Exodus 16:2-15 Commentary

Illustration

I was recently watching a TV show with my 4-year-old and, at one point, an item begins to ring. The main character picks up the top part, connected to the bottom part with a curly wire and speaks into it.  On the main, bottom part, there is a circle with numbers, almost like a clock, but only numbers 1-9 and 0 at the end. There is a clear piece of plastic with holes laid on top of the strange, not-quite-clock face.  My son looked at me strangely and I told him: “that’s a telephone.” He continued to look at me—and the rotary phone on screen—strangely. I’m not sure he believed me.

It might be fun to include some “ancient artifacts” as a part of a children’s sermon or pictures on a screen to begin your sermon. And you could name this segment of the worship service “manna.” 

Commentary

The Strangeness of God’s Provision

God has provided for God’s people in the wilderness. They will not die of starvation or thirst.  But when the people go to pick up and make sense of God’s provision, they name it “Manna,” which means: “what is it?”

I think about the many intonations that question might have: puzzlement, suspicion, outright revulsion. 

What even is this?

What am I supposed to do with it?

Thanks but no thanks.

And then I recognize the many ways I respond to God’s provision in my life.  I don’t understand it.  I don’t know what to do with it. I set it aside looking for something more, something better.  

The gift of manna is an excellent case study for challenging our responses to God’s provision in our lives. Robert Alter suggests that “The refractory nature of the people — or perhaps one should say their anxiety and their greed — is manifested even in their response to this bounty from God that has come to answer their complaints.”

From Complaint to Covenant

Perhaps here we need to back up and consider what was happening before God rained down the what..I mean, manna. God’s people are worried and in their worry, they’ve forgotten the oh-so-recent provision of God for their safety through the Red Sea on dry ground and the not-so-distance terror of slavery in Egypt. Less than 50 days after their liberation, they are questioning God’s goodness and slavery’s badness. Robert Alter suggests that there is something about the way slavery has conditioned them that makes them vulnerable to this anxiety. “There seems to be a note of panic in the claim that they are on the point of death from starvation. That note would be plausible for a population of newly freed slaves who had been accustomed to having all meals provided by their masters and who now find themselves in the arid moonscape of the Sinai desert.”

They have learned a kind of dependence, an unavoidable helplessness that was created and exploited by powerful and unkind masters in Egypt.  Now God steps in to provide, to build an alternate place for the people to lean into their dependence. But notice this too: even as God’s provision clearly stands between the people and starvation, even as they are dependent on God, God is also building out their capacity to live in relationship to this provision in new ways.  God is not interested in creating and exploiting the people’s helplessness.  God gives them instructions for collecting — just enough for one day at a time.  God gives them another gift at the same time — the provision of rest on the Sabbath day.  God is teaching them to trust in God’s goodness rather than slavery’s exploitative system. God is teaching them to live into God’s provision as gift rather than snare. God is building the kind of muscle memory that God’s people will need when they finally do enter and settle in the Promised Land.

Creating a People

Consider this sojourn in the Wilderness. God’s people didn’t just make a wrong turn, and God is not being unnecessarily punitive.  Rather, God is interested in creating a people capable of living in the land that God will show them. For now, they are no longer slaves but are not yet citizens of the promised land. For now, they have to figure out how to be God’s people when they are stuck between these two things, which means: releasing the habits and patterns of slavery, rehearsing the habits and patterns of citizenship in God’s Kingdom. This, at the very least, requires God’s people not to tell false narratives about the slavery of the past or to dismiss or doubt God’s narrative about the Kingdom that is coming. 

What this means, according to scholar Judy Fentiss-Williams, is that “Free from the place of bondage, Israel is homeless. The God she follows does not appear to be anxious about this matter. To the contrary, God seems content to have Israel wander where she must depend on YHWH for everything.”  The point of deliverance was not simply to get to a new place but to become a new people. “The point of the exodus in Egypt was the creation of a people. Against the harsh backdrop of the desert, the Israelites learn that if they are to be the people of God, they must develop a faith born out of imagination.”

Fentiss-Williams continues her argument by pointing to the role of wilderness in Hebrew Scripture.  Wilderness is a place of meeting with God. In Genesis 12, God calls Abram into a season of wandering.  In Genesis 16 and 21, God meets with and is known by Hagar in the wilderness. Jacob, too, encounters God and a new direction when he is a wanderer. “Now the entire people of Israel are taken from bondage into the wilderness for an extended period of formation that is rooted in Israel’s utter dependence on God.” 

As God’s people leave their slavery behind, they need the Delivering God we encountered in the last Lectionary reading. When they enter the Promised Land, they will need a Reigning God. In between the deliverance and the reign, God’s people need  a steady, providing, faithful, trustworthy God. And so do we. Caught between Christ’s human Incarnation and Christ’s coming again as King, we are also in the process of relearning bad habits of slavery to this world’s powers and principalities as well as rehearsing life in a world in which every square inch already belongs to God and will, one day, be redeemed and restored through Christ.