2, where young men were called upon to serve God, King, and Country by going to war. Using God’s name to further your own agenda. Using God’s name in vain.
But if God is so unknowable, where does that leave us. Can we never say anything definitive about God? Well, the good news for us as Christians is that in Jesus, we get to understand God better. We still can’t define God in any finite terms, but in Jesus we get a sense of God’s hope, God’s power, God’s vulnerability, God’s love. In the book of Hebrews, it talks about Jesus as the exact representation of God. In John’s gospel, Jesus says to the disciples, “If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the one who sent me.”
That’s all well and good, but we’ve already got four different gospels which describe Jesus to us in sometimes very different ways. And throughout those gospels, Jesus uses parables and metaphors to talk about himself, to explain who he is. So even then, we can never be absolutely certain.
And that’s probably a good thing. Because certainty can lead to arrogance; it can lead us into the path of us being right and everyone who disagrees with us being wrong. But instead the mystery of God and the mystery of Jesus leads us into wanting to discover more, wanting to learn from each other, wanting to get to know Jesus better, wanting to come closer to God.
And in that mystery, we will discover far more than a set of finite facts about God; we will discover a relationship that is engaging and confusing and purposeful and frustrating: full of wonder and hope and love.
Thanks be to God. Amen.