The Golden Calf

Xerxes wants to declare water sacred, because it is so important to life. “Water needs to be treated as sacred -- a gift, and a holy responsibility.”

I heard something similar from David Suzuki in a lecture once: he wanted us to worship the four classical elements, earth, air, fire, and water.

This idea does not appeal to me. If being important to our physical life is the standard of holiness, it would be just as proper to say that we ought to worship money. Does that sound right?

If not, is it because money is invented by man, and water comes from God (or nature)? Fine. Then at least, we ought to worship sex.

Or try this one. No form of life could survive without some form of waste elimination. These wastes then become the staff of life to other beings, which feed other beings, throughout the chain; the “great circle of life.” So surely by this same standard we should worship—er, excretions.

Does that sound right?

The first Bible reading at mass last Sunday seems to address the issue. It is Exodus 32, the story of the Hebrews casting a golden calf “to go before them”; against which Moses, in rage, broke the tablets of the law.

Why were the Hebrews wrong to bow before a golden calf? Because it was a graven image? But they have not yet heard that commandment. Moreover, the passage actually takes the trouble to note that the tablets of the law were also “graven” (Exodus 32:16): also graven images. Exodus is obviously contrasting the two, the tablets of the law and the golden calf, smashing one against the other, as opposite representations of the sacred. The tablets proper, the statue improper. And this should be evident without having read the tablets.

It is not because the statue is a graven image, then, but because the statue is an image from nature. The full commandment is “you shall not make for yourself a carved image—any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath.” It is a prohibition specifically against worshipping nature, or any part of nature, as sacred.

And the passage seems to illustrate why. Moses burns the statue, spreads the ashes on the waters, and forces the Hebrews to drink it. This is striking, because the statue was made of gold. Gold does not burn, does not form ash, and does on float on water. In other words, this must be symbolic, metaphoric. The point is nature’s destructibility. Nature is all that passes into non-being. It burns, dissolves, is devoured, one way or another is ultimately gone. By smashing the tablets of the law, then getting a replacement set, Moses is demonstrating the perfect indestructability, by contrast, of spiritual things. Breaking the tablets cannot break the law. Only such eternal things are to be worshipped.

The moral law, the Good, is sacred. Cows aren’t. Even gold isn’t.

Worshipping water is the essential idolatry here condemned-- which is, in a word, materialism.