© 2024 Evan D. Garner
Audio of this sermon is available here. Video can be seen here.
Is there any such thing as bad bread? From the nutritionally vacuous white bread to the hardiest whole-grain varieties, just about any bread will do. Yes, I know it can get moldy, but you can usually cut off the green edges. Yes, I know it can grow stale, but that just means it’s time for croutons, breadcrumbs, French toast, or even bread pudding. Although bread can go bad, it all starts off pretty good. As a child, I didn’t like the end-piece or the heel, and I preferred pillowy soft Wonder Bread to the more healthful stuff my mother bought, but, these days, it’s hard to find a bread I don’t like.
But, after wandering in the desert for almost forty years, the people of God had had enough of the bread that God had given them. “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?” they grumbled against God and against Moses. “For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food!” Literally, “Our very souls loathe wretched food,” implying, perhaps, that the Israelites had eaten so much manna for so long that they wretched or gagged at the mere thought of it. I suppose four decades of eating the same thing would make any of us a little irritable.
But God wasn’t having it: “The Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died.” The poisonous snakes—sometimes translated “fiery serpents,” presumably because their venom felt like burning to those who were bit—were God’s response to the people’s ingratitude. Apparently, taking for granted God’s heavenly provision made God angry enough to teach them a deadly lesson. But what is this strange story supposed to teach us?
The manna from heaven was always designed to be a test. In Exodus 16, shortly after the Israelites had escaped captivity in Egypt, the people ran out of food. So they grumbled against Moses and his brother Aaron, saying, “If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.” Back then, God heard the people’s complaint, and God said to Moses, “I am going to rain bread from heaven for you, and each day the people shall go out and gather enough for that day. In that way I will test them, whether they will follow my instruction or not.”
The next morning, when the Israelites awoke, there was a layer of dew all around the camp. When the dew lifted, a fine flaky substance was left behind, “as fine as frost on the ground.” The people asked, “What is it?”—a phrase which in Hebrew sounds like “manna.” “It is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat,” Moses explained to them. “This is what the Lord has commanded: ‘Gather as much of it as each of you needs, [one measure] to a person according to the number of persons, all providing for those in their own tents.” In other words, the people were told to gather as much as each person needed—no more, no less. If they gathered too much, by the next morning, the excess had become foul-smelling and worm-infested, unless it was the sabbath. On the day before the Sabbath, the people were told to gather two portions per person because the manna did not appear on the sacred day of rest. And, if they forgot to gather a double-portion, they went hungry for a day.
The rhythm of receiving, gathering, and depending on God’s provision, which was literally their daily bread, was itself a test. Each day, God gave them everything they needed, but there was no opportunity to horde leftovers, to commodify God’s bounty, or to leverage their blessings to get ahead. The test God gave them, therefore, was not a test of survival but one of faithfulness. When everyone has exactly what he or she needs and no one must struggle to survive, there is no way to confuse our accomplishments with God’s generosity. In a manna economy, people learn to depend on God each day, and the test is whether we will be satisfied with the portion we have been given.
That’s why the people’s grumbling in Numbers 21 invokes such a strong response from God. Their complaints are not merely a reflection of their “menu fatigue” but also of their collective refusal to accept what God had given them. “There is no food and no water,” the Israelites claimed, shoving the manna away like a dissatisfied toddler, refusing even to consider it as real food. “We would rather die than eat what God has given us,” they effectively said. “We would rather be slaves in Egypt than free people who belong to God.”
In effect, God gave them what they asked for, though it came in the form of poisonous snakes rather than starvation. When interpreting this strange passage, the rabbis teach that God sent serpents upon the people because a snake was the first creature who slandered God.[1] Because the people had spoken falsely against God’s goodness, they were to be punished by the original slanderer. But there is more to this punishment than the fiery serpents that bit the people. In the reading of this story, we cannot separate the punishment from its remedy.
The people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed. But, instead of taking the serpents away, as the people asked, God devised an even stranger means for their salvation. “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole,” God said to Moses, “and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” In so doing, the people were saved not because they looked upon the cast bronze image of a snake but, as the rabbis teach, because they lifted up their eyes to heaven.[2] A symbol of death became the window through which God’s people looked for God and God’s salvation. And, thus, by returning to their dependence on God’s sustenance, the people returned to their faith.
When Jesus taught his disciples to pray, he taught us to ask our heavenly Father for our daily bread. Every time we gather as God’s family, we ask God to give us this day the sustenance we need to make it until tomorrow—no more, no less. Our test is no different from that of the Israelites in the wilderness. Will we recognize that God has given us enough, and will we be satisfied with what we have been given? In an economy like ours, which rewards the accumulation of wealth and punishes those who have nothing, it is perilously easy to confuse our accomplishments with God’s generosity and fail the test that we have been given. When it comes to remaining faithful to God by depending solely on God’s daily provision, we are snakebit.
But there’s hope, although it might not be the answer we want. We want God to take away our struggles and hardships, even when they are the problems of our own making. God hears our prayers and beckons us to return, but the window through which we gaze upon God and God’s mercy is, again, the symbol of our own death—nothing less than the cross of Christ. “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,” Jesus taught us, “so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”
We look upon Jesus, crucified for our sins, in order that we might lift our eyes up to heaven. The cross is a sign of our failure to believe in God and trust in God’s sustenance. It is the embodiment of our greed and our self-indulgent ways. It is the ultimate sign of our refusal to accept what God has given us and our decision to choose our own death and slavery to sin rather than the freedom and abundant life God chooses for us. And yet that same cross becomes the means of our salvation—the window into our forgiveness, our redemption, and our eternal life.
The hope that God gives us is not a denial of our failures but our salvation from them. We must journey through the death of the cross in order to enter everlasting life. We must look upon the one who was crucified for our sins that we might be forgiven. And, by returning to our dependence on God’s sustenance—on God’s saving grace—we return to our faith—the faith by which we are saved. Here, we receive the true bread that came down from heaven to give life to the world, even God’s Son, Jesus Christ, our savior, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.
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1. See, for example, Bamidbar Rabbah 19:22.
2. See Ein Yaakov (Glick Edition), Rosh Hashanah 3:1.
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