A Change of Plans—Lectionary Reflection for Pentecost 20A/ Proper 23A (Exodus 32)

Exodus 32:1-14 New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition

32 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.

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                Moses went up the mountain to meet with God, receiving the rules and regulations that define the covenant relationship. We visited the ten primary rules last week as we explored the words of Exodus 20:1-21. That reading of what we call the Ten Commandments opened a multi-chapter section that explored the remainder of the rules that helped define the meaning of the Ten Commandments. God also gave Moses instructions concerning liturgical rules and vestments and much more (see chapters 21-31 of Exodus). God gave these instructions to Moses while he was with God atop Mount Sinai. While Moses was up on the mountain having a “mountain-top” experience, the people were getting worried. We humans are not known for our patience. It was true back then and it’s true now. Since they didn’t know if Moses was coming back, they decided to take things into their own hands. It didn’t work out very well.                 

Humans like physical/material things, things they can see and feel. That is true in religious life. We need stuff in our spiritual lives that we can touch, taste, and see. It’s why we create visual art that represents our spirituality. The Lord’s Supper/Eucharist is a spiritual experience with physical/material attributes. It’s not enough to look at the eucharistic elements, we need to feel and taste them. We could put it this way: we need to see it to believe it. When Moses went up on the mountain and entered the cloud, the people feared what might happen. The longer he was away from them, the more they worried. Finally, feeling they needed something material to rally around, something to represent the divine, the people imposed upon Aaron to create gods for them. These gods could then guide them since it appeared Moses wasn’t coming back. Yes, they needed something that could reassure them that they weren’t lost and alone out in the wilderness. While the people had experienced liberation from slavery in Egypt and God’s provisions, they needed something more. They needed a visual image of this one known as Yahweh. For some reason, Aaron agreed to their request.

This is what Aaron, brother of Moses, did to mollify the people. He gave instructions to the men of the community to gather up all the gold from their wives, sons, and daughters, and bring them to him. He would then melt down this gold and create an image that would reassure the people. The people might not yet know this, but one of the first rules God gave Moses to guide the people had to do with images. Don’t create images or idols. It’s the second rule, coming right after the rule about not having any gods besides Yahweh. Don’t make them, don’t bow to them, and don’t worship them (Exodus 20:1-6). That is the foundational rule, which is very exclusive.

What did Aaron create from all this gold? While the people didn’t specify what kind of image was appropriate, Aaron decided to create a golden calf from this gold. So why a calf or a bull? As Ron Allen and Clark Williamson note, the calf “served in the ancient world as a symbol of fertility and military power.” What the people wanted was something that would stand in the place of the absent Moses and invisible Yahweh, since Moses had represented God to them up to this point. “They failed to trust God and they put their trust in something that they could manipulate—an image” [Preaching the Old Testament, p. 100]. When he unveiled his creation, the people responded: “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt!” Yes, here is their god, a golden calf cast by Aaron from the gold they brought to him. It might have brought some reassurance, but is this Yahweh? After he created the golden calf Aaron built an altar that sat before the calf. Finally, Aaron proclaimed that the next day would be a festival so they could worship Yahweh who stood before them in the form of a calf.

Now, we might want to give the people the benefit of the doubt. According to the story in Exodus, this relationship with God was a new thing. While Moses had revealed the Law to the people, they were afraid of God (Exod. 20:1-21). It’s possible that the people didn’t fully understand what God had in mind, but surely Aaron did. While God told the people not to create images, they were used to gods who were visually represented. While Aaron might have known better, he may have felt abandoned and alone, and he now had a burden to provide the people with something that would comfort them. They needed to have something to celebrate. There was the calf to fill their need.

As we continue this journey through the Old Testament during this season of Pentecost/Ordinary Time, following the semi-continuous stream of readings, the focus is on the nature of God’s covenant relationship with the people of Israel. It’s a covenant relationship that begins with the call of Abraham in Genesis 12 and gets passed on and renewed in the persons of Isaac, Jacob (Israel), and Joseph. Now it gets reconfirmed when God meets with Moses and provides instructions for living in covenant. God is the one who initiates the covenant, but it does involve some reciprocity. God may stay faithful to the covenant, but will the people? The rules provided to Moses are supposed to help this come true. But, again, the people don’t yet know the rules!

Getting back to the story in Exodus 32, the next morning after Aaron created the calf and altar and proclaimed the festival, the people rose early in the morning. They offered burnt offerings and sacrifices of well-being to the calf. Then they sat down for a meal. They ate and they drank and then they got up and partied. While the NRSVUE simply says they stood up to revel, The Message seems to catch the mood a bit more strongly: “The people sat down to eat and drink and then began to party. It turned into a wild party!” (Exodus 32:6b MSG).

While the people partied (wildly), God was watching. Yahweh turned to Moses and told him to go back down quickly because the people Moses led out of Egypt were out of control. They were acting perversely. They were turning aside from God’s commandments. Yahweh wanted Moses to go down and straighten things out. After all, this is a “stiff-necked people” (stubborn). While God seemed to want Moses to go down and settle things down, God was also contemplating wiping them out. God told Moses to “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” (Exod. 32:10). This is one of those difficult passages because many of us don’t like images of God’s wrath. We prefer God to be steadfast in love and long-suffering, never giving in to anger.  That vision of God is present throughout Scripture, even in the Old Testament. But it does appear that God has had enough. It’s time to start fresh. God could wipe out these people and start from scratch with Moses. 

