When the people heard these distressing words, they began to mournand no one put on any ornaments. - Exodus 33:4

Today’s Scripture Reading (June 21, 2012): Exodus 33

I remember the day that my mom got her ears pierced. That is probably not a memory that a lot of men have, but it is one of mine. I think I remember the day because of my mom’s reaction to the event. Even though she wanted to get her ears pierced, she was worried about what her mom (and my grandma) would think. Today my grandmother wears clip on ear rings, but I have a feeling (not a memory) that then grandma did not wear any ear decorations. So my mother was caught between the desire for something and the fear that her mom would not approve. The fear of disapproval probably extended back to an avoidance of excessive make-up and jewelry characteristic of some Christian churches in the first half of the twentieth century. I am not sure I understood that belief, and on some level I also wondered if there was an age when you stopped worrying about the approval of your parents. (Since then I have learned the answer to that question – and it is no.)

But whether or not I understood it, the avoidance of jewelry was a reality for a number of our Christian ancestors. I think that I always thought it was just another example of a rule for the sake of having a rule – that there was no solid reasoning behind it. But now I am beginning to wonder if maybe there was a reason.

Israel had sinned. In building a false god to replace the real God, they had done was actually to commit an act of treason against God. And treason is still the one crime that will get you executed in most areas of the world. So God tells Israel that he will send them to the land that he had promised to them, but that he would not go with them. And the reason that he would not go with them was that they were a stiff-necked people – a treacherous people that deserved nothing but death – but God loved them enough to want them to live. So he was willing to remove righteousness (himself) from the situation – God was willing to stay behind so that Israel could live.

And the people’s response to God’s decree was to remove their jewelry, to take off their ear rings and in attitude of repentance ask God to come with them. And that was what I missed about the no jewelry rule. It was not arbitrary, it was not done out of an attitude that jewelry was somehow evil, but rather out of an act of repentance and a recognition that we are still a treacherous people that deserve nothing but death, but that we also still desire God to go with us.

And that is the center of the Gospel story. Jesus takes our treachery and places it on himself, so that we can walk with God. And with or without jewelry, we walk with our Creator and allow him to recreate us from the treacherous people that we seem to be bent toward being into the work of art that God imagined when he first created us.

  

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Exodus 34