Matthew Hester—Year A Proper 23
Anthony: All right, let’s transition to the next text of the month. It’s Exodus 32:1–14. It is a Revised Common Lectionary passage for Proper 23 in Ordinary Time, October 11. Matthew, would you read it for us, please?
Matthew: Absolutely.
When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered around Aaron and said to him, “Come, make gods for us, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.” 2 Aaron said to them, “Take off the gold rings that are on the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters and bring them to me.” 3 So all the people took off the gold rings from their ears and brought them to Aaron. 4 He took these from them, formed them in a mold, and cast an image of a calf, and they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” 5 When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it, and Aaron made a proclamation and said, “Tomorrow shall be a festival to the LORD.” 6 They rose early the next day and offered burnt offerings and brought sacrifices of well-being, and the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to revel. 7 The LORD said to Moses, “Go down at once! Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely; 8 they have been quick to turn aside from the way that I commanded them; they have cast for themselves an image of a calf and have worshiped it and sacrificed to it and said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!’” 9 The LORD said to Moses, “I have seen this people, how stiff-necked they are. 10 Now let me alone so that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them, and of you I will make a great nation.” 11 But Moses implored the LORD his God and said, “O LORD, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? 12 Why should the Egyptians say, ‘It was with evil intent that he brought them out to kill them in the mountains and to consume them from the face of the earth’? Turn from your fierce wrath; change your mind and do not bring disaster on your people. 13 Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, how you swore to them by your own self, saying to them, ‘I will multiply your descendants like the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it forever.’” 14 And the LORD changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people.
Anthony: So, while Moses is on the mountain receiving God’s covenant instruction, the people grew impatient and asked Aaron to make gods for them. Why are they, and why are we, the modern people, drawn to idolatry? It’s alive and well. Is there a contemporary sacred cow of idolatry that has you concerned?
Matthew: Yeah. Yeah. I want to start before I unpack this a little bit. I’m convinced that the only true idolatry is self-idolatry.
Anthony: Tell me more …
Matthew: Because it’s all… Even this desire to fashion this image, it was born out of a human desire to worship something. And so, if we can’t perceive something to worship, we’re going to create something to worship, and usually it reflects our own misgivings, our own frustrations, our own demands. And for me when I behold an idol in any form, I just see it as it’s itself. It’s a manifestation of something that we’re wrestling with, whether it be a certain people group, a certain nationality, whatever it may be, a certain religious proclivity. That’s what I see.
But I think idolatry actually becomes much more interesting when we stop imagining it as primitive people being foolish enough to worship statues, because that’s usually how we set it up. But idolatry is what happens when we take something finite, when we take something manageable, we take something controllable, and then we ask it to give us what God can only give.
Anthony: Come on.
Matthew: And so, notice what triggers the golden calf. It’s uncertainty, it’s impatience. If the people did not have that in their hearts, the idol wouldn’t be there. But it’s uncertainty, it’s impatience. So, Exodus 32 begins with, “When the people saw that Moses delayed.” So, they lost their sense of control.
Moses is gone. In their minds, God feels inaccessible. The future is uncertain, and so, they essentially say, “Give us something we can see. Give us something we can manage. Give us something that we can point to and say, ‘That’s our God.’” and for me, that’s why idolatry remains incredibly contemporary.
Because we don’t … Today we don’t usually melt our jewelry to make golden calves anymore. We’ll go to trade it in at the pawnshop. Give me some cash for that.
But what do we do? We create systems.
We’ll create ideologies, institutions, personalities, doctrines, political identities, religious structures, and then we assign intimacy to those things.
So, this actually … I might step on some toes here for a minute.
Anthony: Go for it.
Matthew: One contemporary sacred cow that concerns me deeply, is our ability to make an idol out of certainty. And that’s …
Anthony: Come on.
Matthew: … has been one of the biggest things that I believe, especially in the Western church framework, that we are going to have to challenge and unravel. It’s not so much a problem in the Eastern tradition of the faith, but in the Western framework, it is very difficult. And it … because I’m talking about religious certainty. So, we can become so convinced that our understanding of God is God, that we lose the humility to even recognize the difference.
