Month: October 2014

This is the story you should hear when you think of the commandment not to have graven images. We think of those pagan stone heads carved on Easter Island, or the Golden Calf as in today’s reading, ancient and superstitious. But let’s suspend that for a moment. Like we did with the fourth commandment, let’s imagine we’re sitting around the fire in the evening with our people. We’re Hebrew slaves in Egypt, and it’s been a long, hot day of gathering straw in the fields and making bricks at the ovens. We have to do it because the king tells us to, and who is the king? He is the very image of their god, he is god’s human effigy, he has power like a god. He says who lives and who dies, who works, and who enjoys. Pharaoh is even called a living god!

But someone is telling a story at the fire tonight. It’s Genesis 1:

“Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’

So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.”

In this story, God created the first people. And created them all in the image of God! All these people, male and female, are created in the image of God! And humans were meant to rule the world, to have dominion, like kings have dominion, as rulers! In this story pharaoh is not the only image of god on earth – we all are! Can you believe it? It says, We Are Somebody! This is radical stuff for a bunch of slaves to hear. The point of the story is not to describe a science of creation. The point is justice, the equality of all.

But then, generations later, the slaves have come out of Egypt, now they are free. They are still sitting around a campfire, now out in the wilderness, because they don’t have their own country, they haven’t found a home yet. And some of them have forgotten the old stories, and start thinking, let’s be like people with a country, let’s have a god like all the other people do. And so they go to Moses’ brother and ask him to make them something they can worship.

This story is not about how God is so wrathful you have to tiptoe around and make sure you obey each and every one of his many rules. That’s not what’s wrong here. What’s wrong is that, way back in Genesis 1, at the very start of the Hebrew testament, we already learned that we are all made in the image of God. You don’t need a golden calf to see God. All the people around you – and all the people over the mountain, in the next country – all are made in the image of God, we can see God in these people. That’s where we are supposed to look for God, that’s why graven images are wrong. Because if god is a bunch of gold, then God is not in the face of my neighbor. So who cares about this rotten neighbor of mine? The golden calf’s priest says to go to war with my neighbor who doesn’t look right or worship right, or eat the right foods. Those neighbors who have different colored skin, or different sexual practices – the golden calf hates them!

But God calls us all to remember our Genesis birthright. All men and women are created equal! You think that’s Jefferson? That’s Genesis 1! We are all somebody! We all equally bear the image of God, so our religion calls us to cherish that God image, and love our neighbors as ourselves. That is some radical good news in the ancient near east…or anywhere, anytime.

If the story that we are all God’s image-bearers, all equal, and so all to be cherished by all, is not good news, I don’t know what is. And it’s way back in the beginning of the Hebrew Testament. The Scriptures call us to accept this great principle of equality

The 10 Commandments are in Exodus, chapter 20, early in the Hebrew scriptures. In the New Testament, in Matthew 22, Jesus is asked what is the greatest commandment, and replies, “Love God with all your heart and soul and mind, this is the greatest commandment. And a second is like it: love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” This isn’t a departure from the list of ten in Exodus 20. If we look at the ten, they are in groups: 1 to 3 are about loving God. 5 to ten are ways to show love for others. Number 4 is a sort of bridge, connecting the two threads. So the ten are elaborations from which are condensed the two greatest commandments from Jesus.

How do we understand the fourth, the bridge? It points us straight back to Genesis 1, to the creation story. What do we hear there? The Spirit hovered over the waters, it was evening and it was morning, and it was good. God did the work of creation in 6 days. But then, God didn’t decide, I’m done, it’s all good, let’s party! No, in Genesis 2, God was bushed: Whew, I’m beat, I need a day off. Even the Almighty finds creation to be hard work.

The Genesis story was not told to people like us, it doesn’t require that we sit home and not go shopping or work in the garden or build a deck on Saturday, the seventh day. Step back and think of the original listeners. This story would not have been told in the Pharaoh’s palace, or among the shopkeepers or in the homes of overseers in charge of the slaves. It was told at the Hebrews’ village fire in the evening, after a hard day in slavery for the Egyptians. Some had been gathering straw under the hot sun, some baked bricks at hot ovens, some had set the bricks to build the storehouses for Pharaoh’s ever-increasing treasure. Exodus 5 recalls the demands for more, and harder, work by the slaves.

As the Hebrew slaves sat at their meager meal, someone would retell the old story, that on the 7th day God rested. Rested! So, does the 4th commandment tell us not to pray on Saturday, because God’s not in the office? No, in my view Genesis is not a science text or description of God’s strengths and weaknesses. It is telling the oppressed how they should be able to live in this world, how life is meant to be. It is telling the slaves that God did not mean for them to be oppressed under the ceaseless work ordered by the Egyptian empire. It was hard to believe, that there should be a different rhythm to life. Did the Kingdom of God mean that we Hebrews, too, should have a day of rest, like a free people? Dare we hope for freedom?

Today we normally think of the New Testament, the Gospel, as the “Good News” of God. But here, in the very first chapters of the first book of the Old Testament, we find good news of how the Kingdom of God would be different from the empires of man.
Certainly the slaves did not yet have a Sabbath day of rest. Scholars believe that the incorporation of this Sabbath rule into daily life came several centuries later, after the sacking of Jerusalem and the taking of the Hebrew elites to exile in Babylon. Here the people who had been administrators and leaders among the Israelites found their abilities in demand in a growing empire, and many of them began to assimilate, to intermarry, to become part of the dominant imperial culture. Daniel 1 describes this.

At this time the prophets cried out for God’s holy people to keep themselves apart from the dominant, secular culture, and the Sabbath became a visible sign of the maintenance of the Hebrew’s way of life.

The Fourth Commandment asks us to recall how Genesis brought good news to the slaves of one empire, and how the descendants of these slaves were called to keep themselves separate from the dominant culture of another empire. This command doesn’t require us to be idle on Saturdays. Rather, it is a reminder that God aids the oppressed, and his people must not be drawn into the life of the secular empires.

This “bridge” commandment reminds us that if we are to love God and our neighbor, we must not be caught in the grip of the dominant culture, we must be “in, but not of” this world.