Like Abraham before him, Moses steps in and serves as a mediator between God and the people. In Genesis 18:16-33 Abraham pled for the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, asking God to spare the people. Abraham did a bit of bargaining, getting God to agree to spare the cities if God could find ten righteous persons. Unfortunately, only Lot’s family qualified, and God destroyed the city. This time, we have Moses seeking to talk God out of wiping out a people. Moses has a good defense. He asks God how his wrath could burn against the people God brought out of Egypt with such power. Just think, Moses points out, what the Egyptians might 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”? (Exod. 32:12). In other words, what would the neighbors think? Moses has a point. If God wipes out the people of Israel in the desert it will look as if Yahweh is a big bully who led the people out into the desert just to kill them. The neighbors wouldn’t take into account the stubbornness of the people. So Moses implores God for a change of mind, turning away from wrath. Don’t bring disaster upon the people. Then comes the kicker. Moses calls on God to remember the covenant made with Abraham, Isaac, and Israel/Jacob. Remember “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.’” (Exod. 32:12-13). Yes, remember the covenant!  Now, it’s true that the covenant has conditions, and Israel had broken one of the rules (don’t make idols). It’s also true that God suggests another way of achieving the promise—starting over with Moses. Still, Moses wants God to think carefully about the optics of wiping out the people in this way.

What did God do when Moses reminded God of the covenant promise of descendants and land? God changed God’s mind and set aside the planned disaster. All was good (sort of). Moses still must confront the people, but the disaster is averted. That God’s wrath could burn with such heat that God might wipe out the people is a challenging message. It’s a vision present in scripture and in Christian theology (think of Jonathan Edwards’ famous sermon: “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”). At the same time, passages like this do invite us to consider the nature of judgment. Is God’s realm a judgment-free zone? Are there no consequences for our stubbornness in sin?  

While we ponder this question of judgment on God’s part, the reference to God’s change of mind demands our attention. Many people will ask the question: If God is immutable, thus “unchanging,” then how can this happen? In fact, how can a human talk God out of doing something God wants to do? It even raises the question of whether Moses is more ethical than Yahweh. We want to know how God can do such a thing if, as other scriptures suggest, God is love and that God’s steadfast love endures forever. So, if this is true then how can God lash out violently against even the most stubborn of people?  There are many questions raised by the passage, and we may not receive a fully satisfactory answer. But then this is not intended to be an abstract academic discourse. It’s a discussion of reality, of the way the world works. Maybe God does have changes of mind. In other words, maybe God is responsive to our requests and intercessions. It’s not that every crisis is averted, but God can respond because God is relational. Maybe that is the way the bible understands God’s nature.

While God relents and shows mercy, the other side of the coin is the idolatry exhibited by the people. This isn’t the last report on idolatry among the people of God. In fact, the nature of the idols people embrace might change with time, idols remain a problem. It might be a golden calf or a bank account filled with symbols of gold. The idol might be power or fame. In our day, fear can lead to an embrace of messages that run counter to the ways revealed to us by Jesus. There are false prophets who appeal to our anger, our fear, and our feeling of a need for self-preservation. Might we reject those voices and stay true to the covenant that God has made with us with Abraham and his descendants, including Jesus, the Christ? Might we who embrace Jesus embrace the covenant of blessing so that we might join in blessing the nations? Blessings are something the nations need in this moment of crisis.

As we consider this passage, it raises important questions about God’s nature and purpose, as well as our natures and sense of purpose. I invite you to consider this word by Brian Russell:

Exodus 32: 1– 14 is a testimony that God’s mercy triumphs over wrath and judgment. Israel’s sin was grave, but the Lord’s love was greater. God’s internal character will be fully revealed in Exodus 34: 6– 7a, where the Lord reveals his internal character as loving-kindness. God’s capacity to relent from judgment serves as a dual invitation for God’s people to worship the Lord for God’s loving nature, while simultaneously turning away from the sins of idolatry.  [Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship (pp. 838-839). Kindle Edition].

It is good to know that God’s mercy and love triumph over God’s judgment. At the same time, it’s important to note that idolatry is no laughing matter. It is damaging to our relationship with God. If we were to take the story further into Exodus 32, we would see that after interceding with God, when Moses returns to the camp and sees what is happening, he destroys the idol and even orders the execution of those who failed to repent (Exod. 32:15-29). It does appear that Moses didn’t want God to get involved, but he was ready to execute judgment on the nation, in the end, the nation itself is preserved. And with the nation's preservation, so goes the covenant. So, we give thanks for God's mercy!  

Image Attribution: Poussin, Nicolas, 1594?-1665. Adoration of the Golden Calf, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=58476 [retrieved October 8, 2023]. Original source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nicolas_Poussin_-_L%27Adoration_du_Veau_d%27or.jpg.