The Visible Presence of God

Do we need visible symbols of God? We certainly need to be reminded that God is with us, but the episode of the golden calf reminds us of a number of possible dangers. Actually the story reminds us of several of the worse forms of religious behaviour, and of the vital importance of realising that the writers of the Bible were not all admirable people with a perfect insight into the nature of God.

The narrative in Exodus chapter 32 has a complex history, but it comes to us as an account of how a nomadic community responded when they grew weary of waiting to hear what God was saying. The image itself seems to have a few well-chosen characteristics: it is an object of value, it represents a source of nourishment, and the people themselves have contributed to it. The problem, of course is that it contravened the recently given commandments.

However, the story goes from bad to worse when Moses comes back down the mountain, sees what has been going on in his absence, and acts swiftly to ‘purify the camp’. The least bad part of it is the psychological violence involved in grinding the image to dust, scattering it on the water, and forcing the people to drink it.

Skip from there to what we still do, and there is one small similarity: we ingest the symbols of our God. It’s the only similarity between the two events, though. The golden calf was only ever meant to represent God, whereas on most occasions bread and wine simply represent bread and wine. In the context Jesus gave it, however, it represents a life given in love for people who suffer ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’.

Another virtue of bread and wine as symbols of God is the fact that they are temporary and perishable. If we ever gaze at them in wonder, we are not gazing at their beauty and grandeur, but at the paradoxical insistence that everything we believe about God can be identified with something so ordinary. God is here not to direct our lives from on high, but to be used up in our lives. Used up completely, in fact, except that the more God is given and shared in the world, the more there is to give and share, and the more our common humanity is able to live in God’s presence.