Impatience can make me fickle. My four-year-old nephews have
taught me this. They frequently teach me things about myself, for I see in
their rather transparent behavior the same motives that I often have but that I
have learned to hide from myself.
Frequently near dinnertime the nephews will be hungry and clamoring for food. “How much longer?” they ask. These polite enquiries soon give way to loud demands. “I want some goldfish! I need juice! Do we have any grapes?” Dinner may only be minutes away, but such is their desire that they are willing to settle for less. They are willing to settle for snacks even when there is a feast around the corner.
In the same way, the Israelites have grown impatient. Moses has gone up the mountain to receive from God the laws that will help establish a good and ordered common life among the people. But it’s been nearly forty days now, and people are beginning to doubt that he’ll ever return. “We don’t know what’s become of him,” they’re saying (Ex 32:2).
The conventional interpretation of this passage is that the people give up on Moses and God and turn elsewhere. It seems like a clear-cut case of idolatry, right? I mean, they make a literal idol, a golden calf.
But I wonder if this interpretation isn’t a little too convenient. It makes it awfully easy to distance ourselves from the Israelites, to point fingers that protect ourselves from any similar self-accusation. After all, who among us has crafted an actual idol to worship in God’s place? But when I read more closely, I see something that strikes closer to home. After Aaron has made the golden calf, the people praise it with the same language that they praise God, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” (Ex 32:4). Moments later, Aaron himself declares, “Tomorrow shall be a festival to the Lord”—using the divine name by which God revealed Godself to Moses (cf. Ex 3:14). And the next day, they worship through burnt offerings and sacrifices of well-being, rituals that God has previously prescribed as a means of drawing near to God (Ex 20:24; cf. Ex 24:3-5). All of this behavior, which resembles authentic expressions of worship, suggests that the Israelites actually think they’re still worshiping God, even if through the medium of a golden calf.
Their speech makes clear that they remember that God has delivered them from Egypt and they know their need for divine help going forward (cf. Ex 32:1). It’s just that they become impatient. Their idolatry is less about worshiping a different God and more about securing God on their own terms. They want a God who operates on their timetable, so they fast-track their worship.[1] They want a God they can see. So they make an image.
As God puts it, they are “quick to turn aside.” In their impatience, they take what they can get…which is nothing more than the work of their own hands. Like my nephews before dinner, they settle for a snack when a feast is not far around the corner.
“Change Your Mind”:
A Story of Two Changed Minds
For me, the wrinkle in today’s scripture is not the people’s behavior. That seems relatable enough. I regularly confuse God with what I want from God.
The wrinkle for me is God’s behavior. God is indignant with the people. God’s wrath burns hot against them, and God plans to consume them (Ex 32:10). Only after Moses intercedes, reminding God of God’s longstanding promise to Abraham, does God relent. “Turn from your fierce wrath,” Moses pleads. “Change your mind and do not bring disaster on your people” (Ex 32:12).
Today’s scripture is a story of two changed minds. The people change their mind in a bad way. They turn away from God. God changes God’s mind in a good way. God turns toward the people in mercy.
But how do we make sense of a God who changes God’s mind? Isn’t God immutable, unchangeable, the unmoved mover? As one prophet in the Old Testament declares, “God is not a human being…that he should change his mind” (Num 23:19). And yet the Bible is filled with stories like today’s, where God does change God’s mind. In the book of Jonah, when God sees the repentance of the Ninevites, “how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity he had said he would bring upon them” (Jon 3:10). Likewise, in the New Testament, Jesus tells a parable that implicitly compares God to a judge who eventually relents to the persistence of a troubled widow and changes his mind, granting her demands (Luke 18:1-8).
The Harder Truth of
God’s Mercy
Our lectionary psalm for the day declares, “[God’s] steadfast love endures forever” (Ps 106:1). In the New Testament, the writer of Hebrews similarly affirms God’s incarnate love, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and tomorrow” (Heb 13:8). This is a principle of my faith. God’s love in Christ does not change. So, my interpretation of passages like our scripture today, is not that God literally changes God’s mind. Rather these passages show us a significant turn in the evolution of a people’s faith. It is the Israelite community of faith who are changing their mind about God. It is the community of faith who are waking up to the incredible reality that their God is a God of mercy.
In the time and place that Exodus was written, it was normal to think of the gods as doling out judgments left and right. So, when I see divine vengeance in scripture—when I see God’s wrath burn hot, God doling out judgment left and right—I am inclined to think of this not as revelation but simply as the prevailing cultural perspectives of the day. It’s just the way everyone thought of God.
It is the novel element in scripture, what is different than the surrounding culture, that captures my attention. The revelation in today’s passage for the Israelites is that their God is not simply doling out judgments. The natural judgments of our actions, the consequences that we might call karma, are a hard fact of life that we must learn to accept. But an even harder truth to accept is God’s mercy. That is the good news that is so different from what the world believes. We hear from the prophet Hosea God declaring, “I will not execute my anger, for I am God and no mortal…and I will not come in wrath” (Hos 11:9). When God changes God’s mind at the end of today’s scripture, I choose to interpret that, actually, it is Israel changing their mind about God.
They realize that their God is not out to get them. And that is good news.
“We Must Help You”:
Embodying God’s Steadfast Love
The call I hear in today’s scripture is that I am meant, like Moses, like Jesus, to insist on God’s steadfast love and to give it a flesh-and-blood reality in my own life. With that in mind, I’d like to conclude with a short anecdote from the life of Etty Hillesum, a Dutch Jewish woman who followed God faithfully under the terror of the Nazi regime to her death in Auschwitz. Even as she headed toward what she knew was the end, she writes:
We must help You [God] and defend
Your dwelling place inside us to the last. There are, it is true, some who,
even at this last stage, are putting their vacuum cleaners and silver forks and
spoons in safekeeping instead of guarding You, dear God. And there are those
who want to put their bodies in safekeeping but who are nothing more now than a
shelter for a thousand fears and bitter feelings. And they say, ‘I shan’t let
them get me into their clutches.’ But they forget that no one is in their
clutches who is in Your arms.[2]
Etty insisted on God’s steadfast love. While the world around her grew impatient and feared for its future, putting its trust in the gods of war and clamoring for judgment on the enemy, Etty trusted in the harder truth of God’s mercy. She writes almost tenderly of an encounter one day with an angry Gestapo officer:
The real import of [this] morning
[was] not that a disgruntled young Gestapo officer yelled at me, but that I
felt no indignation, rather a real compassion, and would have liked to ask,
‘Did you have a very unhappy childhood, has your girlfriend let you down?’ Yes,
he looked harassed and driven, sullen and weak. I should have liked to start
treating him there and then, for I know that pitiable young men like that are
dangerous as soon as they are let loose on mankind. But all the blame must be
put on the system that uses such people. What needs eradicating is the evil in
man, not man himself.[3]
It is easy to hear Etty’s compassion and dismiss it as unpractical. If no one resisted the Nazis, what would have happened? I cannot answer that question. But the question that haunts me even more, is the one that Etty’s example poses: “If we do not embody God’s love, who will?”
Prayer
Whose steadfast love is forever,
When we are quick to turn aside from your way—
When we are inclined first toward judgment
And cannot see your holy image
In ourselves or others—
Grant us patience
…
Reveal to us the hard truth of your mercy
And inspire in us hope for your kingdom.
[1] In
fact, it will be roughly nine months before the tabernacle is constructed and
the people can enjoy the full richness of authentic worship.
[2] Etty
Hillesum, An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943 (trans.
Arno Pomerans; New York: Pantheon, 1983), 151.
[3]
Hillesum, An Interrupted Life, 72.
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