When images become idols

There's nothing like the word "graven" to make a commandment sound irrelevant to your own life. Ditto for the words "bow down thyself."

But the second of the Ten Commandments, say leaders of a variety of religious faiths, is always timely. And that would be true even if America's current favorite TV show didn't have the word "idol" in the title. Obeying the Second Commandment, they say, is about making sure that nothing in your life is more important than God.

The First and Second Commandments are the most interrelated of the ten: Don't have any gods before me, God said, and by the way don't make any other images that you worship. By some reckonings, the two commandments are in fact one: Roman Catholics and some Lutherans include the prohibition against idolatry as part of the First Commandment. Most Protestants, Eastern Orthodox churches and modern-day Jews, on the other hand, separate them into two commandments.

The idolatry commandment is usually shortened so that it's concise and, frankly, more palatable. In its entirety, in the King James Bible, it reads: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; and showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments."

Taken literally, one segment at a time, the commandment seems to imply that no graven images of anything are allowed: no statues of horses, no photos of dolphins or, for that matter, any picture of anything. But the punctuation also suggests that it's not the images themselves that are the problem but, rather, the bowing down to them.

In Moses' time, idols were a part of personal and national life. Even after the Israelites heard the Ten Utterances from the voice of God on Mount Sinai, they fashioned a molten calf out of gold earrings and provided it burnt offerings. It was this apparent lapse into idolatry (along with some Israelite partying) that caused Moses to smash the stone tablets in anger.

"In the middle of one of the most important theological events of the Bible, we were messing it up," notes Dan John, former director of the office of religious education at the Salt Lake Catholic Diocese and now a teacher at Juan Diego Catholic High School. "It's funny how often we do that. You constantly find 'golden calf' moments." Just watch, he says, how people sometimes drive out of church parking lots cutting other people off, just minutes after hearing a sermon about compassion.