18 September 2011
Exodus 16:2-15; Matthew 15:29-38
Last week I mentioned briefly how the gospel of Matthew is a value-added gospel. I mean that the author or authors of the gospel elaborated on the source material that they had received, as they set it down in writing for a particular community of Christians in a particular time and place. For the other gospel writers, one miraculous feeding was sufficient, but not for Matthew’s gospel. The story I just read is the second feeding miracle in the gospel: a reprise of the feeding of the 5,000, this one set not on a hillside beside the sea but in the desert wilderness.
All of the additions to this gospel had a purpose. It wasn’t just to pad the gospel, to make it longer than all the other gospels; there was a theological purpose to the additional material. Like Matthew’s stories about Jesus’ birth, the feeding miracle was retold “to fulfill the scripture”—to connect Jesus to the prophets of the Hebrew scripture. The change in venue is significant-- bread in the desert—when was the last time the children of Israel received bread in the desert? This retelling casts Jesus as a prophet like Moses, the greatest prophet of all.
As Moses himself had promised: “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own people….” (Deut. 18:15) Moses provided bread in the desert, Jesus provides bread in the desert, therefore, Jesus is a prophet like Moses. “Never since has there arisen a prophet like Moses,” (Deut. 34:10) until now.
The manna story itself has an underlying purpose. The reason the story of the manna was told and retold and set in writing is because it said something true about God, something that was not simply true at the time, but something eternally true about the nature of God. In the desert wilderness, God provides.
The wilderness is a scary place, if you are lost and alone with no provisions. The wilderness is even scarier when you are lost, and not alone, but you are there with people who are dependent on you. Some of you saw a new profile picture on my Facebook page, which Richard of me took when I was out in the Badlands with the youth group. In the picture I appear to be in a posture of meditation, and in fact I was, and some of my friends commented that I looked very peaceful. But I was not. Actually I was praying that I would not faint dead away out there, and spoil the trip for the children in my care. We were taken for a hike in the Badlands in the middle of the afternoon, in August, when no people in their right minds would go out there. But we went because it was on the program, and we trusted our guides, the staff at Re-member. When we arrived at this great cavernous bowl of dust, and I had already drank all my water, I thought, O my God they have brought us out here to kill us. Who are these people, really? What do we know about them? I am going to die here and my youth group is going to have to carry my body out. And that will just ruin their week.
Though at the time I questioned the value of that trip into the wilderness, I really should be grateful for the insight into the states of mind of the Hebrew people in the wilderness. Who is this Moses? What do we know about him, really? Maybe he is a glassy-eyed megalomaniac, who brought us and our children out here in this wilderness to die. Pharaoh wasn’t so bad. Yes, we have the scars of the overseer’s whip on our backs, but we also had bread, and fruit, and water, and our children were safe. Pharaoh’s bread was better than no bread at all.
Pharaoh’s bread was better, until there was bread from heaven. Moses sent the people out to gather up bread from heaven, every day, just enough for that day and no more. Every day except for the Sabbath, God’s day of rest, the people gathered bread from heaven.
Eventually, forty years later so the story goes, the people entered the promised land, and they ate the bread of the land of Canaan that year, they ate the bread of the land that God had promised to their ancestors. All the manna ceased on that day, because manna is only for the wilderness.
Many generations later, the descendants of the Hebrew slaves once again found themselves eating Pharaoh’s bread. Not Pharaoh’s, literally, actually it was Caesar’s bread. The wheat may have grown in their promised land, Caesar claimed it as his own. Caesar requisitioned it and redistributed it under his own brand name, so to speak, in the imperial bread dole. As long as conquered people remained loyal to Caesar, they could eat his bread. Rebel, and the bread dole ceases. Thus the empire was held under Caesar’s power, through bread, and the legions, bread and the sword.
Jesus came like Moses to lead the people to freedom: to demonstrate that God still had the power and the will to provide bread in the desert, to make a way in the wilderness.
This is true, and can be trusted. This is a story for our time. When people at the bread of their own land, when everyone had, so to speak, their own vineyards and their own fig trees, when we were self-sufficient, perhaps then we didn’t need this story so much. But now, we live in a land of foreclosures. We live in a land of broken homes and broken dreams. We are afraid that we might watch our children suffer. We are afraid that our children might see us suffer. We are shadows of our former selves, we are exiled from the land of plenty in which we used to live and we pine for the days of plenty. But the way forward is not backward. We step tentatively into an unknown future.
And we bless bread, and break it, and share it with one another to remind ourselves and each other, that we don’t need pharaoh’s bread, or Caesar’s bread. We bless bread and we break it to tell each other something true about God: God provides bread in the desert, fountains in the wilderness. God provides. This is true, and can be trusted. Amen.
