1 When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered around Aaron and said to him, “Come, make gods for us, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.” 2 Aaron said to them, “Take off the gold rings that are on the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters and bring them to me.” 3 So all the people took off the gold rings from their ears and brought them to Aaron. 4 He took these from them, formed them in a mould, and cast an image of a calf, and they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” 5 When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it, and Aaron made a proclamation and said, “Tomorrow shall be a festival to the LORD.” 6 They rose early the next day and offered burnt offerings and brought sacrifices of well-being, and the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to revel.
Exodus 32:1–14 (NRSVue)
7 The LORD said to Moses, “Go down at once! Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely; 8 they have been quick to turn aside from the way that I commanded them; they have cast for themselves an image of a calf and have worshiped it and sacrificed to it and said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!’” 9 The LORD said to Moses, “I have seen this people, how stiff-necked they are. 10 Now let me alone so that my wrath may burn hot against them, and I may consume them, and of you I will make a great nation.”
11 But Moses implored the LORD his God and said, “O LORD, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? 12 Why should the Egyptians say, ‘It was with evil intent that he brought them out to kill them in the mountains and to consume them from the face of the earth’? Turn from your fierce wrath; change your mind and do not bring disaster on your people. 13 Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, how you swore to them by your own self, saying to them, ‘I will multiply your descendants like the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it forever.’” 14 And the LORD changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people.
Recently, while a group of us were away on holiday, one friend asked another, “Do you miss your spouse?” He paused before answering, “No.” He explained that they were inseparable, “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” His spouse was always in his heart and, in that sense, always with him. His answer stayed with us.
Later that day, we asked him about it again. This time he turned the question towards us: “Do we miss God?” We all said no. How can we miss God, we wondered, if God is always with us? “That,” he replied, “is how I feel about my spouse.” His question has haunted me ever since. What does it mean to say that God is always present when we cannot see or touch God as we can another person? And if we never miss God, is that because we trust God’s presence, or because we have stopped longing to encounter God? Perhaps faith asks us to hold both experiences together: the assurance that God is with us, and the ache of wanting to know that presence more tangibly.
In the reading from Exodus 32:1-14, when Moses delayed his return to his people’s camp from Mount Sinai, the Hebrew people in the wilderness asked Aaron to make them gods to go before them on their journey away from Egyptian slavery. The Hebrew people missed God and the man of God, Moses, who was leading them. They wanted a physical, touchable, tangible, visible God who would lead them onward. Why might they have desired such a manifestation of God?
Perhaps, while living in slavery in Egypt, their theological worldview had been conditioned by the tangible and ubiquitous presence of Egyptian gods. The people in ancient Egypt worshiped several gods and goddesses associated with the sun, the Nile, fertility, protection and kingship. These images of God were carved out for people to relate to, to recognise and to worship. So, these Hebrew people in the wilderness have always known the divine in something that they have seen, in images that they have known and in idols they have looked up towards.
Having collected the gold from the people, Aaron fashions it into a calf. But why a calf? In the ancient world, cattle could evoke strength, fertility and vitality. The text does not explain why Aaron chose this form, though the people’s experience of Egyptian religious images may have shaped what they imagined a divine presence could look like. The calf perhaps was a more common, relatable and recognisable image that they could understand.
Yet the story is more troubling than a simple exchange of one god for another. Aaron builds an altar before the calf and announces a feast “to the LORD” (Exodus 32:5). The people invoke the name of their liberating God while worshiping an image, a new-alternative-physical-idol-image they have made. Perhaps that is why the story remains so searching. We, too, can speak the name of God and still reduce God to the shape of what feels powerful, familiar and reassuring to us.
The people had not ceased to desire God’s presence; in trying to make that presence tangible on their own terms, they risked missing the God who was already leading them.
In missing the tangibility of “I am who I am” God, the Hebrew people made a golden calf to lead, worship and make sacrifices. But two questions become crucial in our quest of doing political theology from a decolonial perspective. Why gold? And whose gold? Gold carried into freedom becomes gold surrendered to an idol. The question for political theology is therefore not only whether we have made an image of God, but whose resources give it its shine, whose power it reflects, and whom it leaves outside its circle.
Why gold? It is valuable, beautiful and capable of being shaped into something impressive. Having lived in Egypt, the people may also have known a world in which precious materials were used for divine images. Exodus does not tell us that they consciously copied an Egyptian statue, but it invites us to ask whether they carried more than gold out of Egypt. Had they also carried an idea of what a god ought to look like? In their longing for assurance, the people take something they possess and turn it into something they hope will lead them. That is the danger at the heart of the story: the God who liberated them cannot be made from their valuables or contained within an image shaped by their fears.
I also wonder about those who had no gold to contribute to the making of the calf. Did this new, communal image leave them feeling that they had no part in it? And what of those whose lives did not fit the meanings others attached to a young bull, perhaps strength, wealth or fertility? Exodus does not tell us how they responded, but these questions expose the danger of making God in our own image. When a community gives God a form drawn from what it possesses and values, whose experience becomes the measure of the divine? Whose experience is left outside? An idol can shrink our understanding of God until we struggle to recognise God’s presence and solidarity with all creation. Perhaps this, too, is a way we miss God, by making an image so familiar to ourselves that we cease to see those whom God has never forgotten.
