Two weeks ago, I talked about visiting Michelangelo’s magnificent sculpture of Moses during my recent trip to Rome. That Sunday I took my book of Michelangelo’s art with me to the Children’s Faith Formation classes to show Moses to them. When I mentioned that the sculpture was made of marble, an eight-year-old boy said, “I thought it was white chocolate”. 

The sculpture recreates the moment when Moses came down from Mount Sinai and found the people of Israel worshiping the Golden Calf which was the false idol they had made in Moses’ absence. Moses is seated, extremely angry. His right hand protects the stone tablets containing the Ten Commandments. His left hand, with throbbing veins and tense muscles, appears to be holding back from violent action. Moses could not hold back for long and, as Exodus tells us, “Moses’ anger burned, and he threw the tablets down and broke them on the base of the mountain” (32,19).

Today I am talking about this crucial moment in Salvation history because the event of the Golden Calf and the breaking of the tablets of the covenant by Moses foreshadowed the need for a new covenant. God, through the prophet Jeremiah, precisely makes the promise of the new covenant as we heard in today’s first reading.

In Exodus, God proposes a covenant to the people of Israel, based on the keeping of God’s Law, summarized in the Ten Commandments. The people accepted the covenant and Moses splashed on the people the blood of the sacrificial victims. Moses went up the mountain to receive the tablets of the covenant.   

Moses stayed on the mountain for forty days. Before his return, the people got tired of waiting and asked his brother Aaron to make them a god, an image to worship. Aaron makes the Golden Calf. It is surprising to learn that the people of Israel almost immediately broke the covenant. They broke the most fundamental commandment of the Law of God by committing idolatry. Their sin violated the covenant at its core. 

To understand the sin of the people we need to keep in mind that they were still under the power of original sin. In addition, they were still spiritually young, confused, and uninstructed in the Law of God. So much had taken place in their lives and so quickly that the external events that surrounded their election as God’s chosen people had not yet sunk into their hearts and minds. They needed some training before God would take them to the Promised Land; forty years until all that generation died in the desert.

The popular chant for Good Friday, “Were you there when you they crucified my Lord?” helps us reflect on what we would have done if we had witnessed the Lord’s crucifixion. Similarly, we can wonder, “Were you there when they worshiped the Golden Calf?” The Church, all of us believers, today are the people of Israel of the new covenant. Thanks be to God that we are not under the power of original sin. Some of us Christians, though, have not let the external events of our Baptism and Confirmation sunk into our hearts and minds. Some of us need more spiritual training to be able to walk in the Law of God and one day be admitted in the Promised Land of heaven. The letter to the Hebrews todays tells us that even the Son of God needed some training in obedience. That training was necessarily through suffering. We cannot expect less.

All along God knew the spiritual weakness of the people of Israel. For that reason, God promised the new covenant. That new covenant needed to be based on God’s mercy alone, not on our own merits. The old covenant foreshadowed the new covenant. God’s grace, God’s mercy, and the adoption of the people as children of God was manifested already in the old covenant.

The promise of the new covenant was fulfilled on the Lord’s passion. On the eve of his death, the Lord claims to fulfill Jeremiah’s prophecy. We hear those words at each mass: “This is the chalice of my blood, the blood of the new and eternal covenant”. Let us humbly ask the Lord to grant us his grace to allow the things that happen externally in the sacraments to penetrate our hearts and minds to be faithful to his covenant.