Ordinary 28 Year A

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, O God our Strength and our Redeemer.

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For three parables in a row now, Jesus has been speaking to those who question and challenge his authority, his identity. Soon, the rift with the religious elite will be so great and Jesus’ popularity so ‘in their face’ that ‘they [will] dare not ask him any more questions’ (Mt 22:46). The sense of conflict is escalating.

When Jesus arrived in Jerusalem he cleansed the temple of the money changers, and, outraged, the religious leaders challenged him: “By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?”

In response, Jesus told the parable of the two sons who both in different ways dishonour their father’s authority, and then the parable of the wicked tenants. Then Matthew lets us know that the religious authorities have realised that Jesus is speaking about them, and they’re angry, but they don’t want to attract the displeasure of the crowd, so they keep quiet.

But Jesus isn’t finished. He goes on to tell this third parable about the wedding banquet, and his words seem to be full of growing anger and violence. It’s a distressing parable, hard for us to understand. “Once more Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying: ‘The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet…’”

Who is the king in this troubling story? If we simply assume that the king represents God, as is often suggested, we find ourselves in very dark territory, confronted by a God who seems vengeful, violent and unreasonably demanding. Something else must be going on here.

I’ve been greatly helped by a commentator who suggested that we might hear this story differently. What if Jesus is exposing the kind of king his hearers already know, rather than describing the character of God? What if the king in this parable looks rather more like Herod, whose power is maintained through coercion, punishment and fear?

It’s a provocative reading, and not the only possible one. But it raises an important question: what happens when we begin to imagine God in the image of earthly power?

Remember that this is Matthew’s gospel, a story developed in a community struggling to understand its identity and its relationship with other Jewish communities, in a world dominated by the violent oppression of the Roman Empire.

And remember also that Jesus’ challenge to the religious authorities stands firmly within Israel’s own prophetic tradition: the call to justice and mercy, to faithfulness in covenant, and to recognising God’s authority over every human claim to power. Jesus is challenging those who have confused their own authority with God’s, and whose understanding of God has become distorted by the exercise of power. They have made God in the image of Herod.

Jesus is pushing and pushing this issue of right authority because what sits behind it is right relationship with God. And this is because what he sees is a breaking down of covenant relationship, a loss of the identity that comes from belonging to God. Jesus is crying out for his people to turn back, to return to God.

As I pondered our readings this week, I realised that the thing that makes sense of the grief and anger that seems to drive Jesus’ weaving of these parables is this breaking of relationship, this up-ending of God’s authority, this making of a false and frightening God we must  placate or bargain with.

This relationship has a long, long history. This morning we heard about one of the key moments in its establishment – the story of Moses and Aaron and the golden calf.

This is a story of Jesus’ ancestors-in-faith breaking the very first Commandment while Moses was still up on the mountain, talking with God and being gifted the Ten Commandments, the Law that is the very framework for the covenant that binds God and God’s people.

The people of Israel, remember, have been led out of slavery in Egypt by Moses and then been on a very long journey, an extended pilgrimage in the wilderness, learning to trust God and follow in God’s ways. There is the miraculous parting of the Red Sea, the provision of manna in the desert, the water that flows from the rock; and on the part of the people there has been disobedience and misunderstanding and complaint, and each time a return, a new learning.

And now finally there is the giving of the Law, the Torah – understood not so much in the sense of rules to follow but an identity to live by, a pattern for wellbeing and for belonging to the Most High God, the God who said to them, ‘I will be your God, and you will be my people.’

But while Moses is on the holy mountain wreathed with cloud, the people become restless and anxious, and they find that anxiety intolerable. Rather than dwelling in it with trust and faith, they demand something tangible, something they can see and understand, something which will reassure them that God is still with them.

Aaron, captive to the same anxiety, gives them what they want. “He took the gold from them, formed it in a mould, and cast an image of a calf; and they said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel…!’”

And interestingly, the golden calf may not represent an entirely different god. Aaron even proclaims a festival to the LORD. Perhaps what the people have done is to try to give visible and tangible form to the God who has brought them out of Egypt. They have tried to give shape to the God who cannot be contained, to make the mystery of God’s presence manageable.

So it will go for century upon century, that God’s people embrace God’s covenant love for them, and then it is broken, and then remade again; Jesus stands in this pattern in his time and, I think, again in ours.

Whether it happens on the way to the Promised Land, or centuries later in Jerusalem, or today in our own faith journey, there is a persistent human tendency to shape God into one that we can manage and manipulate – or use to manage and manipulate others. A god over which, therefore, we have authority, because we become the author of God – rather than the other way around.

Perhaps our false gods, our idols, represent something we long for, or long to be. Perhaps they provide spiritual junk food to feed our deep hungers. Like the Israelites in the desert, and like those whose authority Jesus threatened, we struggle to tolerate uncertainty, anxiety, change, and we will do almost anything to restore certainty and control, and fill that gap where we think God should be.

And there is no shortage of voices in our world offering us precisely that certainty. Political leaders who promise simple answers to complex problems; ideologies which divide the world neatly into those who are right and those who are wrong; religious voices which claim to know exactly what God thinks, and whom God approves of or condemns. The temptation is always to make God smaller, more predictable, more like ourselves – and therefore more useful to us.

Where does this leave us, surrounded as we are with golden calves?

It is worth remembering that God does not abandon the people who have made the golden calf. Moses intercedes for them, and the covenant relationship continues. The story is not finally about human failure, but about the extraordinary persistence of God’s faithfulness, even when we get God so badly wrong.

And I wonder if that’s where we find ourselves too: with the knowledge that idolatry is deeply ordinary and human, and that God in Christ calls us to turn away from it, again and again, because we are loved, and because we belong to Christ, and because we are all invited in love and freedom to God’s true feast.

Perhaps with a renewed willingness to receive moments of uncertainty and anxiety as the cracking open of a false but golden certainty we have created.

Perhaps with a renewed heart for prayer that is open to mystery rather than certitude, and grace rather than control.

In all things, may the deep peace of God, which surpasses all our certainties and all our understanding, guard our hearts and minds and keep them in Christ Jesus.

Amen.