CONVERSING CANVASSES: ART, ARTIST AND THE SOCIETY

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Theophany of the Living God versus Theocracy of the Ungods!

Bradley Platz's The Golden Calf

[Reflections on Exodus 24:12-18 & 32:1-6]

The Good God and the Evil God met on the mountain top.

The Good God said, “Good day to you, brother.”

The Evil God did not answer.

And the Good God said, “You are in a bad humour today.”

“Yes,” said the Evil God, “for of late I have been often mistaken for you,

called by your name, and treated as if I were you, and it ill-pleases me.”

And the Good God said,

“But I too have been mistaken for you and called by your name.”

The Evil God walked away cursing the stupidity of man.

Kahlil Gibran, The Good God and The Evil God [1]

The struggle to choose between the Living God and the Ungod is as old as humankind. As Kahlil Gibran’s poetic lines very beautifully portray, humankind has often mistaken Living God to the Ungod. The prescribed Biblical text, when read in its entirety, is all about such a historical friction in the choice between Living God and Ungod. Therefore, I would like to invite you to reflect with me on the theme, Theophany of the Living God versus Theocracy of the Ungods!

The first part of the text (Exodus 24:12-18) is a very dramatic and spectacular screenplay that is believed to have been played on a high mountain stage which was called Sinai. The previous passage tells us that the People had seen the Lord at Sinai. It was a Theophany – God’s visible manifestation to the people. It was an experience of life. You can see, the elements of the nature that appear in the text are all the symbol of life: Earth, Sky, Fire, Light, Air… everything…They are all symbolizing the presence of the Living God. God’s life is manifested in a spectacular way at Sinai. Interestingly, Biblical scholars do not come to a conclusion about the exact geographical location of mount Sinai. That uncertainty gives us the gift of imagining Sinai as a non-location-bounded space, as against to the Mount Zion. The Reform Judaism even today believes that Sinai is a non-location-bounded space, in other words, a borderless space/ a non-bordered entity. That is why perhaps the diaspora Jews of Reform Judaism in different parts of the world imagine the idea of Temple Sinai. In that sense, Sinai is a borderless temple – it’s a radical imagination of God’s borderless dwelling. God cannot be static like an Empire to be within the border. The Theophany at Sinai manifests that God is borderless.

Now interestingly, while the borderless life of God was getting manifested at Sinai there was something extremely opposite was happening underneath the mountain. What was that? The second part of our reading tells us that it was a border-building… A border was erected by the lifeless forces, the forces of death, the forces of illusion, the forces of glittery imaginations… In other words, an Empire was getting built by the people of God. The making of the Golden Calf and the worship of an Ungod! Golden Calf as an Empire!

Wait! Here we need to take a conscious break. Let us make a deliberate pause here and ask ourselves a few important questions: How can we possibly jump into the conclusion that the worship of Golden Calf was sinful? Are we not proposing Yahweh worship as Normative spirituality whereas the Golden Calf worship as deviant spirituality? In fact, the idea of Golden calf was borrowed from the Canaanite spirituality. The spirituality of the occupied land and the people! The Spirituality of the Colonized! Are we not demonizing an indigenous spirituality in our attempt to talk about the ‘living God’ of the Israel? And if you read further in the same chapter 32, what happens to the Golden Calf worshippers is nothing but a genocide. Massacre of about 3000 people. Bloodshed. Killing. In verse 27 onwards Moses says to the sons of Levi: "Put your sword on your side, each of you! Go back and forth from gate to gate throughout the camp, and each of you kill your brother, your friend, and your neighbor." The sons of Levi did as Moses commanded, and about three thousand of the people fell on that day. And Moses said, "Today you have ordained yourselves for the service of the Lord, each one at the cost of a son or a brother, and so have brought a blessing on yourselves this day." Does killing my brother, my sister, my son, my daughter, my neighbor bring blessing to me?

What an anarchic act it was! What a brutal belief! Are we justifying such a brutal genocide of about 3000 people, just because they had a ‘different’ spirituality? Is such bloodshed orchestrated by the living God? If yes, can such God be a living God? Do we need that God who takes pride and pleasure in the bloodshed and genocide?

Well, let us come back from our deliberate break! Let us now consciously confess, what Israelites did on that day was not godly; it was brutally ungodly. The living God would never orchestrate such a brutal act of killing/genocide. Therefore, we need a different strand to read these scenes: On the one hand the spectacular scene of the Theophany of the living God at Sinai and on the other hand the ruthless, vicious, heartless scene of the genocide by the people of living God.

We must remember that the Theophanies in the book of Exodus happen in the context of the Empire. The immediate context of the people was the years-long suffering under the empire of Pharos. We may have to compare the earlier Theophany at the Mount Horeb in Exodus 3 with this Sinai Theophany. We could see a huge shift in focus. In the Horeb Theophany of Exodus 3, the focus was: Liberation: “let my people go.” The Theophany that led to the beginning of a liberation movement. But the focus of the Theophany of our text today is totally different: It is about the commandment!: “I will give you the tablets of stone, with the law and the commandment, which I have written for their instruction.” Now we must ask, why does, after all, a liberated community need law, commandments and instruction? It tells us something very profound. It tells us that the liberated community was no longer a liberated community. It tells us about the prevalence of injustice within the liberated community. Therefore, the divine justice of liberation had to be replaced by the legal justice of the commandments. Remember, the commandments are the moral codes for the colonizers. Colonial history, history of the Empires, tells us that. It was a clear indication that Israel, the liberated community was becoming an Empire, a colonial power. When the liberation movement becomes a colonial power, such massacres do happen. In other words, when the Theophany of the living God is not understood and embraced rightly, the Theocracy of the Ungods does happen. Therefore, the making and worshipping of the Golden Calf must be understood as the sign of Israel’s desire to be an Empire. The worship of the Golden Calf was nothing but the fetishization of religion and spirituality. It was the rejection of the living God and the celebration of the Ungod!

