Thursday of the Fourth Week of Lent
Here we are, four weeks into Lent, four weeks into the liturgical time of desert and we have a reading from Exodus (32: 7-14) about the Israelites in the desert. In this reading, they have grown impatient waiting for Moses who has gone up Mount Sinai awaiting God’s instructions. In their impatience they make a golden calf to worship. They were not pleased with God, the God of Moses, so they created an idol to make their god.
As a child, I never really understood the interest in worshipping a calf made out of gold. I didn’t think I was vulnerable to breaking the first commandment, but then I didn’t understand all the other false gods and idols we can create and worship. Later I learned of making money an idol or possessions, or physical beauty, and other fleeting things, even people. It was much later in my spiritual development that I began to read about and understand how we can and do create false images of God, of Jesus.
The book of Genesis tells us that we are created in the image of God. But often we prefer to create God in our own image, or in the false image that was given to us as children, or in the image that we determine best meets our needs, rather than the true God. Maybe our image of God is an angry father always ready to judge us, or of a distant, unfeeling deity that doesn’t really care about the suffering of the world, or of Jesus as our personal savior who doesn’t really require anything from us, who loves us but doesn’t challenge us to grow.
In today’s gospel reading (John 5: 31-47), Jesus addresses those who would not believe in him saying that they “search the scriptures” (which testify on behalf of Jesus), believing they have eternal life through them, “But you do not want to come to me to have life.” Jesus did not fit their image of the Messiah, so they completely missed that He was the son of God. I wonder what I miss because of my own false images of God, of Jesus.
Caryll Houselander in her spiritual classic book, The Reed of God, offers that we are called to continually seek Christ for “We know Him only by continually learning Him anew; we get away from false gods only by continually seeking Him; we hold Him only by losing Him.” We have to continually let go of our conceptions of God so that we may truly know God, not just the false images we create. Further, she encourages that “He wants us to seek, because He wants to give Himself to us.” It reminds me of marriage and how we have to let go of our projections or ideals of our spouse, even our children or close friend, in order to discover and let he or she be who they truly are.
In this Lenten time of waiting, let us not grow impatient like the Israelites and create false images of God. Let us seek God, seek Jesus, and ask Him to reveal Godself to us in a new way this Lent, so that we may truly rejoice in the resurrection. Let us ask the Holy Spirit to help us let go of our false images and open our eyes and minds and hearts to who God truly is.
Eileen Miller