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Reflections from your Pastors
March 14, 2024
Thursday of the Fourth Week of Lent-Exodus 32: 7-14- The Golden Calf
Sacred questions invite us to journey inward, to close the gap between what we believe and what we live, to be transformed by the Spirit. Francis Bacon once said, “A prudent question is one-half of wisdom.” Rainer Maria
Rilke advises us to “…love the questions themselves…perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” Good questions outrank easy answers.
Today’s first reading from Exodus shares the engaging conversation between God and Moses when the Israelites, merely humans, made a God to be their leader. Aaron asked the people to bring all their golden earrings that he might melt down the gold and fashion a golden calf as their God. Though the Israelites, by divine commandment, were explicitly forbidden to make graven images, the calf was completed, and the people “offered holocausts and brought peace offerings” to it.
Moses was up on Mount Sinai speaking with God when this occurred. God,
knowing and seeing all, said to Moses, “Go down at once to your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt, for they have become depraved. They have soon turned aside from the way I pointed out to them, making for them a molten calf and worshiping it, sacrificing to it and crying out, ‘This is your God, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt!” I see how stiff-necked this people is. Let me alone, then, that my wrath may blaze up against them to consume them.”
But Moses, acting as a good spiritual director to God, asked God these questions: “Why, O God, should your wrath blaze up against your own people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt with such great power and with so strong a hand?” And… “Why should the Egyptians say, ‘With evil intent he brought them out, that he might kill them in the mountains and exterminate them from the face of the earth?’ Let your blazing wrath die down; relent in punishing your people.”
Further sharing his understanding, Moses reminds God of the promises God has made to Abraham, Isaac and Israel, that God would make their descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and give to them the promised land as their perpetual heritage.
Moses offers God a look into God’s own soul.
And the outcome? God takes a deep look inside and relents in the punishment that God had threatened to inflict on the Israelites—God’s people.
Simone Weil, in her book Listening for the Soul, offers this: “Our attention is
the only faculty of the soul that gives us access to God”
How has your attention to God manifested throughout this Lenten season? How is it with your soul? What do you need or desire from God? What do you imagine God desires for you?
Do you think your prayers, your pleadings, and your questioning of God
could ever change God’s mind?
For Moses’ sake, it wouldn’t be the first time…
Amen
Mother Rosean
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