After the Bitter Pill

After the Bitter Pill

"As soon as he came near the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, Moses' anger burned hot, and he threw the tablets from his hands and broke them at the foot of the mountain.  He took the calf that they had made, burned it with fire, ground it to powder, scattered it on the water, and made the Israelites drink it." [Exodus 32:19-20]

This is the conclusion I have come to, after spending my decades reading the Scriptures so far: the people of God face the truth about our past actions... but we do not weaponize it.

At least, we are not supposed to. Mercy intends to let us see one another in a new light.

That is a critical difference.  Facing the truth is admitting where I have made a mistake, or where things took a wrong turn, or what didn't go the way it should have.  But weaponizing history is when I use something from the past to attack or undercut someone else.  And for the people of God, going back even to these early days of the children of Israel fresh out of slavery in Pharaoh's Egypt and including the beloved community of Jesus, for us in the people of God, mercy allows us to see ourselves truthfully without letting our vision of the future be tethered to the failings of the past.

You and I have seen the "weaponizing" of the past plenty of times.  It's the way two spouses say they have reconciled, for example, but deep down they are really holding onto the old hurts to trot out any time some new offense comes along.  "Yeah, I lied about the gambling debts again, honey... but you had a fling with So-and-so before we were married and never told me about it!"  Or, "Yes, I left the toilet seat up--but you are always forgetting to refill the toilet paper roll!" Weaponizing history, whether it's the big events or bathroom etiquette, is when you keep going back to some past event that you had thought you moved beyond, and reopening old wounds with it--or never letting them rightly heal in the first place.  Couples, families, friends, communities, or nations that cannot speak the truth and deal with it in the first place are doomed to live with a festering wound they have agreed to ignore until it kills them... and on the other hand, those that keep using the past as a stick to beat others with get themselves stuck in old routines and roles without ever being able to start again or get better.  Neither death by festering wound nor death by relentless beating sounds very appealing.  And so the people of God are dared to see the past--and thus, also the future--through the turning point of forgiveness.  That is to say, through the new eyes of grace and truth.

A wise person I know often says that forgiveness includes taking the past offense of the other person, burying it with a shovel... and then burying the shovel.  That is to say, forgiveness--mercy--allows us to speak and to acknowledge the past, but then allows us to forgive and to move beyond.... so that no one gets permanently cast the "the helpless victim" and no one is doomed to be the perennial "villain."   Forgiveness means I refuse to keep going back to the thing that harmed our relationship--I refuse to keep weaponizing it, and I refuse to let it hold both you and me down in the company of ghosts and memories.  Weaponizing history is making the other person wear their past failures or sins like an albatross around their neck (thank you, 10th grade English teacher!  I never thought I was going to EVER need to remember anything from "Rime of the Ancient Mariner"--but now I know why I read that!).  But facing history--individual or collective--allows us to see with clear eyes what happened... and then to say, "All right, so where are we going from here? And what can be left behind?"

Well, here, tucked away in the later chapters of Exodus, is one of those moments that I have come to believe gets at the critical, vital difference between weaponizing history and facing the truth about our past.  We all know the story of the golden calf.  It's one of those important, essential, basic-warning stories you learn at some point in Sunday School--often, with the mental images provided to our imagination courtesy of Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments.  The freed slaves are in the wilderness, camped out at the base of Mount Sinai while Moses is up on the summit meeting with God and getting the Covenant and the commandments from Yahweh.  And in their impatience, they had consulted with Moses' Vice President of Operations and brother, Aaron, and asked Aaron to make them an idol--an image of their god to worship. This request, of course, came just as Moses was receiving the commandment not to make graven images or idols of anything, no matter what name you called it by or what god you connected it with.  The bottom line was that this golden calf moment was a time of utter failure for the people of Israel--a time when, truthfully they should have known better already, given their recent recollection of the gods of Egypt and the contrasting faithfulness of the God of their ancestors, Yahweh.

So here's a sort of test-case for society-wide remembering (and maybe a template, too, for how we deal with our past in families, in friendships, and in the closer-in relationships that matter to us).  What does God have Moses do with the history of the golden calf?  Does God instruct Moses to keep the golden calf, or to put it inside the soon-to-be-constructed Ark of the Covenant along with the other important keepsakes from the Israelites' wilderness journey?  Does God have Moses hang the golden calf around Aaron's neck like an albatross?  Is there some permanent, fixed location for the golden calf to become a monument, at which future Israelites would learn the history of the Exodus?

No... oddly enough, Moses simply makes the people swallow it.  Literally.

Moses takes the golden calf, burns it to a powder, and makes an Old Testament version of Metamucil for his people.  He makes them drink the powdered remains of their idolatry and unfaithfulness.  It is a bitter pill, but they must swallow it in order to face and recognize what they have all been complicit in.

Now not to get bogged down in potty humor, but the thing about being forced to drink your punishment is that eventually, this too shall pass.  That is to say, eventually, you can move on from that facing of a harsh truth, rather than having to constantly worry that someone will keep bringing up something you have done and apologized for, made amends for, and rectified.  Moses makes the people face up to what they have done--that they were all complicit in--but once they have consumed the bitter pill of the golden calf episode, they can move on.  The essential part of their story--the faithfulness of God who claims them--will remain, but the record of failures can be faced and then go down the drain.

