We apologise for the poor quality of the image in this video. We had a camera that failed to focus properly.
A sermon on Exodus 32:1-14 and Matthew 22:1-14 by Nathan Nettleton
A video recording of the whole liturgy, including this sermon, is available here.
Times of crisis and uncertainty always seem to produce a hunger for strong leaders, and so, when Moses is missing, presumed dead, in our first reading, the fear and anxiety among the Israelite people is no surprise. They are out in the wilderness where daily survival depends on finding water and not being found by enemies, and now their leader has disappeared up a mountain, hasn’t been heard from for 40 days, and the mountain is on fire. No more Moses. Panic is spreading.
It is in the face of that panic that Aaron gives in to the people’s desperate demand for something solid and visible and manageable that they can rally around to make themselves feel safe and hopeful. Aaron manufactures some serious hardware, a gold image in the shape of a calf, and declares a festival to the Lord.
This story is often over-simplified, with the golden calf seen as a kind of anti-god, but the people claim the calf as a visible link to their true God. “This is the god who brought you out of slavery,” they say, and “tomorrow shall be a festival to Yahweh.” And just as our worship of God centres on a feast, the Israelites settle down to eat and drink and revel in celebration.
We are told that God was outraged, but it is not instantly obvious why. After all, God has just been giving instructions to Moses for the making of all sorts of gold and silver objects for use in their portable temple. But as our psalm explains it, looking back, they were forgetting God, their saviour, and putting their trust in the hardware instead.
I suspect that things haven’t changed that much. Australia used to look to the USA for leadership that would keep us safe, but now most of us think that American leadership is missing in action, and we’re anxiously feeling the need for something new and solid and very expensive to go before us and keep us safe. We’re going to need our own nuclear submarines, even if, somewhat ironically, we are hoping the USA will provide them under the AUKUS agreement.
The gold for Aaron’s calf came from the earrings of wives, sons and daughters. I wonder whose futures we are willing to melt down to produce these submarines that are supposed to go before us and make us feel safe.
By the time Moses is ready to come down from the mountain, everyone is feasting. Can you imagine how difficult it would have been for anyone to refuse to participate in that feast? When an anxious fearful mob have decided that this is the answer, you question it at your peril. Once something is seen as sacred, no dissenting voice can be tolerated.
Theologian John Thatamanil, writing about the worship of guns in America, argues that a surefire sign that we are in bondage to an idol is that any questioning of the reverence shown to it triggers anger and hostility, perhaps even threats of death. You can tell that something is considered sacred when it requires unconditional loyalty and unquestioning obedience.
It’s always much easier to see that in other people than it is in ourselves. I know I don’t worship guns, but there are all sorts of other idols. What do I treat with such respect and reverence that I’d be outraged if someone questioned it or put it down?
In our increasingly polarised world, that sort of sacred outrage can appear on both sides of the one issue, with both pointing at each other and alleging blasphemy and idolatry.
Take, for example, the polarised reactions to the arrest of Ben Roberts-Smith on war crime charges. To some, “our” soldiers are the most honourable soldiers in the world and so can do no wrong. Charges against a decorated Aussie soldier are thus an outrageous slur on all our troops and an act of gross disloyalty, even treason.
To me, that view seems blinded by idolatry. But maybe I’m not so different. Maybe I’m simply the mirror opposite, seeing him as so obviously guilty that a trial seems like a waste of time. Just strip him of his medals, lock him up, and throw away the key.
Both sides, locked as we are into our idolatries, would be ready to skip the trial and just declare him a hero or a murderer without any proper process. And the Afghan men who were killed are almost entirely erased and overlooked by both sides. To one side they are the forgotten inevitable collateral of war, and to the other side they are reduced to legal exhibits to prove a point.
Both sides tend to forget the humanity of the soldiers too. We don’t want to see what war did to them, or accept any responsibility for those who came home broken and morally wounded.
Perhaps the terrifying parable we heard from Jesus tonight speaks to this. But I can’t really do anything with this parable without first addressing a big problem with it. When Jesus starts a parable by saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who … blah, blah, blah,” we commonly jump to the conclusion that the king represents God. But the king in this story is a capricious monster who commits horrible crimes. Problem!
To those who first heard Jesus tell this story, the behaviour of this king would have sounded very familiar – it would have sounded just like King Herod. Burning a city down while dinner went cold would have been recognised as on a par with beheading John the Baptist during a birthday banquet. But we get confused because Herod is no longer current affairs, and because there is a somewhat similar parable in Luke’s gospel that works the other way around. So perhaps the king here is not God. Perhaps something else is going on.
Firstly, I want you to notice that, in common with our golden calf story, we have a feast, and in both cases, it is a feast that you dare not refuse to participate in. The people who fill the seats at this feast came after seeing the king burn down the houses of anyone who was invited but didn’t turn up. No dissent is tolerated.
