What is it? Exactly. - Exodus 16:2-15
The berries are purple, bright with an almost neon sheen. They grow, bunched along the branches, with little clusters shaded by green, serrated leaves. This time of year, if you sit by one of these plants full of berries, you are almost guaranteed to see a catbird—the elegant, gray cousin of the mockingbird.
Most children are taught not to eat berries like these. Some berries, after all, are poisonous, and so rather than teach the difference, we instruct children not to enjoy any of them. This is largely because the parents themselves have never learned the difference. For food, they have become entirely dependent upon agriculture, processed and packaged and shipped to the grocery store. Even our knowledge of growing our own food has become diminished—a task for a small number of people in some “middle of nowhere” place. And quickly enough, farming is giving way to the lab, where edible substances are being made rather than grown, all according to a patented process.
If we were to place most modern Americans in a forest for a few months, they would starve. But it wouldn’t be from lack of available food; instead, it would be from a lack of knowledge—an inability to recognize the gifts all around them. Our sense of the gifts of creation have been replaced by a dependence upon the economies of commerce and the Empire way of life that they serve.
The people of Israel were in a similar situation in their exodus from Egypt. They knew how to shop at the grocery stores of the Empire, eating from its ready supply of grain and meat, but they didn’t know how to eat from the gifts of creation, freely available on the land. And because of this lack of knowledge, their trust for their wellbeing was placed in the very Empire in which they had been enslaved. So it was, that when the food of Empire began to run low, they began to panic.
The blame, as so often happens, was pointed toward their leaders. They didn’t want to admit that it was God they didn’t trust, so they blamed Moses and Aaron. God, however, sought to make them honest about their problems. God tells them, in effect, “Look, your problem isn’t with Moses but with me. I know this is a stressful place to be. You grew up completely dependent upon an economy of extraction and exploitation, and now that it is gone, you don’t really know another way to live. But I’m going to show you a new reality in which you can live with abundance without becoming enslaved in the process.”
It is here that the genius of God’s response to Israel becomes clear. God could have acted like a divine U.N. Food Program plane, dropping flour sacks into the wilderness from above. People would have known what to do with that kind of food. But God doesn’t want to feed them in the patterns of the Empire. As the political philosopher Michael Walzer has remarked: It took less than 40 days to get the people out of Egypt, but it took 40 years to get Egypt out of the people. God is not just liberating Israel from Egypt, but is also liberating them from the entire pattern of life that Egypt represents. So, to offer a new pattern, one that doesn’t depend on controlling people and exploiting the world, God offers them a strange food, one that can’t be identified according to any of their old ways of knowing or stored up for more than a day’s time.
“What do you call it?” they ask. To which God answers, “Exactly.” So, it that manna is named as a question, one that is left forever undefined. Manna means, literally, “what is it?” And one can only know the answer by trusting God for this daily food and eating it without understanding. It was a mysterious provision from the generosity of God, and for all the scholarly proposals put forth, we still don’t know what manna was exactly.
Though we do not rely on manna as our daily bread these days, our task is still the same as Israel’s in the Sinai wilderness. We are all too easily tempted to think that some institution or human system will meet our deepest needs. Instead, we are called to recognize that it is God we must trust, rather than the grocery store, the military, the government, or even the church. And if your experience is anything like mine, you will likely find that what God gives you in that trust will be food enough, even if you don’t understand it. We will be asking to our graves—“What is it?” To which God will only respond, “Exactly, eat and be filled.”
On a recent hike, I saw some of those purple berries, lush on a branch. I pulled off a handful and offered them to my family. Are you sure they’re edible? my wife asked. My youngest daughter, without hesitation, grabbed a handful and poured them into her mouth, enjoying the sweet, spicy flavor of an American Beauty Berry. She ate them, not because she knew what they were, but because she trusted me and what I offered. It was a delicious reward for her trust, and such flavors await us too, if only we will accept the gifts God is already offering us. What is it? Who knows other than that God is giving it to us and we can trust that, whatever it is, it will be good. Amen.