This is a really crucial insight on Moses' part, because he knows that it matters how you retell and rehearse your history--whether it's a couple recounting slights or successes in a family story, or a congregation learning to tell the story of the faithful people who gave and worked and ministered, or a whole nation like the people of Israel dealing with their colossal failure and faithlessness in the golden calf episode.  Of course, Moses makes the people own up to what they have done--surely, they would never forget the taste of having to drink the cloudy, ashen water mixed with the dust of the idol.  And after that moment, there would be the storytelling--after all, the story of the golden calf has been handed down to us in written form in the book of Exodus, rather than at some shrine or museum.  Stories, after all--as well as the books in which they are written--are how you pass along your history, now matter how messy that history may be. 

So Moses has the people drink down the powdered remains of the golden calf--and then they move on--because he wants them to be defined more by the story of God's redemption and liberation than the story of their failures and sins.  Both are true, the idolatry and the exodus, but both do not have equal weight, equal ultimacy.  After the bitter pill is the promise that the living God is not giving up on this people, even though a lesser deity might have dusted off hands in disgust and walked away.  Not Yahweh. Not the God who freed the Israelites.  What needs to remain, moreso than the memory of Israel's failures, are the assurances of God's relentless faithfulness and God's enduring claim on them.

And that's exactly what Moses gives to the people.  It's not that Moses wants to undo or ignore history by having the people drink away the evidence of the golden calf--but rather, that the bigger Story that needs to be told is of a new beginning, one in which the people of God are continually led out of the ways of Egypt (slavery, idolatry, and fear) and led into a new future.  And so, throughout (like, seriously, almost every other paragraph) the rest of the books of the Law that Moses gives to the people, there are recurring references, not to the golden calf episode, but to God's liberation at the sea, or how God had rescued them from the misery of the slavery system in Pharaoh's Egypt.  At every turn, God says, basically, "Remember who you are--you are the people I have delivered, freed, chosen, and loved..." rather than, "Remember that you are crooked sinners who can never be anything other than lying idol-worshippers." 

That's of vital importance--not just in Bible times, but in our families and relationships, too.  The other day, I was working on a project and let my six-year-old son help with the hammer and nails with my guidance.  And after he kept missing the mark and striking the side of the nail, he stomped off in vital frustration, saying, "I never get it right.  I can't do it." Even into the afternoon, when I offered him a new fresh chance of working with the tools, he still was apprehensive and cautious, because he still felt shame from missing the mark earlier.  It is a true part of the story of what happened--but once it has been named and faced, we can leave it in the past, rather than becoming part of my son's identity.  There are two ways that boy can remember the day--either, "Daddy lets me work with him on projects, even when I don't get it all the way right," or "I always mess up and can't ever do any better."  Both versions acknowledge the missed mark on the hammering, but the second version puts him in a permanent rut he did not need.  It's worth asking ourselves, "What version of the story do we tell about ourselves?"  And for that matter, "How do our stories affect the way other people understand their stories?"

It is important to tell as full an account of our history as possible, but once it is told, Moses knows that it matters what of that history the people will build on, and what will be left behind.  The exodus story?  Keeper.  The pathological, systemic fear of Pharaoh's Egypt?  That can be left behind.  The memory of a God who parts the seas and saves the firstborn with the Passover Lamb's blood?  Hold onto it. The old, entrenched pattern of turning our gold into our gods?  Leave it in the desert. 

See, Israel was never in danger of forgetting its history--you can't go very long at all in the books of the Torah without at least a passing reference to God's past promises or deliverance.  The question is how that story is told and treasured, rehearsed and remembered, for the sake of the future God is creating.  And just like it is technically true either way to tell the story of my son and the hammer (either "I'm a failure" or "Daddy keeps letting me work with him even when I don't hit the nail straight), only one of those is the version I am willing to allow to inform my son's identity.

That, in a nutshell, is the way mercy teaches us to see with new eyes.  It is not that we see a pleasant lie rather than an uncomfortable truth.  Nobody--not Moses millennia ago, and not anybody now--would suggest we can forget or erase the messy sins of the past. The real question is how we use that history--and whether it is faced and then forgiven, or weaponized to force people to stay stuck in old roles ("I never get right..." "I always mess up..." "I can't ever be any more than...." "You will never amount to anything..." and so on).  After all, part of why Pharaoh's Egypt was stuck in the unending structure of slaves on the bottom and a bitter, fearful Pharaoh on top was that everyone felt they were stuck in those roles and could not imagine that things could be otherwise.

So the question for us today, whether we are talking with the people under our roof, the people in your community or congregation, or the people in a whole nation, is how we will choose to remember--will we face the past with open eyes and then let go of what we will not need to keep lugging around, or will we weaponize the past and wear it like an albatross?  In the aftermath of the golden calf story, Moses tells us that it is possible to face the truth of the past without letting it pigeonhole us into set roles from which we, or someone else around us, cannot escape. 

How can we today both "own" our history and be free from getting ourselves stuck in old ruts and casting?  How can we dare today to let mercy move us to see with new eyes?  And how do we, once we are seeing with new eyes,  allow the living God to give us vision?

Lord God, help us to see truthfully about our histories, and then to be transformed by your Merciful-ness into your own likeness.