So it’s no secret. I’m a big guy. I have been for a while now, and honestly, it’s just within the past few years that I’ve started trying to do something about it. Throughout high school, I somewhat foolishly tried to act as if this was not at all the case, though. I thought I could hide my weight from everyone and myself if I layered properly. My solution? I wore a Hawaiian shirt and t-shirt almost every day of school for four years. It became a trademark-like thing; people knew me for my Hawaiian shirts. Did they really hide the fact that I was overweight from the world? Absolutely no. Did I somehow trick myself into believing this was the case? Absolutely yes.
I decided the summer after I graduated that I was going to be more confident about who I am, that I was going to turn over a new leaf and not try to “hide” who I was but be happy about the person God made me to be. But this confidence would come at a cost: to truly leave behind the destructive self-consciousness and self-image I had harbored for so long, I had to cut off all ties to it. So I said goodbye to my aloha shirts, and didn’t pack a single one to take with me when I moved out to TLU in the fall.
To get to where I wanted to be, I had to let go of the things that anchored me where I was.
In this week’s chapter, one of the stories we encounter is the story of Moses and the Golden Calf. In this tale, so full of impatience, bad choices, and idolatry, it might seem hard to find hope and a message of redemption. The Israelites mess up, and they mess up badly, forsaking their God and Moses after a mere forty days of waiting. Aaron takes gold from them and makes them a new god to worship, a god who takes the image of a golden calf. The people turn away from the LORD and are punished for it. And yet God is able to use even in this act of idolatry to bring about His will.
When the people come to Aaron and demand that he fashion for them a new God, Aaron agrees, but only after making a demand of them. Let us take a closer look at this portion of the text: “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.’ And all the people took off the gold rings that were in their ears and brought them to Aaron.”
What is the significance of the gold earrings? Is it an old Israelite custom for the women and children to adorn themselves with golden earrings? From where did these earrings come? Why would Aaron want these particular earrings when the Israelite people had taken so much gold and silver from their Egyptian oppressors?
To find some answers to our questions, let’s hear from one of the foremost Jewish commentators, a man by the name of Abraham Ibn Ezra. Ibn Ezra sheds light on a number of interesting truths about these earrings and Aaron’s request for them. The first is that the verb Aaron uses to tell the crowd to take off the earrings connotes tearing or ripping them out of their ears. He points out that this is the same verb used in 1 Kings 19:11 to describe how the wind tears the mountains apart before Elijah. This is a quick and violent process, one that will leave them bloodied and scarred. They will have with them always a reminder of what once was as well as a reminder of their choice to turn away from God.
Ibn Ezra also points out for us, as an almost off-handed comment, that the wearing of gold earrings is an Egyptian custom, not an Israelite one. The Israelite people, God’s chosen people whom God had freed and brought out of Egypt, were adorning themselves in the fashion of their old oppressors. With their similar skin tones and mannerisms picked up from over four hundred years of living with the Egyptians, they probably very closely resembled their former masters, and in this way were maintaining a close tie to their old lives as slaves. How could they ever fully be the people of God when they were seemingly trying so hard to be the people of Egypt? It is no wonder why they were so quick to turn on their Redeemer and uplift an idol as their god; they had not yet removed their identity as a people of oppression and accepted their identity as a freed people, a people of God.
And herein lies the hope of this text, the redemptive quality of this story that allows us to see God’s will acted out in the midst of idolatry and desertion: by compelling the Israelites to give up their golden earrings, Aaron unknowingly helped sever one of the ties that Egypt still had on the Israelite people. Those small golden earrings would have forever been a reminder of their lives in Egypt, a very literal hook that was constantly tugging on the minds of God’s people that might eventually pull them all the way back to Egypt and again into the arms of their oppressors. Without them, though, the Israelites are one step closer to completely overcoming their past identity as the oppressed people of Egypt and completely accepting their new one as the redeemed people of God. A generation of Israelites might have wandered around the desert with jagged, misshapen ears, but this tie between Israel and Egypt was severed completely, and generations later, these earrings would not be around to serve as a constant reminder of the riches of Egypt and lure into the false security of Goshen.
The Israelites should not have turned away from their leader, Moses, and, even more importantly, their Redeemer, God. As is the case a myriad of times throughout Scripture, they had forgotten everything that their God had done for them and were willing to move on to whatever seemingly new and improved god they could find. And yet God, even while angry at the Israelites for abandoning Him, was able to use this as a way to strengthen the bond between the Almighty and His chosen people.
I am sure if we think about it, we can identify the golden earrings in our lives that are constantly pulling us away from God and away from our covenantal life with the Almighty. Maybe it is the music we listen to or the movies watch that we have unknowingly thrown into the mold and reshaped into our God. Maybe it is an addiction or relationship that is slowly causing us to turn impatiently away from our God and is slowly becoming deified in our hearts and minds. Who knows? Maybe the gold earrings in our lives actually are gold earrings!
Whatever these golden earrings are, though, they are serving to tie us to the oppressors of the world and turn us from our life lived in harmony with our God. What is it going to take to sever that tie between Egypt and ourselves? Will we allow them to gain so much of a hold upon us that God will finally compel us to rip them out of our ears and leave us with a jagged, bloody mess? Or will we allow God to be our God and help us rid ourselves of them before we reach this point?
May God ground us in our identity as the Israelites, the people of God. May we have no need for the earrings that lead to the golden calves in our lives. May we hold strong in our faith of our God who is so much bigger than any man-made idol we could ever imagine. And may our faith always keep us coming back to the mountainside to wait on what God is doing in our lives.
I really like the twist you brought to the interpretation of this story. I had never realized that the earrings tied the Israelites to the past--but knowing that helps me to have more respect and understanding for them. That was all they knew, and it's hard to leave what's comfortable, even when you know there's something better. That transition can be rough and not seem worth it when you're feeling especially low. But God never gives up--on them or on us.
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