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.
Obey.
After these things God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt-offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.”
So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac; he cut the wood for the burnt-offering, and set out and went to the place in the distance that God had shown him. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place far away.
