The Magic Golden Calf

by Fr Jonathan Tobias

— not an idol, but the way beyond it

Out came the calf …

Moses was taking far, far too long up on Mount Sinai, and the people started to ask questions.

Maybe he was never coming back. Maybe he had fallen off a cliff. Maybe he had been deluded all along, making up this whole God-story.

This God, after all, had such a strange name: “I AM.” That is not even a proper name, they might have thought. It sounds more like an ontological statement — at least to the philosophers among them.

Moses’ brother Aaron was supposedly in charge while Moses was away. So the people demanded a meeting.

“Make us gods who shall go before us,” they said. “As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.”

Aaron, who knew which way the wind was blowing, relented. He told them to take off their gold earrings, which everyone seems to have been wearing at the time. From these donations, he fashioned a golden calf.

Then he announced, with astonishing religious confidence, “Tomorrow shall be a feast to the Lord.”

And, as the book of Exodus recounts, “the people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play.”

And play they did, with bells on. If you have seen The Ten Commandments, that “play” was quite a display.

Moses heard about all this straight from the Lord and came down the mountain in a fury. He threw down the tablets, whose words had been inscribed by God, and demanded from Aaron an explanation.

Aaron’s answer was one of the great evasions in religious history.

“They told me to make them gods,” he said, “so I took their gold, threw it into the fire, and out came this calf.”

Out came this calf.

As though it had simply appeared. As though no one had shaped it. As though idolatry were a kitchen accident.

That was not exactly true.

The modern art of golden calf making

But it is often true that this is how golden calves are made, then and now. We rarely mean to do it. We do not usually wake up one morning and say, “Today I think I shall replace the living God with a more convenient one — a god who will stay put, do as I say, bless my tribe, vindicate my resentments, sanctify my fears, and march at the head of my army.”

We do not announce, “The true God is not quite useful enough, so I shall make another.”

And yet the gold goes into the fire.

And somehow, out comes this calf.

The golden calf was not made because Israel had suddenly become secular. That is the first thing to notice. The people were not asking for atheism. They were asking for religion.

They wanted a god they could see. A god they could manage. A god who would go before them on schedule. A god who would not disappear into cloud and thunder and silence for forty days.

The living God was too free. Too hidden. Too mysterious. Too slow.

So they made a god who could be counted on.

That is the great temptation of idolatry. The idol is not merely false. The idol is useful. It gives us religious certainty without surrender, divine sanction without conversion, worship without waiting, community without holiness, power without repentance.

Advantages of a pet god

And this is where the golden calf becomes more than an ancient story. It becomes a mirror. A quite modern, fully up-to-date mirror.

Because a golden calf need not be gentle, sentimental, or indulgent. A pet god does not have to be cuddly. Sometimes the pet god is ferocious. Sometimes he is a god of iron will, absolute decree, sovereign violence, and sacred cruelty.

But he is still a pet god if he reliably serves the needs of the people who made him.

He may roar, but he roars on command. He may condemn, but he usually condemns the people we already despise. He may bless war, but it is always our war. He may explain disaster, but in ways that protect our system from repentance. He may be called “Almighty,” “Sovereign,” “Biblical,” “Yahweh” or even—yes even—“Christ.”

But if he exists to authorize domination, excuse cruelty, silence moral protest, and give divine cover to our fears, then he is not the living God. He is not Jesus.

He is a theological instrument.

He becomes a threat armed with eternal torment, a god more fluent in hell than heaven.

He is a golden calf with thunderbolts.

The abuse of Surge Illuminare

This is why I am so troubled by the way some Christians misuse Isaiah’s words: “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor your ways my ways, says the Lord.”

Too often this line is used to defend divine arbitrariness. God may look cruel to us, we are told, but that is only because cruelty is secretly a higher form of love. God may appear to author disaster, violence, and destruction, but who are we to question the Almighty? We are only clay. He is the potter.

But that is not what Isaiah is saying.

In Isaiah 55, the higher ways of God are not higher cruelty. They are higher mercy. The wicked are told to forsake their ways and return to the Lord because God will “abundantly pardon.” God’s transcendence is not the transcendence of moral unintelligibility. It is the transcendence of mercy over vengeance, pardon over retaliation, generosity over scarcity.

God is not saying, “My ways are morally incoherent.”

God is saying, “My mercy is beyond your miserable little retaliatory imagination.”

Dismantling the golden calf

Christians do not read Scripture as though Christ has not come.

We read it after Bethlehem, after the Sermon on the Mount, after the Cross, after the empty tomb, after the road to Emmaus where the risen Lord opened the Scriptures and taught his disciples to see everything in the light of himself.

The Sermon on the Mount dismantles the golden calf.

It dismantles the god who blesses retaliation.

The god who authorizes contempt.

The god who sanctifies religious performance.

The god who gives us permission to hate our enemies and despise inconvenient people.

The god who can be invoked to make our yes and no sound more divine than they are.

Jesus does not reveal a God beyond good and evil. He reveals the Father whose perfection is mercy: the One who makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and unjust.

That God cannot be turned into a tribal fetish.

That God cannot be made into a war banner.

That God cannot be used.

That God does not stay put.

And this is why we keep making calves.

The living God moves. He calls. He interrupts. He forgives the wrong people. He commands mercy when we want vengeance. He blesses the poor in spirit when we are busy admiring the powerful. He tells us to love enemies when we would rather have a religion that confirms our hatreds.

He prefers mobile tabernacles to stone temples that become talismans.

He goes ahead of us, but never as a mascot.

He is not the possession of our nation, party, class, tribe, ideology, or grievance. He is not the patron deity of our resentments. He is not the chaplain of our violence. He is not the guarantor of our rightness.

He is the Lord.

When the golden calf quotes us too well

So the question is not whether we are capable of making golden calves. We are. The question is whether we can recognize the calf when it bears the vocabulary of our own religion, when it quotes Scripture, when it promises order, when it blesses our side, when it offers certainty without repentance and power without love.

Aaron’s mistake was not only that he made an idol.

It was that he called the idol by the name of the Lord.

That remains the danger.

Not that we will reject God openly, but that we will fashion a god we can use and then announce a feast in his honor.

Not that we will abandon religion, but that we will turn religion into a furnace where fear, grievance, violence, and anxiety are melted down and shaped into something golden, visible, manageable, and false.

And then, when someone asks what happened, we may shrug like Aaron and say, “I threw the gold into the fire, and out came this calf.”

The God who does not stay put

But that is not the Gospel.

The Gospel is not the announcement of a god who can be managed. It is the revelation of the Father in the face of Jesus Christ: the crucified and risen Lord, the healer, the enemy-lover, the feet-washer, the one who forgives from the cross, the one who breaks the machinery of vengeance by absorbing it and returning peace.

The living God is not made by our fear.

He is not molten from our anxieties.

He is not forged in the furnace of our need to dominate.

He is not a golden calf with thunderbolts.

He is the God who comes down from the mountain, not to be possessed, but to set us free.

And freedom, as Israel learned, is much harder than slavery.

Slavery at least had predictability. Egypt had schedules, quotas, gods, monuments, and chains. Freedom had wilderness, manna, cloud, fire, waiting, and a God who would not stay where they put him.

That is why the golden calf is always tempting.

It offers the religious comfort of Egypt without the inconvenience of chains.

But the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ — does not lead us backward into manageable bondage. He leads us forward into the dangerous mercy of the Kingdom.

And in that Kingdom, the golden calf has no place.

The Sermon on the Mount has broken it.

The Cross has exposed it.

The Resurrection has left it behind.

The living God walks on.