Word to the Wise
Monday, July 30, 2007 - Seventeenth Monday in Ordinary Time
[Exodus 32:1-24, 30-34 and Matthew 13:31-35]Aaron replied, "Let not my Lord be angry. You know well enough how prone the people are to evil. They said to me, 'Make us a god to be our leader; as for the man Moses who brought us out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has happened to him.'"
The story of the Israelites and the Golden Calf is a familiar one. It gives rise to humor about Moses "breaking" all ten commandments at one and the same time. Some of the pictures I've seen of this show Roman numerals on the two tablets! But the power of the story is still there. Moses seems to be gone too long up on the mountain and the people get restless. They lose faith in Moses as a prophet ("this man Moses) and they demand a substitute god - a god of their own designs! The result is the infamous Golden Calf and they eventually wind up having to eat it! What strikes me as very modern in this incident is the fact that Aaron simply sees himself as somebody meeting the needs of the market! The consumers want a god of their own designs, so he gives them one. If the people are prone to evil, what's that to him? Perhaps he was afraid the mob would take out their resentment on him? Who knows? His response to Moses' angry question seems to be a sort of shrug. The true danger is in looking for a god of our own designs. If the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob isn't going to meet our needs, why not have a god of Tom, Dick and Harry? Why not make up our own set of "commandments" to meet the needs of the moment? I wish those questions were not strange or exaggerated. I hear them in various ways all the time. The "Chosen People" will often give God reason to regret the choice! Our world seems to follow in their footsteps. We make gods we can consume! The irony is that these "gods" often wind up consuming us! AMEN