Crowning Glory

The responsorial psalm today has a comic twist; it's a kind of prayerful meditation on Israel's history, specifically, the incident with the golden calf. The psalmist notes wryly, "They exchanged their glory for the image of a grass-eating bullock." That just sounds like a poetic exaggeration ("their glory"?) until you realize that in the Scriptures, the "glory of Israel" was God himself.