Out of Manna
Joshua 5:9-12; Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
March 14, 2010
A few years back Anthony Hopkins starred in the movie The Remains of the Day, playing a butler in post-World War I Britain. He sought out a real life butler to ask about the way it really is, attitudes and all. He discovered that those wealthy enough to have servants tend to believe before long that they deserve them, that they are privileged and entitled to such service simply because of who they are. So how should a proper butler behave and act when he is doing the right kind of job? The butler responded, “The room seems emptier with him in it.”
I am not sure where to go with such an insight, but it does reveal how our sense of entitlement can allow us to reduce other people around us, right next to us, to not being worthy of recognizing their presence. And then the manna stops.
The people of Israel, freed from four centuries of slavery in Egypt, saved at the parting of the Red Sea, somehow could never quite seem to find their way back home. Along the way they were the older prodigal son in the parable, grumbling at everything with the doting prodigal father reassuring them that there was nothing he wouldn’t give them.
So when they were thirsty in the barren desert, Moses only had to break a rock for water to come rushing out. When they were hungry, yearning for that good Egyptian sour dough, God provided sweet manna every morning on the floor of the desert. There are still guesses about the nature of manna: the name itself is Hebrew for “what is it?” But it was spiritual food as well - you could only collect and eat what you found that day. Try to keep some for tomorrow and it would spoil and mould and fester with worms. You had to eat what you needed for that day only, and then you had to trust that the following morning God would provide. Bakers were out of business in the wilderness wandering Israel, because this went on for 40 years. But once they reached the Promised Land and started eating the produce of the land, unleavened cakes and parched grain, it had to change. Something very religious here too, for the very day after they celebrated the Passover for the first time, there was no more manna. The Exodus was over. For once, there were no murmurings from the Israelites. Was the room emptier now?
The Pharisees and the scribes were murmuring, however, as the tax collectors and sinners were flocking to hear Jesus. Let me fill out what they were saying about Jesus, “He’s eating bread with them!” He began telling them a parable, but it is a little ambiguous which “them” he was speaking to - the tax collectors or the Pharisees. Which “them” are we? It doesn’t really matter.
There’s no butler in this story, yet plenty of servants who never speak although they have an important role. Most of us know the story all too well: a young man is restless at home and wants to see more of the world - the oldest story in the book. Young people who live in the centre of the universe, aka Toronto, or New York or London or Tokyo, all want to get out of there and see the bigger world. Everybody else wants to leave Biggar and go to New York.
I could avoid using some puns now, but I won’t. The dramatic tension starts with the younger son asking for his share of his father’s inheritance. Usually this was portioned out after the father’s death, but now is fine. He wanted “Dead Man’s Bread.” That means as a consequence he impoverished his father. And he ate it all up, probably way down somewhere in the warmer climes of the US. He must have thought it was manna.
He thought he was in the Promised Land, and maybe he had been, but this place ran out of bread too. Famine, not a divine decision, but no bread at all. He had to reduce himself down to feeding somebody’s pigs, which meant he was not in a land that practiced his religion, and apparently it was against the rules to eat the bread of the pigs. Then he comes to himself, an odd phrase when you think of it.
If I were to go home and beg with my father to let me be one of his slaves and servants, I would be able to eat all the bread I need. Some readers have wondered whether he was truly penitent at this point, but let’s face it, he was willing to humble himself tremendously, so something is happening in there.
The prodigal son returns home with his speech all nervously prepared. If he were playing a game, we never find out because the father sees him from a good distance off and recognizing his gait, rushes out to greet and embrace him. The son blurts out the prepared speech, but the prodigal father is not listening, ordering instead the fatted calf and a big party. Lots of bread, and other stuff.
The elder son is out working in the field as he should be, but when he hears the music and dancing, and the reason for it all, he is angry and refuses to party. He wants no part of that loaf of bread, wants no part of this country. The father comes out to soothe him, surprised that the older son doesn’t seem to get it, to be filled with the same joy on the return of his younger brother. The issue is that the older brother never received any manna - never received a gift of grace. No fatted calves, no parties, no dancing gophers; instead, he earned everything by his works, and where did that get him? “I have never touched a harlot!” he pontificates.
The prodigal father, too lax for many of us, sighed before he answered his son who never ate manna. It doesn’t say that in the text, it’s written loudly between the lines.
“Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.” It’s never been a matter of working or earning all this stuff. Manna didn’t have to appear out of heaven; the bread was always on the table for you. You think you have never been given a gift? You don’t know how to look. You’ve kept looking away from the gifts right before you, thinking that made you look more dignified and respectable. Lighten up, dear son, because in fact you are already lighter than you have imagined through the grace of love surrounding you. Now your brother, yes, he had a problem. But he has died to all of that and now has come back to life, and what better reason for a party. He was dead and is alive; he was lost and is found. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a prodigal like me and you.
Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan