Exodus 32:7–14
By: Jonathan Melton
I cannot read this passage from Exodus without thinking of Mooby the Cow, a fictional and Mickey Mouse-like pop culture icon in the hilariously appalling (as in, seriously offensive) 1999 film Dogma, starring Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. Affleck and Damon play fallen angels meting out the judgment of God on their own terms.
In the Mooby scene, the two fallen angels break into a board meeting of high-powered corporate executives seated around a golden calf – Mooby. (As a film, Dogma does not suffer subtleties.) The angels name the corporate sin – idolatry – before circling the room as they name each executive’s personal wrong-doings. After some extended monologue, the angels leave briefly, then Damon’s character returns and kills the members of the board – all but one, whom he declares “innocent,” before remembering that she had failed to say, “God bless you,” when he sneezed. He lets the woman live, but takes pains to remind her know how lucky she is.
The scene is at the same time absurd/offensive and deeply truthful. For surely it is true that we remain a people immersed in idols, and that our awareness that we are people of idols sometimes leads us to a legalism that is the opposite of love, as in Damon’s treatment of the woman who failed to say, “God bless you.” We know that God makes claims on the lives of the faithful, but we also know that conflicts over these claims – with one another and within ourselves – threaten to undo us, and, historically, have left Christians within the Church looking silly and insecure.
Unfortunately, we Christians have no discernible advantage with respect to avoiding idolatry. It is just as easy to worship styles of worship as it is to worship corporate greed; as easy to worship one’s ability to be “better than the idolatrous ones” as it is to be idolatrous. Sometimes we lose sight of what idolatry is all about.
The account of the original golden calf and the people of Israel reminds us what idolatry is all about. Idolatry is forgetting by whose power and hand Israel has been set free. Idolatry is Aaron telling the people, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” Once upon a time, God had freed Israel to be God’s people, in order that the world would see God’s glory through them. Idolatry is forgetting what freedom is for.
God’s freedom is freedom to be loved by God and to show God’s glory; God’s freedom invites the world to see God’s glory through your life, and your life’s pointing to God. God’s freedom, and your enjoyment of it, is the Vocation to which all other callings must answer; God’s freedom names the God who led Israel out of Egypt and raised Jesus from the dead.
O God who “brought our fathers, the children of Israel, out of bondage in Egypt, and led them through the Red Sea on dry land” and taught your people “to have no other gods before me,” daily remind us by whose strength we have been set free, we who have been baptized into the death and resurrection of the One who “broke the bonds of death and hell, and rose victorious from the grave.” Reminded of these things, Lord, may we sing your praise across our days and love without fear at last. We ask this through Jesus Christ, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, world without end. Amen.