Anthony: Wow.
Matthew: What you believe about God may not be God. And you’ve got to allow God to challenge it. And so, the irony for me of the golden calf is that Israel isn’t actually necessarily saying, “Let’s abandon God and become atheist.” For me that’d be a little more clear-cut.
Aaron actually declares a festival to Yahweh. If you go back and look at it, he declared, “Okay, this will be a festival day to Yahweh.” So, they’re attempting to make this invisible God tangible. That’s what they’re trying to do. It’s not … we think idolatry, false gods. I don’t think that’s what was in their hearts. In their hearts it was, we can’t approach it, we can’t see it, but we can at least see this. So we want to see if there can be a connection between the unseeable and the unknowable, and now we can see and behold something that’s knowable.
They’re trying to manage something on their terms. And I think Christians do the exact same thing. I know I’ve been guilty of the exact same thing. You can even turn your theology into a golden calf.
Anthony: Sure you can.
Matthew: We certainly have seen what it’s done to turn the Bible into a golden calf. We can use the Scripture to … we can weaponize it against people we don’t like, people we don’t agree with. We can turn political power into a golden calf. There’s so many things: church growth, platforms, celebrity leaders, nationalism. Your denomination is the only right one.
And before we know it, we’re surrounded by golden calves, doing all these things in the name of God. But we’re actually trying to worship a God that we fashioned in an image that allows us to relate to him on our terms.
And so, actually, I don’t even think the question is, do I have idols? I think it’s more of what have I made ultimate that Jesus might actually challenge? How many things in your life have you said, “This is a non-negotiable,” and in that moment you’ve actually disinvited Jesus from the ability to challenge that paradigm.
And a lot of it, sadly, brother, it’s in the name of God, but it looks nothing like the nature of God. So yeah, yeah, that gets pretty intense. Maybe we’ll back off of that a little bit, but …
Anthony: No. I really do like this conversation because I just think there is, there can be a sin of certitude that you just, you’re so certain about what you believe, and you hold so tightly to that.
But I’m finding, brother, as I get older, I’m releasing my grip on that stuff more and more. I feel like at the age of 55 I know a little less now than I did before.
Matthew: Yes.
Anthony: And just trusting, because relationship, there’s no certainty in any relationship. It’s always about learning the other, growing in love, growing up into Christ, knowing that he’s a certain one, but my belief about him, my understanding … that’s why I really lean on what Barth says about: we just apprehend God. None of us are experts when it comes to God. We’re learning. We’re growing and growing in love. And so, I really appreciate what you said there.
Verses 7–14 ― the Scripture tells us that God announces judgment. Yet Moses intercedes on behalf of the people. And it seems to be that he’s appealing to God’s character and his covenant. The Lord was merciful because the Lord is merciful. That’s who he is. It reveals the heart of the blessed Trinity. So, I just wanted to give you an opportunity to riff on the richness of God’s mercy. Tell us about it, preacher.
Matthew: Yes. Honestly, that’s what I love about this passage. It’s, mercy is not Moses trying to talk an unwilling God into becoming a better God.
Anthony: That’s right.
Matthew: And for me, that is an incredibly important distinction to make. Because if we read it superficially, it can sound like God is furious, ready to annihilate everybody, and it actually looks like Moses is the compassionate one who’s trying to calm God down.
But when we read this story through the fullest revelation, so through a Christological lens, and then we discover Jesus tells us something about his Father, God is not less merciful than Moses. Jesus literally says it that way. God is not less merciful than Moses.
Moses’ intercession is itself participating in something that originates in the heart of God.
See, this becomes even clearer as that story unfolds. God repeatedly describes himself as merciful and gracious, slow to anger abounding in steadfast love. And then the prophets return to that confession over and over again, and then Jesus arrives and embodies that confession. And so, Jesus doesn’t come to convince an angry Father to love humanity. Jesus comes because the Father loves humanity.
