Golden Calves

No, I speak not of my resplendent lower legs. Rather I speak of that poor bemused bovine held up as an example to all of how not to worship God.

Those poor Hebrews having struggled through seemingly endless times with an ever elusive God finally got sick of the whole thing and decided that they just wanted something they could grab hold of; something they could actually “look up to”, to be their object of worship. It really doesn’t seem too much to ask does it? It is very tricky worshipping a God that can’t be sculpted – something about us always wants the security of the “tangible”.

That got me to thinking about the whole idea of an “idol”. I mean we really give the Golden Calf worshippers a hard time about the whole false god thing but are we really any better?  Our Christian history seems to me to be a long pilgrimage from one idol to the next.

Statues of the Saints or the Blessed Virgin Mary and relics of the saints became objects of veneration and adoration because they give us something concrete to focus one. Priests became the representation of God for us, even though one of the obvious things that Jesus seemed to make clear was that there was nothing now standing between us and God. Then of course came the Reformation with Martin Luther’s wondrous claiming of the Bible for all people, not just the chosen Latin reading few. And what did we do with it? – why we made the Word of God into an idol of course!  The Word became that which we must hold on to and immerse ourselves in and, like the Golden Calf, when we remove the attention of our heart from God onto anything tangible, God becomes smaller. 

Our idols can be anything. In some personality based churches the idol is the pastor.

In some churches the idol has become “showing the fruits of the Spirit”.

I sometimes wonder if we haven’t made Jesus into an idol. When I hear the church sing “It’s all about you, Jesus”,  I wonder how Jesus would react to that. I’m not sure it would find favour.

The devil once went for a walk with a friend. They saw a man ahead of them stoop down and pick up something from the ground.

“What did that man find?” asked the friend.

“A piece of truth,” said the devil.

“Doesn’t that disturb you?” asked the friend.

“No,” said the devil, “I shall let him make a belief out of it.”