Ex. 24:12-18
Then the Lord said to Moses, “Come up to Me on the mountain and be there; and I will give you tablets of stone, and the law and commandments which I have written, that you may teach them.”
13 So Moses arose with his assistant Joshua, and Moses went up to the mountain of God. 14 And he said to the elders, “Wait here for us until we come back to you. Indeed, Aaron and Hur are with you. If any man has a difficulty, let him go to them.” 15 Then Moses went up into the mountain, and a cloud covered the mountain.
16 Now the glory of the Lord rested on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it six days. And on the seventh day He called to Moses out of the midst of the cloud. 17 The sight of the glory of the Lord was like a consuming fire on the top of the mountain in the eyes of the children of Israel. 18 So Moses went into the midst of the cloud and went up into the mountain. And Moses was on the mountain forty days and forty nights.
Ex. 32:1
Now when the people saw that Moses delayed coming down from the mountain, the people gathered together to Aaron, and said to him, “Come, make us gods that shall go before us; for as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.”
There are so many stories that we tell of waiting, stories of the Simeons and the Annas, the Zechariahs and the Elizabeths that we lean into during the Advent season. There are stories of consummation and stories of hope deferred. There are stories of those days to come when every tear will be wiped from our eyes, when we will see it all clearly and know the goodness of God in the land of the living.
It’s a wonder to me in all this waiting that we don’t tell the story of Moses on the mountain, that we don’t tell the story of Exodus 24.
I suppose it’s because, for the most part, we see this as a story of failed waiting.
And, in some ways, that’s what it is. The Hebrew people, alone in the desert, need something to worship, something that they can see and touch and, here’s the real part, control. You’ve probably heard that talked about, taught, preached on. There’s no need to point out the idols, the golden calves, that we all have. We’ve had them pointed out enough, haven’t we? And even if we haven’t, we know, with just a cursory glance over our lives, we know what they are.
For me, though, the story of Moses and the children of Israel at Mount Sinai is an Advent passage not because of what happens in Exodus 32, but because of what happens in Exodus 24. Only four chapters earlier, the people told Moses that they were afraid to speak to God directly, that they wanted him to speak to the Lord and bring back His words. They’d seen lightning and fire, felt the shaking of the earth and the power of God’s presence.
Now, in Exodus 24, Moses is going up the mountain again, being beckoned there by God. “Wait here for us until we come back to you,” says Moses.
Wait.
With these words, Moses, their leader, the one who has calmed them, spoken for them, encouraged them and explained things to them leaves. To climb Mount Sinai (which, incidentally, is the very same mountain, Mount Horeb, where Moses met God at the burning bush—God does have a penchant for renaming things, you’ll notice).
Wait, says Moses.
He doesn’t tell them how long he’ll be gone, or what to do while he’s chatting with the Almighty. He doesn’t give them any further elaboration on the Ten Words (the most accurate translation from the Hebrew of what we call in English the Ten Commandments), or tell them to take up basket weaving while he’s gone. Just, wait.
So hard to do at the best of times.
And if I were the people of Israel, with the one that I trusted my life to throwing a few words over his shoulder as he trekked toward the One I’d seen turn the Nile into blood, I might just feel a little, well, abandoned.
It’s all of those pieces, I think, that contribute to the great contradiction that’s found in verses 16, 17 and 18.
Do you see it?
Take a moment. Scroll up and read it again.
Here’s Moses, at the top of Mount Sinai. Covered in cloud. If you’ve ever been in a thick, thick fog, where you couldn’t see your own outstretched hand, it was probably a little like that. White, muffled, still. And, like fog, the cloud would have softened the edges of everything, making the world seem porous. Moving around would have been a bit dangerous, so it’s possible that Moses was hanging out just in one place. It must’ve been something, hearing God’s voice from the midst of that white, wet wonderland. I would have wanted to stay, with the voice of the One who loves me reverberating off of all those suspended drops of water, like being inside the world’s womb.
It’s odd, then, what comes next. The words matter, and not just because they strike hard against the picture painted in verse 16. At the bottom of the mountain, what the people of Israel see, what the white, gentle, resonant cloud is to them, is a consuming fire. Not just burning—destroying, ravaging. The word consuming here has the same root as the word for that which they were commanded not to do in the Garden—eat. The image is stark, and as one who has watched wildfires consume great tracts of land, I get it. Consuming fire is terrifying, and nothing survives it.
So Moses went into the midst, says verse 18, but we’re back at the top of the mountain once more, and it isn’t fire, not really, it’s cloud.
The Scriptures are clear, here, that what is actually happening at the top of this mountain is different than what the nation of Israel is seeing when they look at the mountain.
Standing at the foot of Sinai, it looks like there’s no way Moses will ever survive forty minutes, let alone forty days, in this raging inferno. Standing at the top of the mountain, Moses is surrounded by grace.
What we see tells us a whole lot about where we are.
Wait, says Moses, the word echoing down the centuries into our Advent here and now.
Wait, even when it looks like God is a fire. Wait, even when everything your eyes see is destruction. Wait, because everything that seems like consumption and death will be revealed as something else all along.
Wait, because your eyes have been shaped by the narrow place, by Egypt, and it hasn’t been so long since you’ve left that place where you couldn’t be you, couldn’t worship freely, behind. Wait, because those eyes aren’t the eyes of Moses, shaped by decades in the wilderness, eyes that saw the bush wasn’t consumed after all.
Wait, because you’ve been trained to see as a slave, live as a slave, seek leaders who will treat you as a slave. Wait, though your slave-eyes see fire, because the God who called you out into this wilderness, waiting place is coming to transform you.
Wait, oh, just wait, beloved, when you feel abandoned, because maybe, just maybe, you too, will be called up this mountain. Maybe, just maybe, you too, will see that this place that was fire is truly cloud and the voice of the Lord will call to you from within it, calling out all of who you are and all of who you are meant to be.
Now that’s an Advent story, wouldn’t you say?