But then there is a dissenter. This becomes the focal point of the parable. There is someone who isn’t conforming to the expectations. He’s not wearing the right clothes.
“Friend, how did you get in here without the right clothes?” demands the king. The question is like a loyalty test. Are you one of us, or not? Do you dress yourself in the right values, the right opinions, the right politics, the right theology? Are you going to fit in and conform, or be the intolerable outlier?
The non-conforming guest stands speechless. That’s another clue about which way round to hear this parable, because that description sounds just like Matthew’s description of Jesus standing speechless before the high priest and Pilate. Matthew seems to be inviting us to recognise the one who refuses to conform to the groupthink as the Jesus-figure.
The guest’s silence, like the silence of Jesus, is not an attempt to keep his head down and keep out of trouble. He’d be wearing the expected clothes and blending into the crowd if he was doing that. This silence is the silence of one who stands before the trumped-up court and refuses to answer on its twisted terms. Like Jesus, he is saying, “Your questions are grotesque, an obvious loyalty test trap, and do not deserve to be answered.”
Some of you may have felt yourself cornered in just such a loyalty test this past week. There is really no neutral way to talk about what October 7 means anymore, and each year when the anniversary comes around, many of us feel tempted into the other kind of silence, the keep-your-head-down, stay-out-of-trouble kind of silence.
That 1,200 people were killed in Israel that day is not in dispute, most of them brutally murdered. And that the Israeli response has so far seen more than 70,000 Palestinians killed is not in dispute either. But beyond those facts, even how you name the date is not neutral, because whether October 7 is portrayed as the beginning of the story or as the next stage of an ongoing story changes who you are implying committed the first atrocity, who started the chain of attack and retaliation.
Each side holds its telling of the story as self-evidently true. Neither can tolerate any dissent. Both treat any questioning as hostility, as taking the side of criminals and barbarians. Turn up in the wrong clothes, in the wrong colours, and you will be silenced, bound and cast out.
The loyalty test can target any of us here, but it is particularly hard on Jewish Australians, who feel pressured to denounce Israel in order to be accepted, and on Palestinian Australians, pressured to condemn Hamas before they’ll be listened to.
I mentioned earlier John Thatamanil’s thesis that intense hostility to questioning is a sure sign that an idol is in play. But don’t mishear that as suggesting that every intense conviction is an idol. Many of the biblical prophets were pretty intense in their convictions. Jesus was pretty intense in his convictions, even when standing in silent protest. Intense convictions about what’s going on in Gaza are not automatically idolatrous. Perhaps the real test of idolatry here is this question: “Whose dead am I forbidden to grieve?”
To return to the golden calf, surely one thing that we can recognise here is that both the Israeli and the Palestinian peoples are living in heightened states of fear and anxiety, as were the mixed crowd of slaves escaping from Egypt. And the rulers of both have responded to that fear by producing expensive hardware to go before them and give them some sense of security – vastly different scales, but the same move. Those who worship that hardware accept no questioning of the appropriateness of its lethal deployment. On both sides, they erase from memory the victims of the other side, and seek to silence and cast out anyone who would bring those victims back to mind.
There are real people who continue to refuse to conform to the dress code of either feast. The Parents Circle–Families Forum is a grassroots organisation that brings together bereaved Israeli and Palestinian families to listen to each other’s stories and grieve each other’s dead. As their website says, the personal stories foster an “understanding that the pain of bereavement is the same for both Israelis and Palestinians.” Such “projects of beauty” in the face of horror are surely what our faith traditions call us to, but of course, these people are often treated as traitors by both sides.
“Whose dead am I forbidden to grieve?” And when I succumb to deadly idolatry myself, whose dead will I forbid you to grieve?
In the very next chapter of Matthew’s gospel (23:29–30), Jesus confronts us, saying, “You build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous, and you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part in shedding the blood of the prophets.’”
We build the tombs which claim to honour the victims of violence, but which actually erase them by coopting their memory and deploying it in service of the myths that justify our current idolatries. The murdered prophets, the Afghan villagers, the broken soldiers, the Israeli hostages, the people of Gaza – the idols feed on them all.
On Australian war memorials and soldiers’ graves, we often engrave the words, “Lest we forget.” At their best, they are beautiful words calling us to remember truly. But sadly those words are too easily coopted by our partisan minds to mean “Lest we question,” or even “Lest we forget the atrocities of our enemies,” and thus become part of the mythology that serves the voracious idols.
The feast at the centre of our worship is hosted by the guest who was cast out of the king’s banquet, denounced as a traitor by all for refusing to clothe himself in the myths of either side at the expense of the other. It is hosted by a Galilean Jew who was killed for refusing to bend the knee to the idols of empire. And on his tongue, “Lest we forget” becomes “Do this to remember. This is my body, broken for you, and you, and you. Do this to remember me. Do this to remember me, and to remember all who I am remembering, all the unnumbered victims who I bring to the table with me.”