Читать книгу Breaking and Entering - Liz R. Goodman - Страница 9

When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered around Aaron and said to him, “Come, make gods for us, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.” Aaron said to them, “Take off the gold rings that are on the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.”

So all the people took off the gold rings from their ears, and brought them to Aaron. He took the gold from them, formed it in a mold, and cast an image of a calf; and they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made proclamation and said, “Tomorrow shall be a festival to the Lord.” They rose early the next day, and offered burnt-offerings and brought sacrifices of well-being; and the people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to revel.

The Lord said to Moses, “Go down at once! Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely; they have been quick to turn aside from the way that I commanded them; they have cast for themselves an image of a calf, and have worshipped it and sacrificed to it, and said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!’” (Exodus 32:1–8)

There’s a man who had a statue made of the Ten Commandments that weighs about five thousand pounds, two and a half tons. He needs a crane to move it, and sometimes the crane buckles under the weight.

That’s a joke.

You’re not laughing—which means either the joke isn’t funny or you don’t get it. But I know it’s a funny joke. So let me explain it. (And don’t get too down on yourselves. I didn’t get it at first either.)

I noticed something last week during worship that I’d never noticed before. The last line of the reading, which was the Exodus version of the Ten Commandments—there are two versions, one in Exodus and one in Deuteronomy—told of the people’s response to Moses’ encounter with God. They had been watching while Mount Sinai was engulfed in smoke and fire, and while Moses disappeared into the pyrotechnics; they saw Moses then emerge and come down, and they listened as he read what he’d been given—Ten Commandments that are actually better rendered as ten utterances, brief as they are, and even more so in Hebrew.

Here’s what the story said about this response: “When all the people witnessed the thunder and lightning, the sound of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking, they were afraid and trembled and stood at a distance, and said to Moses, ‘You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, or we will die.’ Moses said to the people, ‘Do not be afraid; for God has come only to test you and to put the fear of him upon you so that you do not sin.’”

Here’s what’s striking about this: Moses’ admission that the reason for all the spectacle, the shock and awe, has nothing to do with God’s presence, God’s essence. There’s nothing about God that is fire and smoke, trumpets blasting, thunder thundering. This isn’t how God necessarily comes to manifest among humans; this isn’t how God’s essence substantiates. No, this has to do with some human need, a human expectation of God.

Not unrelatedly, there’s been another shot fired in the culture war about religion. Bill Maher—comedian, and provocateur who’s got his own talk show, and mind behind the film Religulous by which he meant to strip naked the ridiculous nature of religion itself—made comments about Islam that then had movie star Ben Affleck coming to Islam’s defense.

Now, already you can likely guess that the discussion wasn’t an intellectually rigorous one. Not that I think these two are incapable of intellectual rigor—I have no idea about that—but I do know the context for the conversation isn’t conducive of such a thing: a talk show that is often more of a shout-down. Plus, what little I know of each of these two indicates that neither has any actual experience with Islam or any other “religious” practice for that matter.

So, what superficiality got played out between these two—attacker on the one side and defender on the other—is the idea that there are two kinds of people in the world: there are religious people and their gods, and there are irreligious people and their common sense; there are people who will defend religion (or at least their religion) against any and all attack or critique, and there are people who see religion as, well, “religulous.”

Amidst all this straw-man knocking-down is this depth that goes uncovered and unexplored and indeed probably entirely unknown: the idea that Lord himself, the Living One whom we meet in the Bible and with whom many people of the book throughout history and the world over pilgrimage through life to life, is as critical of religion as Bill Maher could ever be.

The Bible is a deeply ironic text. God, whom the Jews first recognized and then, across centuries, witnessed into the world; God, whom Jesus knew intimately as Father, Abba, Daddy; God, whom Peter and Paul and the other apostles spread abroad through preaching and baptizing and community-building—this God is a God who is deeply ambivalent about religion.

First, to define our terms: “religion” is famously difficult to define, and “you know it when you see it” doesn’t cut it. Knowing this, scholar William Cavanaugh surveyed university religion department catalogs and found courses on the following: “totems, witchcraft, the rights of man, Marxism, liberalism, Japanese tea ceremonies, nationalism, sports, [and] free market ideology.”6 In fact, the whole concept of religion is one that arrived late to the game. Though the practices that fall into this category are as old and persistent as humanity itself, the critical concept of religion is a modern concept, one introduced to study the strange peoples and practices that exploration and colonization had European people encountering the world over.

