Golden Bull, Golden Bear: Year A, Proper 23

Exodus 32:1-14; Isaiah 25:1-9; Psalm 106:1-6, 19-23; Psalm 23; Philippians 4:1-9; Matthew 22:1-14

The Golden Calf! What a story for our times with global credit markets crashing, and panicked investors stripping off their assets and thrusting them into gold and cash money markets.

The Elves have set it all up for us, as usual. On the one hand, undisciplined people, unable to wait for guidance from their leader who has gone up the mountain to seek guidance from God Himself, have forgotten who they are, and who saved them from the worst kind of oppression. Psalm 106 tells how “Moses, [God’s] chosen one, stood in the breach before him, to turn away his wrath from destroying them.” But Matthew’s Jesus has no time for compassion: “Many are called, but few are chosen.” On the other hand, Isaiah sings of the great feast, the banquet on the mountain, prepared for the just at the end of time. Paul exults in the nearness of the Lord, and the beloved Psalm 23 leads us gently home.

The choice is clear, if stark: right-wing conservatism, or left-wing liberalism; the proletariat versus the bourgeoisie; violent apocalyptic judgment or non-violent distributive justice-compassion. The conflict is as old as time. Once more we are sent back to the four questions of the apocalypse :

1) What is the nature of God? Violent or non-violent?
2) What is the nature of Jesus’ message? Inclusive or exclusive?
3) What is faith? Literal belief, or commitment to the great work of justice-compassion?
4) What is deliverance? Salvation from hell, or liberation from injustice?

This week’s focus is on Jesus’s message.

The parable of the wedding celebration appears in three versions: Matthew 22:1-14, Luke 14:16-24, and Thomas 64:1-12. Matthew’s version is the most elaborate, and the most compromised with contemporary First Century Christian concerns. Jerusalem has been destroyed, along with Jewish temple-centered religious practice; the Romanization of society has brought systems of patronage and collaboration. Anyone who isn’t properly dressed, who doesn’t fulfill the proper qualifications, is subject to exclusionary judgment. Only the elect can be trusted to be part of the community.

The version in Thomas, found in The Five Gospels, is much simpler. Here, a person is receiving guests, and has prepared a dinner party, not a wedding party. Thomas has no reference to invading armies that destroy the city. But the party-giver is frustrated when four invited guests turn him down. He has his slave go out and “bring back whomever you find to have dinner.” Then the transcriber of the sayings collected in Thomas opines, “Buyers and merchants [will] not enter the places of my Father,” (The Five Gospels, p. 509), which puts a very different spin on the story.

The third version in Luke is not included in any of the Revised Common Lectionary readings for the three-year cycle. Apparently the Elves decided that Matthew’s version is the definitive one for Christian theology and practice. However, the Jesus Seminar scholars point out that the version in Luke is likely the closest to what the historical Jesus would have told, although it too is permeated with early Christian piety. Imagine the scene, based on the stripped down version (The Five Gospels p. 353):

When Jesus was in Jericho, he encountered a head toll collector – a rich man named Zacchaeus. Later that evening, Jesus arrives for the banquet at Zach’s house. After the meal, as the wine jug is passed among the reclining guests, Zach asks Jesus what is the Kingdom of God? What is it like? How do we find it?

Jesus says, “There was a man who held an important position in Herod Antipas’ administration. He wanted to give a dinner party for some local businessmen so that he could recruit them to act as liaison with the Roman proconsul. But they declined the invitation for perfectly good reasons – don’t forget, it’s the law that if the Romans draft you for some project, you can finish your own work first. So later, this guy sends his servant around again telling his cronies that the feast is ready, but they all refuse to come. In a rage, now, the host tells the servant to bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame. . . .” Jesus looks around at the group, but they don’t seem to get it. He goes on: “When he sees that there is still room in his banquet hall, he sends his servant out into the countryside to round up people at sword-point.”

This parable is a huge joke, which does not translate well in a 21st Century world where the Roman patronage system no longer is in force. According to John Dominic Crossan, in First Century Rome, everyone participated in the patronage system, from God to the Emperor, to the noble classes, to the merchants, the traders, the military, servants, slaves, and the totally disenfranchised. Everyone was either a patron or a client, and everyone had both patrons and clients, people to whom and from whom favors or commercial debt was owed. The way to repay the debt among the upper classes was to hold a banquet, usually a sacrificial banquet, in which an animal (or several) were slaughtered in the temple, the blood poured out for the gods, and the meat shared among the guests – all of whom were clients of the one giving the feast. For a guest to refuse to attend would be social, political, and commercial suicide, regardless of where one was in the social strata. For a host to then fill the banquet hall with people with whom one did not and would never do business would be ludicrous. There would be no possibility of ever receiving an invitation or favor in return.

But of such is the Kingdom of God. This story is about grace, not apocalyptic judgment.

As for the Golden Bull, the temptation to extrapolate the metaphor to include pious diatribes against Wall Street Greed is great, but irrelevant. Moses makes his own Wall Street deal with God when he reminds God that if God takes out his frustration and anger on the people, God will look bad in the eyes of all the surrounding tribes and nations, including – especially – Egypt. “And the Lord changed his mind about the disaster he planned to bring on his people.” Then in the part we never read in any of the 3-year cycle of the Common Lectionary (Exodus 32:15-35), Moses takes on the roll of God and commands the Sons of Levi (who answer the call to be on the Lord’s side, and later become priests) to kill “your brother, your friend, and your neighbor.” So a great blood bath ensues. Perhaps in order to reinforce the point, by the end of chapter 32, God has gone back on his promise to Moses not to punish the people, and sends a plague on them “because they made the calf – the one that Aaron made.”

Taking Matthew’s version of the parable of the wedding feast as definitive, and including the entire story about Aaron and the Golden Calf, puts post-modern, 21st Century followers of Jesus, in the same camp with an avenging, double-crossing Moses in the service of a capricious God. Is the nature of God then violent, and is Jesus’s message then exclusive and relentlessly judgmental? Or are these stories illustrations of the constant human struggle with the normalcy of civilization, and the consequences of failing to act with distributive justice-compassion?

The relevance of the 21st Century Christian message for sustainable life on Planet Earth depends on the answer we choose. As we have seen in the past several lessons, in the realm of God, the requirements of Empire for debt and death have no power.

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