The temptation to follow idols

A Reflection for Monday of the Thirtieth Week in Ordinary Time

Find today’s readings here.

One of the Biblical themes that fascinated me most as a child—helped a great deal by an illustrated Bible whose artists seemed also enthusiastic about the concept—was idolatry. What was this constant temptation to turn away from God and get into some truly wild alternatives? The Old Testament is a treasure trove for an overactive imagination: You’ve got calves made of the gold of Israelite earrings, Philistine statues of Dagon that topple over at night. You have King Solomon, whose wisdom did not prevent him from following foreign idols like Ashtoreth the goddess of the Sidonians, or Molek the detestable god of the Ammonites, or Chemosh the detestable god of Moab. Even Moses’ bronze serpent that could cure snakebites through the power of God was eventually turned into an idol and offered sacrifices by the people.

No matter how much of a spectacle many of those idols can seem to a child, however, they also feel like they wouldn’t be impossible to avoid. “For a variety of reasons, I found myself falling down and worshipping a Golden Calf,” said no one I’d ever met.

And yet the temptation to follow idols never goes away. They just look different as you get older. In today’s first reading, we get a decent list of what those idols look like for an adult: Immorality, impurity, greed, even gossip. “Silly or suggestive talk,” you say? I have drunk of that deadly thing. These idols are far harder to look away from, far easier to succumb to, because their surface allure might seem less but their actual pull is far greater. And notice something else: Those ancient idols were not simply statues, totems, magic sticks and stones. All of them were connected to something else that required its own kind of devotion: wealth, sex, violence, intoxication, dominion. 

In other words, they are the same idols as those mentioned today in Ephesians, just without the gold and the snakes and the statues. The lack of those accoutrements, in fact, is what contributes to the greatest and most insidious temptation of all: to believe that we have no idols, that we are not drawn in by their strange allure, that they do not cause us to stray from God every single day. 

How would each of us depict our idols, those parts of our lives that demand increasing attention and devotion above all else, if we had to give them a form, a body, a personality? A Golden Calf might be too mild, truth be told. Not bestial enough. 

God’s plea—return to me with all your heart—is a rebuke to every idol, those which we fall down before and worship and those whose allure works its way into our hearts little by little every day.