I always find it helpful, then, to go back to the word’s root. Re-ligio is a term meaning to re-bind, ligio meaning bind, as in ligature and ligament. So, perhaps religion is any phenomenon that binds people back together—one with another and one with their god, which is the transcendent made imminent. Re-ligio is, then also, that phenomenon which establishes who’s in and who’s out.

And now we’re in some tricky territory. Now we must proceed with caution. It’s what God would have us do.

Consider the story of Abraham and Isaac and Mount Moriah—when Abraham bound Isaac at God’s command so to sacrifice him, and then unbound him, at the Lord’s command so to let him go. There are those who call this story “The Binding of Isaac,” the Aquedah in Hebrew; and there are those who call this story “The Unbinding of Isaac.” Which is it to you?

And consider this—the scene revealed to the prophet Ezekiel of a valley that was full of dried bones, a mass grave, really, filled with the remains of a people slaughtered. But then the bones began to come together, a clattering, bone to its bone. And then there were sinews on these bones, ligaments, so to hold them together; and then flesh. It was a re-binding, this scene. It was a re-ligious coming together. The moment of true life for these resurrected bones comes when the breath of God enters each body, but the breath wouldn’t have had any place to fill had not the bones been rebound, bone to its bone.

But then consider this—when the king of Aram, Israel’s enemy, Naaman, was suffering terrible leprosy and sent for the Jewish prophet Elisha for help, for a cure. And, though he received one, it wasn’t what he was expecting, and he was dismayed, outraged actually, by the irreligious nature of the cure—so common a thing, so unspectacular a thing. “Go wash in the river Jordan seven times.” He said, in a rage, “I thought that for me he would surely come out, and stand and call on the name of the Lord his God, and would wave his hand over the spot, and cure the leprosy!” But then his servants approached and said to him, “Father, if the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it? How much more, when all he said to you was, ‘Wash, and be clean’?” So he went down and immersed himself seven times in the Jordan, and his flesh was restored “like the flesh of a young boy, and he was clean.”

Now consider Jesus and his many arguments with the religious authorities, noticing first of all that his objection was not because they merely abused their authority but because they abused their religious authority. Sloppy thinking has had those in the church often hear this as Jesus taking issue with them because they were Jewish. Sloppy thinking has had us sometimes assume Jesus objected to their religious practice because it was the wrong religion, the religious authorities of his day being Jewish while he was the first Christian. But Jesus wasn’t a Christian. He was a Jew. He was a Jew living in Jewish territory with other Jews, worshiping by Jewish Scripture and abiding faithfully with the Jewish God. So, no, he didn’t object to them because they were Jewish. He objected to them because they were religious, were religious before they were anything else. They led with religious rectitude and never departed from this.

And consider him saying this, as his ministry was becoming more and more focused on the cross: “Come to me, you who are weary; and I will give you rest—for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” The great twentieth-century theologian Paul Tillich claims, “[T]he burden He means to take from us is the burden of religion.”7 And he goes on to say that, when it comes to knowing and abiding with God, “Nearly nothing is demanded of you—no idea of God, and no goodness in yourselves, not your being religious, not your being Christian, not your being wise, and not your being moral. What is demanded is only your being open and willing to accept what is given to you, the New Being, the being of love and justice and truth, as it is manifest in Him whose yoke is easy and whose burden is light.”8

Finally, consider Jesus in the last week of his life, according to the Gospel of John, when he went to the grave of his friend Lazarus who had recently (though really) died. To no one in particular or to the grave or to the power of death, Jesus said this of the bands of cloth used to wrap a dead body, and more specifically to have wrapped Lazarus’s dead body: “Unbind him, and let him go.”

But then be mindful that on the night of his arrest, Jesus said to his disciples in reference to bread, said to all of them together (the “you” of this plural): “Take, eat; do so in remembrance of me;” And of the cup, he said, “This is the cup of the New Covenant; whenever you drink of it, do so in remembrance of me.” And consider this, that if to remember is to re-member or to reattach what has been dismembered or cut off, then this could well be understood as a sacrament of re-binding, of re-ligion.

And yet once dead, Jesus’ passion is said to have had this effect: the temple curtain torn in two, that is, the curtain that separated the inner sanctuary from the Holy of Holies, that innermost sanctuary into which no one could enter but the High Priest on the High Holy Day—this very seat of religious observance and cultic practice—yeah, that curtain. It was torn in two, as if to say there is no separation between the holy and the mundane, between the divine and the created order or even among those within the created order; there is no such dismemberment, or at least not anymore; and so there is no formal need for reattachment, for re-ligion.

