Bible Study Guide for Sunday, October 15, Year A

 

It seems to me that the main theme connecting the Old Testament and Gospel readings are the division between God, The Israelites, and The Kingdom of God, as well as the juxtaposition of God’s wrath with his unexpected clemency.

The Old Testament reading opens with the Isealites being stunningly impatient. While Moses is up on Sinai, The Isrealites have demanded a new god and Aaron, who seems bizarrely willing to indulge this behavior, commands them to give up their jewelry so it can be smelted into a golden calf. The people immediately declare it a god and that the next day will be a feast.  God is in dire wrath over this and  considered eradicating the Isrealites and starting over with Moses as a new Abraham, counting the last six-hundred odd years for naught. Interestingly God also asks that Moses leave him alone. Moses promptly ignores this and asks God to spare the Israelites for the sake of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but also, so that God is not spurned by the Egyptians as one who led the Israelites out of slavery only to lure them into the wilderness and slaughter them.  Then, God changes his mind.

How? How does an omniscient, omnipotent deity who exists outside of time and is the author of causality change His mind? There are a few options—firstly he doesn’t. This would effectively change the relationship between God and Moses to be that of a medieval King and Queen. Where in order to look formidable God/the king pronounces a harsh punishment but Moses/the queen intercedes on the behalf of the accused in a way that is preordained but allows the sovereign to be merciful in such a way that preserves royal authority and prestige.  While this reading preserves the text and is more in line with a lot of Thomistic thought (particularly extrapolating Aquinas’s position on the nature of prayer), which I often find very moving and will usually defer to, I still find it disturbing, not necessarily because of the display of divine wrath but because it makes God too remote, unknowable and impassible. While it is an intellectually sound theological answer I find it to be an emotionally insufficient pastoral answer.  While God is holy and eternal, as temporal human worshipers, we need at least the feeling that God can be present and spontaneous. So the other option is to ignore the classical distinctions and analogies in Theology and just take the passage literally.  The relationship would then be more friendly, God airs his grievances against his chosen people and Moses, who God respects, convinces God not to be too harsh.  To be entirely honest, I don’t really know what reading to go for.  Both seem to me to be slightly wanting.  Moses is one of the characters in the Bible that is closest to God, and is the most important human figure in the Old Testament and I very much believe that God does care about Moses’ opinions.  But that God would somehow be surprised by them or the supposed reaction of the Egyptians stretches credulity.

The Gospel passage describes the Kingdom of Heaven, and who is a member through the Parable of the Wedding Banquet.  This story too has a display of wrath, and God substituting his unwilling people for a more general public. But unlike in Exodus, here the king (God) commits to his anger by destroying the city where his slaves were slain and casting out a man who came underdressed. Oftentimes, this was thought to be a supersessionist passage, declaring that The Church replaced The People of Israel. For much of the Church’s history, though, it has been read as God rejecting people who are supposedly religious but don’t make any time for Him, or are spiritually lazy.  I feel like this reading is substantially less obvious but I do like it much more, even if I fear being in and often feel like I am in that category.  Nevertheless both of these readings are as much, if not more, about God’s clemency than His indignation. In Exodus, while there is punishment that follows, and some of it seems very harsh to modern readers, it is always to continue to shape the people of Israel, not to undo and remake them.  Meanwhile in the Parable of the Wedding Banquet, “While many are called but few are chosen” it is still many more than the King had planned on inviting and of a much more diverse crowd. Furthermore, while the framework of these stories deal with God dealing with populations, they do reveal that God is still personable and especially in His interaction with Moses, God takes the feelings and opinions of His individual followers very seriously, indeed. –Ben Watts

Questions

When answers that are doctrinal seem at odds with what is good pastorally how should we respond?
What human analogies do you use to conceive of God interacting with his followers in the Bible or us?  How are these illuminating and how do they hinder our understanding of the relationship between God and His Church/His followers?