Exodus 32:1-14 Commentary

Meanwhile, Back at Camp…

Let’s pause for a moment to consider where we are in the text.  Last Sunday’s lectionary reading was the 10 Commandments in Exodus 20 but the intervening 11 chapters are filled with all kinds of instructions for God’s people — from how to treat animals and property to the ordination of priests. God is preparing a whole way of life, an infrastructure for the flourishing of God’s people in the wilderness for now and the Promised Land beyond. 

It is all glory and hope and provision on that mountaintop.  It is God lovingly providing a way of life for God’s people.  Since the text is not adverse to anthropomorphism, we could imagine God’s excitement in describing the temple to Moses, geeking out about the details and dreaming up the beginning of a legal and ethical framework in which all of God’s children will experience justice. Finally. After years and years of slavery. The CEB Study Bible suggests “The reader’s expectation is that now the story will proceed to the actual construction of the dwelling that will provide a home for the Lord’s glorious presence. That, after all, was God’s ultimate desire and intention.” 

Then, like a needle scratching a record, the camera zooms away from the mountain and focuses in on the people gathered at the base of Sinai.  An ominous voiceover intones, “meanwhile, back at the camp” and the CEB Study Bible tells us that God’s plan for flourishing “is suddenly and unexpectedly shattered. Israel breaks the most important commandment against worshipping other gods and against making idols of gold or silver.” The covenant that God is nurturing at the top of the mountain is being actively violated by God’s people at the bottom of the mountain. 

A Tale of Two Leaders

We see two leaders in this tale. The CEB Study Bible contrasts their leadership in this way, “Moses takes full responsibility for the future of the people and pleads on behalf of the Israelites before God. Aaron, on the other hand, blames the people for his own bad actions and refuses to accept responsibility as a leader.”

Rising up among the people, Aaron can’t fend off their idolatrous request. In fact, it doesn’t even seem like he tries to redirect them at all! In verse 5, he attempts to reframe their worship of the idol by building an alter to the Lord in front of it, claiming that their worship to the idol is, in fact, worship of the Living God.  Although the obvious commandment-breaking is the second commandment, you could argue that Aaron’s leadership adds a trespass of the third commandment as well.  Aaron wants to pretend that worshipping a false god is part of worshiping the LORD God.  He wants to have it both ways (and here I hope all us pastors take notice because this temptation is so very prevalent in ministry.) Robert Alter suggests, “Aaron tries both to placate the people and yet to preserve a sense of loyalty to the Lord, YHWH.”  How easy it is for ministry leaders to use the LORD’s name in vain in this way! 

Standing on the mountain, Moses is aglow with the vision God has shaped all around him of what life will be like for the people under God’s care. Then God relays to Moses all that is happening below and wants Moses to stand aside while God punishes the people.  God can do this because, in the process, God no longer refers to Israel as “my people.”  He hands them over to Moses, like “check out what your people are doing!”  Perhaps there is a kind of humor in it, like disobedient Israel is a hot potato between Moses and God on that mountain top. But it isn’t funny, really. With this language, God is effectively disowning Israel. They are not his problem any more and, if they are disowned, then God can punish them as enemies. 

God also pens a loophole into his contract with Moses in verse 10. If Moses stands aside, God will “make a great nation out of you.” In other words, “God gives Moses the chance to abandon the Israelites and start over. Moses can become a new Abraham, the father of a whole new and great nation.” Robert Alter gifts us with a glimpse of how Jewish scholarship has engaged this passage that is rightfully as troubling to their theology as to ours by suggesting “either God, imagined in frankly human terms, is so thoroughly fed up with the refractory people that He really contemplates destroying them utterly and then starting from scratch with Moses, or these words are a kind of test of Moses.”

If this is a test, Moses passes with flying colors. Moses stands by his people. It sure seems like Moses is recalling God to God’s own covenant promises. Part of this is hot-potato-ing the people back to God’s remit. Moses stands firm. They aren’t MY people. They are YOURS. Now think of all you’ve already done to deliver them.  Consider what it will look like when news of your smiting reaches Egypt. Moses keeps going, reaching back into history to argue that ending things here and now isn’t just going back on a covenant that is 12 chapters long.  Breaking covenant now reduces all of God’s promises to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to lies. 

God Does WHAT?!

After all this, verse fourteen tells us “the LORD changed his mind about the terrible things he said he would do to his people.”  This will, of course, present some trouble to those who hold to belief in the immutability of God — what God says, God will do.  God is unmoved and unchanging.  Even so, God desires relationship with human beings, which requires God to be discernable in human terms.  God relents to have human authors tell the story and share the history of God’s relationship with God’s people.  In that process — as, indeed, with the incarnation — God becomes vulnerable.  This is certainly a story of God’s vulnerability even as it is, ultimately, the continuing story of God’s determined pursuit of God’s people. The CEB Study Bible points out the irony that “in this case, God reverses course about destroying Israel in order to avoid reversing earlier long-standing promises to bless Israel.” 

Illustration

The idea of Scripture as human language about God might be off-putting to some and here it is helpful to draw in the faithful witness of John Calvin himself, who wrote this: “For who even of slight intelligence does not understand that, as nurses commonly do with infants, God is wont in a measure to ‘lisp’ in speaking to us? Thus such forms of speaking do not so much express clearly what God is like as accommodate the knowledge of him to our slight capacity.”  Although Calvin argues that this does not express clearly what God is like, the notion of what theologians call divine accommodation is, itself, a beautiful depiction of God’s character, as a loving parent who desires to know and be known.