Breadbug
Propers: The Eleventh Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 18), AD 2024 B
Homily:
Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.
Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
In 1968, shortly after the end of the Six-Day War, an Israeli botanist embarked upon a scientific expedition in the Sinai Desert, one of several territories recently conquered by Israel. He noticed some white drops on the green stem of a desert shrub—a plant quite common throughout the Middle East. “What is that?” he asked of a passing native Bedouin. “That is manna,” the Bedouin replied. “That’s what you ate when you left Egypt.”
The central story of the Hebrew Bible is the Exodus: not the Garden of Eden, to which scant attention was paid; nor even Father Abraham, important as he was; but the Exodus, the emancipation, when the God of lowly slaves defeated the pantheon of Egypt. Exodus is the genesis of the Jewish people—even more so than Genesis is the genesis of the Jewish people! It is their founding myth, not in the sense that it’s false, but in that it’s the tale that holds the whole together, the story that makes sense of all the rest.
You know the deal. 12 Tribes, descended of Israel, settle peaceably in Egypt. Yet as the centuries roll by, and their population grows, ethnic tensions arise between themselves and the native Egyptians. A new dynasty subjects them to slavery, to forced labor, killing off their children in order to manage their numbers. Then a remarkable figure emerges, born a Hebrew slave, raised a prince of Egypt, only to flee to Midian, there to become a shepherd. This of course is Moses, the author of the Law.
Long story short: Moses returns to Egypt as an envoy of the Lord, and God proclaims through Moses, “Let my people go!” —to which Pharaoh replies, “Over my dead body,” or something to that effect. 10 Plagues pronounce judgment upon 10 false gods. In the end, the Israelites gain their liberation so quickly that the bread that they’d prepared had not time to rise. We remember this as Passover, the central festival of Judaism.
Without the Exodus, there is no Passover. Without Passover, there is no Last Supper. Without the Last Supper, there is no Eucharist, no Holy Communion. We know the story of the Exodus because of Jesus Christ: it was His story, the founding of His people, well over a thousand years before our Lord’s Nativity. We have been grafted into His inheritance as wild branches spliced into a cultivated tree. Holy Communion is the Christian Passover feast. It makes no sense without the Exodus.
But getting back to Moses: after the people were sent out from Egypt, making their way laboriously back to the Promised Land of their ancestors; they wandered in the wilderness some 40 years or so, strangers in a strange land. According to the Book of Exodus, what sustained the people in their wanderings was a mysterious substance called manna. Now, manna literally means, “What is that?” because this is precisely what the Israelites asked upon first encountering it on the Sinai.
The Bible tells us that “in the morning there was a layer of dew round about the camp. And when the layer of dew was gone up, behold upon the face of the wilderness a fine, scale-like thing, fine as the hoar-frost on the ground … like coriander seed, white; and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey.” Not bad for breakfast!
Each morning Israel would gather enough manna for the day—“give us this day our daily bread”—and on Friday they’d gather twice as much so that they could then rest on the sabbath. They called it the bread of heaven; they called it the bread of angels; sweet and nutritious and gathered with minimal labor. So much did they love it that the priests preserved a jar of manna inside the Ark of the Covenant, along with the 10 Commandments, as witness to the superabundant bounty of our God.
But here’s the kicker: people still eat manna to this day. It’s true. Manna is found on tamarisk trees throughout the Middle East, from Sinai through Mesopotamia to Persia. They make it into candy, with cardamom and nuts, to produce a sweetmeat similar to nougat. French travellers first discovered manna at St Catherine’s monastery back in the 16th century. It was said to be the specialty of the Jewish confectioners of Baghdad. And it’s precisely as described within the Scriptures: a sweet white seed-like substance left behind by dew.
It ends up—get this—that manna is the digestive byproduct of insects that feed on the sap of the plant. This results in honeydew, formed at night, which then evaporates in the morning, leaving behind hard white granules that people still collect from spring to early autumn. I find that remarkable. I’d honestly love to try some. And if the involvement of insects might seem to us distasteful, well, then we shouldn’t think too hard about our honey.
Does this insight rob us of a miracle? Certainly not. Indeed it corroborates the broad strokes of the story. The authors of the Exodus did not clearly distinguish between the mundane and miraculous. There might surely be a natural explanation, but who after all was the Author of nature? Who gave to the powers that be all their powers? God provides; through sun and grain and sap and bug, through milk and honey, through rivers and springs and seas. Mother Nature is herself firmly rooted in God. The miracle is not that manna’s magic. The miracle is that our God is here: Immanuel, God-With-Us.
In our Gospel reading this morning, the crowd has once again found Jesus. This poor guy can’t catch a break. He climbs up a mountain and the people climb up after. He walks upon the waters and the people skirt the shore. Jesus just wants to pray, and to prepare His 12 Apostles. But notice that He never turns a needy soul away.
The crowd catches up to Him—out of breath, I’d imagine—and they say, “Whew, boy, You’re fast. Just how’d You manage to cross that lake so quickly?” Jesus says, “Truly, I tell you, you are looking for Me not because you saw the signs but because you ate your fill.” This follows on the heels of last week’s Gospel, when Jesus fed 5000 with two fish and five small loaves. “You’re just looking for a free lunch,” He tells them. “You didn’t get the message. You didn’t see the sign.”
And that’s what John calls them, mind you: not miracles but signs; the purpose of which is to reveal to us just who and what Christ is. Jesus says it’s not about the belly. He feeds the hungry, yes, yet ever strives to give them more. “Do not work for the food that perishes,” He tells them, and thereby tells us all, “but for the food that endures for eternal life, that the Son of Man will give you. For it is on Him that God the Father’s set His seal.”
“How exactly do we do that?” they reply. “What must we all do, to perform the work of God?” “This is the work of God,” He answers them, “that you believe in Him whom He has sent.” The Gospel isn’t what we have to do; it’s all what God in Christ has done for us. Trust in that, trust in Him, for trust in God is faith. “Okay,” they say, “but how do we know You’re the guy? What sign are You going to give us? Our ancestors ate manna in the wilderness. Can You also call down magic bread from heaven?”
And now we get to the meat of the matter. This is what He wanted them to ask. “Manna’s not the real bread of heaven,” Jesus says. “Moses got you manna, but My Father gives to you the true and holy bread.” Because what is the bread from heaven? It’s not bug spit on a tree. “The bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” Boom. That’s what He’s been getting at. That is what the sign was meant to show. It isn’t just about free food. It isn’t just about the sugar and the dough. It’s about Christ.
Jesus is the Bread of God, come down from heaven, in order to give life to the world, to pour Himself out, to pour out His Blood and His Spirit, thus to resurrect Creation, to free us from our bondage here to sin and death and hell, and raise us up to everlasting life. As sunlight is captured within the grain, which dies to nourish us all, so Christ has come from heaven, the only Son and Word and Image of the Father, to put the life of God in us, to feed us with His Body, His Blood, and His Spirit in this Christian Passover feast.
Jesus is our Bread. And He fills up our hunger for God.
In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Pertinent Links
RDG Stout
Blog: https://rdgstout.blogspot.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RDGStout/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsqiJiPAwfNS-nVhYeXkfOA
X: https://twitter.com/RDGStout
St Peter’s Lutheran
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064841583987
Website: https://www.stpetersnymills.org/
Donation: https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home
Nidaros Lutheran
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100074108479275
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@nidaroschurch6026
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