This is what the Bible has to say regarding religion: it’s good, it’s bad; it’s a blessing, it’s a dreadful trap; you don’t need it, here it is as a fulfillment of your need; take and enjoy, take care and be very cautious.

Ambivalence, anyone?

Walter Brueggemann has something interesting to say about the golden calf. This is often thought to be an idol. This is often taken as the first transgression against the recently given Ten Commandments, one of which is, “You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God.” The golden calf is often taken as just such an idol, which means it took the people all of ten chapters to break their covenant with the Lord. But Old Testament scholar and quite fiery preacher (from what I’m told) and member of the United Church of Christ (go, team!) Mr. Brueggemann suspects it’s not so simple. He suspects that the golden calf “is an alternative representation for God . . . not idolatrous but simply a competitor to the ark of the covenant as a proper sign of divine presence.”9

This makes some sense to me. What’s more, as far as competitions go, this one seems epic. The golden calf is an appropriated fertility symbol—appropriated from Egypt, perhaps, and their bull god Apis; or from Canaan, perhaps, and their god Baal, imaged as a bull. This is to say the golden calf is a religious artifact plain and simple. Endowed with a power based on the people’s belief that it has power, and perhaps on the fact that the materials of which it was made are materials considered of great value, and so perhaps worth fighting over—peoples’ gold jewelry which they surrendered, though by what force or coercion we can only imagine—the golden calf carries no critique of itself, no warning of the power it purports to possess and exercise.

The Ark of the Covenant, on the other hand, is but a box (a gold-plated box, yes, but still just a box) in which the people could carry around the law, those two tablets of commandments by which a people might live together in peace. No magic, no spectacle, these were simple guidelines as to how love is lived out, how love behaves, so to enable life together and life abundant. The binding these guidelines offered the people—the religion contained and offered therein, so to speak—is a voluntary binding one to another. And it comes with the critique written right into it: “I am the Lord your God, have no other gods before me, and make no idols for worship. Rather, to be my people, honor your elders, remember the sanctity of time, and restrain from violating one another out of misplaced desire.”

Of course, this box was eventually imagined as having power of the more spectacular sort. When the Philistines had it in their possession after making war with the Israelites, all sorts of bad fortune that befell them was credited to their having this box. And then there’s the portrayal of the powers of this box in the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark—it burning the skin off any Nazi who tried to steal it. Yes, it’s true that this box came to be imagined as having great and terrible power—but I wonder if that, as Moses said, was all just God putting on a show to put the fear of God into the people so we would not sin.

The cost of sin, after all, is quite high. When a people, a nation, falls out of the bounds of a commonly held law and sense of authority, a common acknowledgement of who’s in charge and to be listened to and respected, it’s not an overstatement to say that all hell breaks loose.

Have you seen the news lately?

Here’s how another scholar sees it. Gene Tucker characterizes what Aaron was up to in authorizing the making of the calf: “Aaron, as a religious leader, responds to a religious need with a religious solution.”10 And that such a solution was an abomination to the Living God is but one more hint that God’s not necessarily a fan of religion.

And yet God does have mercy for our need for it, and so does apparently try to fulfill it—though in ways that actually give life rather than take it, and in a way that actually widens the circle of who’s in and who’s out so that it’s indeed a circle that has a center but no outer edge. God has mercy for our religious needs, and through time has met those needs with religious rites increasingly simple, increasingly light. And what we do here on any given Sunday is the most responsible thing we can as regards our need for religion—we hold it in the light of consciousness and good intention.

Light, indeed!

But, hey, did you hear the one about this guy who made a statue of the Ten Commandments, those utterances, those ineffable puffs of air by which God meant for the people simply to abide together in peace? The statue weighs five thousands pounds, two and a half tons! He needs a crane to move it around, and move it he does. He goes around the country with it so people can see it. Sometimes the crane buckles under its weight.

Now do you get the joke? It might even make Bill Maher laugh—and I don’t mean scoff but really laugh. I know it does me, but then I’m always up for a laugh.

Thanks be to God.

6. Cavanaugh, “Does Religion Cause Violence?”

7. Tillich, Shaking, 102.

8. Ibid., 102.

9. Brueggemann, An Introduction, 64.

10. Tucker, “Proper 19 [24].” 406.