If you’re familiar with William Goldman’s book The Princess Bride, you know it’s supposedly the “good parts” version of an original text by one S. Morgenstern. If you’re familiar with the lectionary, you might be tempted to think of it as Princess Bride Scripture, since as Emily noted last week, it has a tendency to give us the “good parts” version of the Bible. Thus, from one Sunday to the next, we’ve taken a flying leap from Exodus 20 to Exodus 32. I understand the impulse, since the thought of reading four chapters on the construction of the tabernacle is only slightly more thrilling than that of sixty pages on Prince Humperdinck’s ancestry, but we do lose something important in the gap. The dramatic story of disaster and redemption we read in Exodus 32-34 doesn’t exist on its own, it’s an interruption of a lengthy set of instructions regarding the tabernacle, the priests, and the Sabbath. In other words, what we have here is God telling Moses how to set things up for Israel to worship him in truth, interrupted by the reality of Israel’s false worship. The contrast is important, as we will see.
The other key piece of context here comes from Exodus 24:18, which tells us Moses went back up the mountain and stayed there forty days and forty nights. In other words, he’s been gone for over a month, and they’re getting anxious. For one thing, they had begged him to stand between them and God, and he’s not around to do that—either to connect them to God or to protect them from God. So they’re waiting, hoping nothing bad happens . . . and nothing does, but nothing good happens either. In fact, the other reason for their anxiety, there’s nothing but nothing happening. They’re waiting, and all it’s getting them is more waiting, and how long are they going to have to sit around in this boring camp at the foot of the mountain doing nothing and going nowhere? You can only stand so many card tournaments, you know, and if you play Trivial Pursuit enough times, you end up memorizing all the answers. They don’t know when—or if!—they’ll see Moses again, and until they do, they can’t move on. They’re stuck . . . waiting.