John, probably the first verse most of us ever heard, “For God so loved the world that he gave.” And not just loved your favorites. No, he loved the world that he gave.
And so, the incarnation begins in love. The cross reveals love. The resurrection vindicates love. And then the gospel announces that nothing, not even sin and death, get the final word over God’s creation. I mean …
You can definitely preach yourself happy. Paul says it beautifully in Ephesians 2, “But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us.”
Man, I love those words, rich in mercy. Not occasionally merciful. He’s not reluctant about it. He’s not merciful after someone says the right prayer. No, it just says rich in mercy. So, mercy isn’t something you extract from God through your performance.
It actually flows from who God eternally is, and that is where Trinity becomes so beautiful to me. The Father is not the angry member of the Trinity.
And this is actually what we do. A lot of times we’ll go to the Trinity and we try to compartmentalize it, and we’ll say, “Okay the Father’s the angry side. Jesus is the nice one. Holy Spirit is trying to negotiate between them.”
Literally that’s what a lot of us have believed. But Father, Son, and Spirit eternally exist in that communion of self-giving love, and salvation flows from that communion. And oh, I love this, the Son doesn’t rescue us from the Father. The Father, through the Son in the Spirit, rescues us from everything destroying us.
And that’s why Paul can pen beautifully 2 Corinthians 5, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them.” That is the gospel.
And you know what? I think Moses, even if he even … I don’t even think he had any awareness of it really, consciously any awareness, but he’s getting these glimpses into that type of intercession, that type of movement. Because he’s standing in the breach and he’s saying, “Remember your covenant. Remember your promise. Remember who you are.”
But ultimately Jesus doesn’t merely stand there between humanity and God. Jesus reveals that God has always been for humanity. That is such good news. Nothing in the landscape of human history has had to change God’s heart to be for us.
He had to change our hearts, because we didn’t know how to receive him as a father.
Anthony: Yeah. And isn’t it liberating to know that we don’t have to condition God to be good because he is good?
There’s no bound on his mercy. And as Romans 11:32 tells us, he was merciful to all. He didn’t pick and choose. Israel was just his beloved people to show us that all tribes and nations would be included in this good news of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I don’t have to condition God to be good, and I love what you said, that Moses is just participating in something he probably doesn’t even, he’s not even aware of in this moment, right?
Matthew: Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, but that doesn’t stop God ― which I love. And I think about how often, how many times have I been swept up in the momentum, the inertia of the divine dance. And then you’re able to look back and say, “Man, God you knew what you were doing. And I’m glad you did, because I certainly didn’t know what was going on. But thank you for allowing me to participate.”
It’s just beautiful to think about. And just again, just the whole mercy component. You know our sin doesn’t exhaust his mercy.
Our violence doesn’t exhaust it. In this moment our idolatry doesn’t exhaust his mercy. Failure doesn’t even exhaust it.
Because we realize mercy isn’t merely something God does. Mercy … I penned it this way and I’m going to have to give myself a pat on the back for this, and you can steal this too if you want to. But this is what I was, as I was pondering this thought, this is what came up in my heart was, mercy is what love looks like when love encounters misery.
So, you have the God who is love: 1 John 4, right? God is love. Love is not something that God decides to do. If God can decide to love, he can also decide to withhold. 1 John 4 says that God is love, so you can’t have an authentic encounter with God if you don’t have an authentic encounter with love.
And the vice versa is true. You can’t have an authentic encounter with love if you don’t have an authentic encounter with God. So, I say, love is the God stuff. So, in this moment, what does a God rich in mercy look like? It looks like embodied love having a head-on, face-to-face encounter with misery, and we call it mercy.
Anthony: Thank you.
Matthew: That is such, such an amazing thought.
Anthony: Amazing that he meets us where we’re at. And with his ongoing, unfailing, persistent love, which existed before in a part of our decision to even trust in it.
I mean, isn’t that amazing? He wasn’t waiting for us to believe it. It is who he is. Wow. Hallelujah. Praise God.