The history of Christianity is evident for the worship of Ungods on the one hand and for the massacre of indigenous spirituality on the other. Sebastian Kappen, an Indian-Jesuit theologian says, “Ungod is the God whom Christians fashioned to legitimize their lust for wealth and power. It is the Christian ungod who authorized the Christian kings to colonize and enslave all pagan nations and to exterminate indigenous tribes of Americas and the Pacific. It is the Christian ungod who permitted the Trans-Atlantic slave trade involving more than 30 million Africans. In short, the Christian ungod is a god who takes the side of the affluent and powerful against the vulnerable, a god with hands dripping with the blood of the innocent.”[2]

The colonial Christianity, often did not introduce the living God manifested in the liberating Christ to the indigenous communities. Rather, it introduced Ungods, Colonial Christs. A voice from Africa unveils this historical truth very powerfully. Vincent Gordon Harding, an African-American historian and social activist, describes the encounter of the enslaved Africans with the colonial Christ in these words: “We first met this Christ on slave ships. We heard his name sung in praise while we died in our thousands, chained in stinking holds beneath the decks, locked in with terror and disease and sad memories of our families and homes. When we leaped from the decks to be seized by sharks we saw his name carved in the ship’s solid sides. (the name of Christ!). When our women were raped in the cabins, they must have noted the great and holy books on the shelves. (the Bible!). Our introduction to this Christ was not propitious and the horrors continued on America’s soil.”[3]

Today we continue to experience the horrors of the Empires. And we also inherit such colonial horrors and scars on our bodies and minds in a colonial and postcolonial context like that of Pacific. The colonial Christianity, though claimed to believe in the Theophanies of the Living God, in reality it did establish a Theocracy of ungods by nullifying, erasing and massacring indigenous spiritualties. For a Samoan novelist Albert Wendt, the Samoan indigenous spirituality was found in fluid humour and laughter and not in rigid commandments and laws. He argues that the rigid Christian morality was the ungod that the Colonial Christianity brought to the Pacific. He says, “The missionaries (and all other puritans) brought pornography by instilling in us the bourgeois morality of Europe, making us ashamed of the very stories and situations which made us laugh. The puritan would have us believe that one does not exist below the navel. According to a poet friend, “The missionaries came with a Bible in one hand, and a chisel in the other.” True Samoan humour went underground and remains there in those circles we call “respectable.”[4] The bourgeois morality of Europe, or call it Victorian morality, was the ungod that the colonial Christianity used as a chisel to massacre the indigenous spiritualities.

When we identify the ungods within and among us, we are challenged to reclaim the Living God that manifested on the Mount Sinai, Mount Horeb and on the mount of transfiguration where Jesus embodies the living God and continues to fight against the ungods. The borderlessness of divine Theophany must enable us to identify the bordering Ungods within us and among us. We must strive to regain our ability to distinguish between the borderless God of life and the bordered Ungods of power, prosperity and the superiority of gender, race, ethnicity and spirituality. Our faith in the living God demands us to redeem our churches, our theologies, our spiritual practices from the worship of the Ungods. Our faith in the Living God is a faith of re-imagination. May we re-imagine a decolonized borderless Christ who enables us cherish the life in our indigenous spiritualties without compromising with the Empires of our time. Let us experience the Theophany of the living God today in our midst so that we may discard all the ungods that we may be worshipping knowingly or unknowingly.

To conclude, let us go back to yet another prose-poetry by Kahlil Gibran, Garments, but with a little variant:

Upon a day Beauty (read, Living God) and Ugliness (read, Ungod) met on the shore of a sea. And they said to one another, “Let us bathe in the sea.”

Then they disrobed and swam in the waters. And after a while the Ungod came back to shore and garmented himself with the garments of the Living God and walked away.

And the Living God too came out of the sea, and found not her raiment, and she was too shy to be naked, therefore she dressed herself with the raiment of the Ungod. And the Living God walked her way.

And to this very day men and women mistake the one for the other.

Yet some there are who have beheld the face of the Living God, and they know her notwithstanding her garments. And some there be who know the face of the Ungod, and the cloth conceals him not from their eyes.[5]

May the living God enable us to be that someone who cannot be deceived by the glittery garments of the Ungod of our time!

[1] Kahlil Gibran, The Madman in The Complete Works of Kahlil Gibran, New Delhi: Cross Land Books, 2015, 149.
[2] Sebastian Kappen, Spirituality in the Age of Reconciliation, Bangalore: Visthar, 1995, 3.
[3] Vincent Harding, “Black Power and the American Christ”, in The Black Power Revolt, edited by Floyd Barbour, Boston: Beacon Press, 1969, 86.
[4] Cited in Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Ta’isi Efi, “Whispers and Vanities in Samoan Indigenous Religious Culture” in Whispers and Vanities : Samoan Indigenous Knowledge and Religion, edited by Tamasailau M. Suaalii-Sauni...(et.al.), Wellington: New Zealand Huia Publishers, 2014, 15.
[5] Kahlil Gibran, The Wanderer in The Complete Works of Kahlil Gibran, New Delhi: Cross Land Books, 2015, 51-52.