A God Who Listens

Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A – Exodus 32:1–14

And the LORD relented from the disaster that He had spoken of bringing on His people [Exodus 32:14, English Standard Version].

In my Wednesday meditation posted three weeks ago, we encountered Jonah, a prophet who had a bone to pick with YHWH. Jonah had fled from his preaching assignment because he knew what YHWH was like. He knew that He was gracious and merciful, that He was slow to anger and ready to relent. Jonah questioned why he should travel to Nineveh to announce YHWH's judgment against the people there when, because of YHWH's nature, He'd likely spare the city anyway?

In this Sunday's OT reading, we encounter Moses in a rather different conversation. The LORD announces an intention to destroy the people, and Moses argues that He should spare them.

Jonah wanted judgment and objected to mercy. Moses hears judgment announced and pleads for mercy. And I find myself wondering: what happened to the God who is slow to anger?

Within this Exodus text, YHWH isn't, of course, angry without reason. He has brought the people out of slavery in Egypt. He has provided them with daily bread. He has promised a much better life in Canaan. Yet while Moses is with YHWH on the mountain, they talk Aaron into fashioning for them a golden calf. At least according to YHWH, they have worshiped it and sacrificed to it and said it had led them out of Egypt [32:8]. As YHWH relates to Moses, the people's faithlessness is no small matter.

Still, the conversation that follows between YHWH and Moses is troubling. YHWH tells Moses to go down to “your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt.” Your people, Moses. Until now, YHWH has spoken of the people as His people. Now, suddenly, they belong to someone else.

YHWH turns (figuratively) to Moses and says:

Let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them, in order that I may make a great nation of you [32:10].

YHWH's angry words sound remarkably like His earlier promise to Abram [Genesis 12:1-2]. Here, however, YHWH's promise of a new beginning comes with a threat. He will destroy those who inherited His first promise. Moses is offered a place at the center of a new story. He responds by pleading for the people already in this one.

More than thirty years ago, a pastor friend faced with preaching the text from the Lectionary, confessed to me that God's anger made him uncomfortable. "God can't be like that," he said. He continued, "One of my commentaries allows that perhaps God is only testing Moses. He never intends to destroy His people. His purpose must be to see whether Moses will intercede."

I understand the appeal of such an explanation. The only problem is that nowhere within the text does it say anything like that. In the holy text, there is no mention of a test. Instead, it tells us that Moses argued with YHWH, and the latter relented. I suppose that I'm happy that the holy text preserves a difficult conversation between YHWH and Moses, a conversation in which Moses’ protest is taken seriously and matters. Preserving it, however, offers a challenge as we try to explain and understand our God.

Indeed, as I've mentioned on numerous other occasions, the Bible is often an uncomfortable book. Sometimes, as was the case with the Jonah passage, when it has just finished describing what God is like, another passage like Exodus 32 asks us to look again.

Each time I encounter this passage, I recognize that it touches something close to the center of our prayer lives. Like me, you likely want God to be constant and faithful. We want to trust that God’s promises endure. It's unsettling when we read holy text that seems to be saying that occasionally, God needs reminding of His promises.

Yet we also want God to listen.

When we pray for someone we love, when we ask God for help with a broken relationship, when we despair that others are threatened by violence or hunger, we hope that our prayers matter to God. We trust, we hope, that what we bring before God receives a fair and loving hearing. “That is not on my agenda” is not the divine response for which we pray.

How can we hold our prayerful hopes together? How do we speak of a God who is faithful, everlasting, and constant, yet a God who hears and responds?

Moses offers no theory. Instead, he prays.

He intercedes by insisting that these people are YHWH’s people. He points out YHWH’s own deliverance of them from Egypt. He also appeals to YHWH's promises made to Abraham, Isaac, and Israel. Moses rests his appeal on what YHWH has done and by what He has promised yet to do. Listening to Moses, YHWH relents from the disaster He had spoken of bringing upon “His people.”

His people. At the beginning of YHWH's conversation with Moses, He spoke to Moses of “your people.” At the end, YHWH calls them His own. Their covenantal relationship survives this terrible conversation.

Of course, every difficulty is not removed. Nothing in this passage assures us that every prayer we offer to God will result in the answer that we seek.

I do not know how to make everything in this story comfortable. I find it troubling that Moses has to make his argument at all. But I am grateful that Scripture has recorded this discourse for us.

Moses holds YHWH’s promises before God. He pleads for a sinful people whose future is in jeopardy. And the Exodus story tells us that YHWH listens.

You and I have people for whom we need to plead. We have promises to which we are desperately clinging. And we are to bring all our prayers to God, even when we cannot make sense of what God is doing.