What Idolatry Says About Us

Today’s lectionary readings chronicled the relationship of the people of God to the Mosaic law, from their idolatry to Hebrew worship to Jesus’ exhortation of the crowds for not seeing that Moses’ words point to him.

The golden calf is the most detailed episode of idolatry in the Scriptures.  The lessons, from Sunday school to the pulpit, are often on how God feels about idolatry, he’s jealous, and how our idolatry is sinful worship.  While this is true, I think it is a one sided view of the situation: it focuses on God’s relationship to idolatry.  But other than sinfulness, how is our personal psyche affected by idolatry?

Our fathers made a calf in Horeb
and adored a molten image;
They exchanged their glory
for the image of a grass-eating bullock. (Ps. 106 NAB)

This psalm interprets the golden calf incident in terms of Genesis 1.  God is a jealous God, but he is unchanging.  He is hurt by idolatry but unaffected.  How people are affected though, through idolatry, is that the image of God is exchanged for the image of something else.  When we speak of the idolatry of money or power or materialism or addiction we speak of sinfulness.  But there is so much more to it than that.  When we are idolatrous we begin to make ourselves in the image of the idol.  When material possessions or money become an idol we begin to remake ourselves in the image of money.  That’s a scary thought.  When we seek after other things we do more than just sin, we begin to take on the image of something else, the powers of this world.

The scenes in C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce about purgatory show the powers of this world best: not in Dante’s horrid images of Inferno but in dull greys.  Idolatry’s re-imaging is not equal to the power of God’s image—it is only a shadow—and it turns us into shadows or wraiths, shells of ourselves, sapped of our glory and left with the hollow image of fleeting worldly power.