Moses is up on Mount Sinai face to face in conversation with God. But God is not happy. Down below, in Moses' absence, God's people have turned away and have begun to worship a bull (contemptuously referred to as a 'calf') instead of their God. "Here is your god," they cried, "who brought you from the land of Egypt." While guaranteeing that Moses would head a great nation, God wanted to destroy these idolators. Moses, while not denying their sin, pleaded on their behalf. If they were destroyed, he said, it would look as if God had helped them escape from the slavery of Egypt only to face a more horrible death in the desert. He begged the Lord to remember the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and the promise made to them that their offspring would be as numerous as the stars in the sky or the grains of sand on the seashore. So God relents and gives them one more chance. Lent is a time for us to look back and see how often we have gone our own way. From the Gospel we know that God will always accept the repentant sinner but, like the Prodigal Son, we do have to turn back so that God can take us into his loving arms.