Exodus 16:2-5, 13-21, 35 March 4, 2018
John 6:24-35Pastor Lori Broschat
FED BY THE HAND OF GOD
On one of her trips into the South to lead slaves to freedom, Harriet Tubman, whose nickname was “Moses,” was hiding with twenty-five slaves all day in a swamp. They had no food. When it came time to move, one man refused to go. They were all going to die anyway, he said, so he might as well turn back and die at home. He did not care that he was jeopardizing the lives of the rest of the group. Suddenly, he heard a click and felt the cold steel of a pistol at his temple. He heard Harriet’s voice. She didn’t shout. She just said, “Move or die!” He moved.
TheIsraelites in the desert make no mention of Pharaoh and his unreasonable demands. In an indirect way, the people seem to blame God both for their current crisis in the wilderness as well as their enslavement: “If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt.” Pharaoh was the one trying to kill them in Egypt. God rescued them! Their hunger leads them to what seems to be willful forgetfulness.[1]
The people did not respect the power of God or what He had done for them, so He assured Moses they would see His provision and they would see His glory. He spoke to Moses, who then spoke to Aaron, who then gathered the congregation of people together and told them that the Lord had heard their complaints. Sensing a rebellion might be on the horizon, God would provide food along with rules to test their willingness to obey.
He promised them meat and bread in the form of quail and manna, which would appear in the wilderness each morning and each night. They had to do nothing for it, and it was theirs for forty years. Learning to trust God took time, for they became greedy, disobeyed and tried to store up the manna, but it spoiled and began to smell. However, they learned their lesson when God provided a double portion on the day before the Sabbath, so they would not have to gather it.
If we can learn anything from this passage in Exodus, it’s that it is not wrong to feel fear and to cry out and to complain. It is only wrong to dwell on these feelings, to continually doubt and fear and complain despite what we have seen God do. We will have fears, and we need to express them. God will hear sympathetically and respond to our fears with grace and love.
The way God chooses to provide for us varies with each passing year of our lives, often reflecting a need we are not even aware of at the time. Thousands of years after the wilderness wandering, Jewish people today place two loaves of bread on the Sabbath table as a reminder of the way God gave double the portion of manna for the Sabbath.
When crowds followed Jesus to Capernaum after He gave them bread to eat, they asked Him when He had arrived there, Jesus knew there was more than curiosity on their minds. He said, “You are looking for me, not because you saw miraculous signs but because you ate the loaves and had your fill. Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life.”
He was not denying they had seen the feeding of the multitudes as a miracle, but He was denying they had perceived it as a sign. Had they grasped and accepted its deeper meaning, they would have offered Jesus far more than kingship and would have sought from Him something far greater than earthly bread.
Their idea of earning the bread of eternal life was to perform some selfless or sacrificial act, thereby showing God and everyone else how obedient and loyal they were. God may be interested in our obedience and loyalty, but not in a tradeoff wherein we perform, and He rewards. Once they knew they were required to believe in Him, they came back with another question, “What sign will you give that we may see it and believe you? What will you do?”
This was quite a skeptical crowd Jesus was dealing with. They believed in the manna God provided in the wilderness as a great sign of power and provision and they wanted the same kind of proof from Jesus. Little did they know what was going on all along was that God was providing not just the physical bread dropping down from the sky, but the spiritual nourishment which kept alive their faith and hope. That was what God was doing then, and that was what He was doing now.[2]
Jesus came as the true manna; true in that the old manna ceased. Jesus was, and is, miraculous, both in origin and nature, and therefore, all-sufficient in life. As the bread we eat contains many of the elements needed for nutrition, so in Christ we have all that is necessary for our spiritual and eternal life. Jesus corrects our confused view of life, just as He had to correct the confused view of life of His hearers in that day.
Jesus no doubt confused any number of people. He comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable. In speaking to the crowd who followed Him after His miracle feeding of thousands He was especially careful with His words. He needed them to know there was more to hunger than just physical hunger. Spiritual hunger needs to be satisfied too.
The problem with these people listening to Jesus was they were focused on manna in the wilderness rather than on the reality of Jesus, the living bread from Heaven.Because the people sought relief from physical hunger but not true fulfillment of what they really needed, they did not hear His message.
The history of their people who ate manna from God was not like their future of eating the bread of heaven. Accepting blessings from God’s hands is fine, but not if it is all we will take from Him. When Christ offers true life and spiritual sustenance is our responsibility to accept.
We can’t turn back when we’re facing the promised land. We shouldn’t refuse to accept God’s generosity when its right in front of us. This meal we share together is a sacrament, which is not only a way of remembering God’s mercy and love but is also defined as “a thing of mysterious and sacred significance.”
Thisparticular definition appeals to me. I find much of God’s intervention in life to be mysterious and sacred. Was the daily provision of manna in the wilderness a sacrament? Perhaps not in so many words, but surely God would have intended it to be. Manna translates to “What is it?” which is a fine way to name something mysterious. Communion is communication between God and the church. It brings us together as the body of Christ.
What we need to sustain us on our journey of faith is Christ, and in the eucharist we are nourished by Christ; we are fed by the hand of God. In this sense, we can speak of the bread which we share as the bread of heaven and we can be confident that as we feed on this bread, we receive the nourishment we need for our journey through the wilderness of this life to the promised land.
1
[1]
[2]Wright, N.T., John for Everyone, Part 1, Chapters 1-10, pg. 80