A second question troubles me as I read the golden calf story. Where did an enslaved people get gold? Or whose gold is it? Exodus describes the harshness of their labour, including Pharaoh’s demand that they make bricks without being given straw (Exodus 5:7–18). Yet, as they leave Egypt, the Israelites ask the Egyptians for silver, gold and clothing. The Egyptians give them these things, and the text concludes, “so they plundered the Egyptians” (Exodus 12:35–36).
That word “plundered” shocks me. It recalls the taking of wealth that sustained colonial empires. Yet the direction of power in Exodus matters: here it is an enslaved people leaving the land in which their labour has been exploited. Their departure raises questions about wealth, labour and what might be owed to those who have been denied the fruits of their work. Later, Aaron asks for the gold earrings worn by the people’s wives, sons and daughters; the text says that all the people bring their earrings, and Aaron makes the calf (Exodus 32:2–4). The writer of Exodus does not tell us whether those particular earrings came from the Egyptians. But the possibility is unsettling: could gold carried out of slavery have become the material for an idol in the wilderness? If so, the question is not only where the gold came from, but what the liberated community did with it. Wealth gained on the way to freedom could be gathered into an image that narrowed their understanding of God. What might have served the life of the community instead became something before which the community bowed.
When the Hebrew people make the golden calf, they give the God who led them out of Egypt a visible form they can possess and control. They worship and sacrifice before it, declaring, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt” (Exodus 32:4). The tragedy is that they attribute their liberation to an image made by their own hands. God of the ancestors was a God who existed in the freedom of God, whereas the idol of the golden calf belittles the God of the Hebrew people and Hebrew scriptures. They corrupt the theology by drawing limitations on God, by making God in the likeness of their community and by dictating terms to God regarding how God should be.
This is a corruption of their understanding of God. The God who said to Moses, “I am Who I am” and “I can be who I can be” (Exodus 3:14), cannot be reduced to the shape, convenience or expectations of the community. The people who had been led through the sea and fed with manna now try to make God available on their own terms. Rather than trusting the God who leads them through an uncertain wilderness, they create an image they can carry before them. God’s anger at this betrayal is fierce, for God speaks of consuming the people and beginning again with Moses.
Yet Moses intervenes. He appeals first to the meaning of the exodus: what would the Egyptians say if the people God brought out of slavery were destroyed in the wilderness? Then he recalls God’s promise to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob: that their descendants would multiply and inherit the land (Exodus 32:11–13). Moses does not excuse the people’s actions. He pleads for their future on the strength of God’s own liberating act and covenant promise. In this moment, intercession becomes an act of hope; the people’s failure need not have the final word over God’s relationship with them. God eventually relented from the disaster that he had spoken of bringing on his people, for the ‘I am who I am’ is gracious and slow to anger, offering love to all.
This story in Exodus invites readers to wrestle with the tension between God’s intangible presence and our longing for something tangible. The golden calf warns us that when we try to make God visible on our own terms, we risk replacing the living God with an image we can control. Do we miss God? The people missed Moses while he was on the mountain, but perhaps they also missed the reassurance that God was still with them. In the silence of waiting, they made something they could see. We, too, may miss God when divine presence feels distant. That longing is real, but the story asks whether we will remain open to the God who meets us beyond our expectations, or settle for an image of God we have made for ourselves.
The golden calf asks a searching question of us today: What do we make when we are afraid that God is absent? The people in Exodus had been liberated, but the wilderness was uncertain, and Moses had been gone a long time. Their fear was real; the image they made could not give them life.
In our context, ‘white Christianism’ or ‘white Christian nationalism’ can become a golden calf when it makes Christianity an image of a supposedly white, culturally uniform nation. It takes the language and symbols of faith and uses them to decide who truly belongs.
What, then, might our new golden calves in our 21st century be?
- The idol of pseudo nationalism: imagining that God prefers one race, ancestry, language or version of Britishness (or other national identity in your context), while the others are demonised.
- The idol of the fortified borders: treating people seeking sanctuary chiefly as threats, while forgetting that the exodus begins with God hearing the cry of people under oppression.
- The idol of power: wanting Christianity close to rulers, flags and force, while passing over God’s solidarity with those who have little power.
- The idol of a usable Jesus: keeping the name and the cross, but reshaping Jesus until he blesses our fear, resentment or hostility towards neighbours.
- The idol of certainty: choosing a simple story about who is to blame rather than listening to people whose lives unsettle it.
These are theological comparisons, not claims that every concern about migration or public policy is idolatry. The test is what happens to our neighbours when we invoke God. Are migrants, Muslims, Jews, Dalits, women, people of different faiths and people of colour treated as people made in God’s image, or made to bear the blame for our anxieties? Are their voices heard in the church, or excluded from its picture of who “we” are in our community?
A Christianity fashioned in the image of white national belonging cannot hold the fullness of the church: its Dalit and Black Christians, its migrant congregations, its many languages, or its solidarity with neighbours of other faiths. It makes God smaller than the people God calls into relationship. Moses offers another way. He refuses to let the people’s fear, or even God’s anger, end the story. He intercedes and recalls the promise of liberation. Our calling may be to do likewise, to name the idols we have made, to stand beside those they exclude, and to trust the living God who continues to lead us beyond the limits of our own image. Perhaps we miss God most when we are so busy defending our image of God that we cannot hear the cry of our neighbour.
My friend’s reply stayed with me. He said he never misses his spouse because they are present to one another as “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” There is something beautiful in that love: even when they are apart, when they miss each other, their bond remains. Perhaps it offers us a glimpse of divine presence too. We may feel that we miss God, yet God is closer to us than we realise, present in the love that holds us and in the relationships through which we learn to recognise one another.
