Inevitably, we will corrupt ourselves by building idols. We’ll even accuse others of worshipping idols – that, too, can become an idol. We’ll also think that we are not sinners – that others are. So, our readings today show something of a corrupting idolatrous feedback loop: we are liberated from oppression, we make idols for or of ourselves, we deserve God’s wrath, we are saved from God’s wrath, repeat. In this loop, we have a mediator: a good shepherd who goes to great lengths to find one lost sheep, a householder scurrying through the dark to find a silver piece, Moses begging God’s mercy for his people, and Jesus. 

Moses, coming down from Mount Sinai, finds that the Israelites have made for themselves a golden calf to worship. In the world of social justice-adjacent Christianity, we often use the term golden calf to refer to idolatry in regards to Christian nationalism, capitalism, and bigotry and discrimination of all sorts. The golden calf here is whatever the person or persons are worshiping instead of God: power, money, pride, domination over others, and a sense of supremacy. Conversely, a more conservative position would characterize the golden calf as a false belief, most often polemically against other beliefs and “ideologies.” More yet, a radical position would even position the golden calf as ideas of progress, false consciousness, or any ideology that either distracts or simply does not address the material conditions of the poor, the afflicted, the suffering, and the oppressed. Put simply, the golden calf often stands in for something we don’t like or disagree with. While these interpretations certainly have various merits and applications, I’m curious about how we can go deeper into today’s readings. 

Bible scholars point to either the Egyptian god Apis or the Canaanite god Baal as likely inspiration for the golden calf crafted by the Israelites. Apis, symbolic of the creator god Ptah, was associated with fertility, agriculture, resurrection, renewal, and the Pharaoh. According to Encyclopedia of Ancient Deities, Baal, a contender throughout the Hebrew Bible, is subordinate only to god El, who was the creator and supreme god. Baal was the “source of life and fertility, the mightiest hero, the lord of war, and the defeater of the god Yam (a sea god who opposed Baal for the position of king of the gods)” (The Columbia Encyclopedia). The political and theological struggle between the cult of Baal and the God of Israel is a recurring story in the Hebrew Bible, often intertwined with covenantal disloyalty, identity & social cohesion, kingship, the eradication of ritual practices, and the constant critique and wrath of prophets. The point in highlighting is that the golden calf is suggestive of a rich regional and biblical register flush with political and theological meaning. Certainly, fertility, life, resurrection, and renewal are all quite wonderful (war not so much). Moreover, we simply shouldn’t oppose other rituals and beliefs just because they are not ours. Instead, what is at stake is an argument over just how renewal and life come into our lives and liberate us. 

Consider the repetitions of the phrase “who brought you out of Egypt” as it’s found in Exodus, particularly in chapter 32. According to our scriptures, God said to Moses, “Go down, now! These people whom you led out of Egypt have corrupted themselves! In such a short time, they have turned from the way that I have given them, and made themselves a molten calf. Then they worshipped it and sacrificed to it, saying, ‘Israel, here is YHWH, who brought you up from the land of Egypt!’” Here, God is justifying God’s potential wrath by reminding Moses that He is the God who brought the biblical Israelites out of Egypt, not the golden calf of the Egyptians or the Canaanites. For the first time, as a people, the biblical Israelites are confusing the source of their previous and ongoing liberation from oppression, their source of generation, and salvation. At stake, as we’ll see throughout the biblical narrative, is losing the way God has shown them and falling back into sin, captivity, and oppression. Moses, the mediator between God and his people, intervenes, demonstrating to God that at least he remembers God’s promise to Abraham and his descendants.

From this fundamental form of idolatry critique we find in Exodus, we find Jesus in Luke calling attention to the idolatry of the supposedly sinful other. Jesus is accused by the Pharisees of teaching and eating with sinners. This was a drastic break from religious and social expectations of the Second Temple period. Tax collectors, prostitutes, Gentiles, and those deemed ritually unclean were prohibited from participating in the shared life and salvation of the Jewish people.  It is important to note that, outside of their depiction in Luke, the Pharisees were also reformers and teachers among the common people, concerned with extending the Law into daily life. Portrayed in Luke as religiously devout but closed off from God’s transforming grace, the Pharisees are not exactly as proud and vain as might be understood in a supercessionist manner. Rather, consider that this is a polemical discourse between contemporaries attempting to reform Jewish society by applying the Law directly. In place of a golden calf, Jesus is pointing to a different idol that is preventing Israel from remembering the way of liberation and salvation – the exclusion of sinners, those deemed ritually impure, and the other. Jesus is pointing out that both those outside and inside of God’s grace are either forgetting or do not know the God who brought them out of Egypt, the God of unmerited mercy and resounding liberation. 

Rather, like Moses, Jesus puts himself in the position of mediator and shepherd. Forstalling God’s wrath and offering to pick up and help carry the way of salvation, Jesus emphasizes the preciousness of just one person who is not folded into the knowledge and experience of God’s steadfast and eternal love. The way out of captivity  and oppression is the remembrance of the God of salvation, an experience of liberation and wholeness that both accommodates the experience of those unlike us in a shared journey of salvation. This is a deeply joyous act of solidarity and a commitment to collective liberation.

In Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Trans Philosophy, philosopher Tania Mae Betcher posits her work as “a resistance sense-making exercise in the face of trans oppression” (11). She focuses on critiquing the phenomenon of “reality enforcement,” or the violent and coercive inscription of ideology onto the body, the human world, and beyond. Instead of thinking about the self as personhood defined by the self-possessing self of John Locke, she advocates for the self generated from interpersonal space, or the “capacity of all sensory and discursive encounters between us to admit closeness and distance” (38). Against the idolatries of fascism, exclusion, and justified violence, the following are questions of self-inquiry and inventory derived from the notion that we are co-determined selves created through engagement with one another.

1. Where do I notice the pull toward conformity, not simply out of fear, but because of the pleasure of potentially belonging? 
2. What forms of collective identity feel intoxicating to me, and how might they risk preventing my liberation and that of others? 
3. When I act “as myself,” how much of that is shaped by what I think others expect of me? 
4. What illusions of control or self-possession am I most reluctant to release? 
5. How can I practice decreation, not as self-negation, but as an opening to receive the reality of others? 
6. In what ways do my encounters with others create who I am, and how can I attend to those encounters without trying to possess or define them?  
7. When I meet someone in their suffering, am I prepared to stay present without turning them into a symbol or using their pain to confirm my own story?

1. How can I practice being present in a way that allows others to create both themselves and change who I am?