Exodus 16:2-15

There seems to be a theme of grumblers in this week's Lection. Also one of mercy. In this week's Exodus, God responds by giving them what they want, first water, then some magic bread. This is much nicer than chapter 32 when God and Moses get fed up with them and discuss killing them all and starting over. In the previous chapter, right after God killed all their enemies, they complain because they are thirsty. God gives them water and reminds them to follow his rules.

In this chapter, they complain and say they would have been better off if they had remained slaves. That is inconsistent with the earlier chapters when they were treated quite poorly, but never mind, God is going to rain bread from heaven. When they see this stuff that is stuck on the bushes, they say “what is it?” If you look at a Hebrew translation, you'll see the word “manna”. “Manna” means “what is it?” in Hebrew. You may have heard the phrase, “manna from heaven”, now you know it means “ 'what is it' from heaven”. I find that funny, but I digress.

There is some debate about just what they are talking about here, but it seems quite a bit like something you can actually find in the desert, to this day. It would have been new to them, if in fact they were city dwellers who escaped to the desert, and it might have even seemed like a miracle if they were really hungry and here was new food they'd not heard of before. But it is something real. It appears on brush, just like the verse says, and can be harvested. It is perishable, so the rules about only taking as much as you need for one day could be practical. A lot of the Old Testament rules are like this, functional ideas that got codified through story.

Jonah 3:10-4:11

The traditional interpretation of this passage is that God is merciful and men hold anger in their hearts. What isn't mentioned is that the mercy is temporary. These are Assyrians who get spared, this time. They will be conquered by Babylonians later. Even within the story, I don't see it as “being spared” since it is Yahweh himself who made the threat in the first place. And the mercy only comes after they say they will stick with God's plan. That's not mercy, that's bullying. So maybe there is something else going on here.

Jonah is in this prophet section of the OT, but Jonah is not considered a prophet by everyone. He gets some mentions elsewhere, and he is used as a voice of God, but he argues with God and doesn't seem too appreciative. He's not like a Jeremiah, who says he was born to be the voice of God. On the other hand, he succeeds in getting the Ninevites to repent, often prophets fail getting their message across. He's a bit of anomaly.

There is a bit of parrallel of this story to last week's unforgiving servant. He does what God asks, but he doesn't like Ninevites, and he lets God know about that. The mercy turns out to be temporary anyway, as Nineveh is later destroyed. It's probable this story was written after those historical events, so people hearing it would know them. Is this commentary on that history?

In 4:2 we also see an echo of Exodus 34:6, the story that we are following over this period in the Lectionary. In Exodus, they are thankful for God being slow to anger. Jonah seems like he is saying God shouldn't show mercy to the Ninevites. He wants some wrath to be shown on them. The exchanges get kinda weird.

The bush that springs up to shade Jonah, but then gets withered away just as quickly might be the metaphor that wraps all this up. It is the end of the book after all. That is, kingdoms come and go, comfort comes and goes. This is not the story of a merciful God as much as it is a story about merciless nature. One day it shines on you, the next you get a flood. You can choose to be angry at that, or you can try to make peace with your neighbors. You can be upset that your enemies are happy, you can be angry enough to want to die. Or you can see it from a god's eye view, that it wasn't your labor that made any of that happen, and there are thousands of other people and animals with their own problems that you aren't really even thinking about.

You don't make the livestock or build the cities by yourself, you are born into a world with problems, just like everyone else. You can't save the entire world, but there are things you can do to make your corner of it better. You can show mercy to your enemies, and for a while at least, that might make things a little better. You may not like it that it is your job to keep the trend moving toward mercy, but if you resist that, you will cause a storm and end up in the belly of a great fish, only to be spit out right at the place you didn't want to go.

Matthew 20:1-16b

We have a parable unique to Matthew this week, and it starts with “For the kingdom of heaven is like...” to let us know that. This one is covered in William R. Herzog's Parables as Subversive Speech, and as he often does, he spends some time with exactly where the “original” story starts and ends and how the Matthew author frames it. I'll skip that detail this time. Herzog tells us that the interpretation of this parable is pretty well agreed upon by scholars, but then spends some time talking about those who see it as allegory, where God is the landowner. I'll skip that too.

Instead, I'll look at this as many do, that the characters are representations of their actual positions. This landowner has such a large holding that he can't even calculate how much labor he will need in the morning, and has to keep going back for more. He keeps finding workers, so we can assume there is high unemployment. Likewise, there isn't much negotiating going on for wages, they are taking what they can get. This translation says “the usual daily wage”. There is some debate about that. Other translations say “a penny” or “a denarius”. Herzog believes the wage was barely enough to sustain one man for a day.

The ordering is a key point. It's not a statement like Bob Dylan made about “the first ones now will later be last”. Rather it's a reshuffling against the tradition of paying the first hired, first. The first hired react accordingly. The landowner is telling them that he does not value them anymore than the ones who only worked one hour. Their place in the economic order has been reduced to barely surviving on a day's work and now they are being told that is worthless. The landowner is keeping them in their place through humiliation. And delivering his message through a servant no less.

The landower is present however, and the peasants address him. They know where the oppression is coming from and know that they must address it, or risk their own survival. The landowner picks “one of them”, a leader, and addresses him as “friend”. A little Greek comes in handy here as “hetaire” is a condescending form of that word, feigning courtesy. As do his words, which imply negotiation, when there was none. There is no valuing of good labor vs bad, or those who were picked first vs those who picked later. They were probably picked first based on their appearance of readiness or perhaps past experience. But any tradition of worker rights, minimum wage or merit system is gone at this point. These ideas existed in Jewish tradition, but they are being challenged by this landowner. His character in the story represents the new order of the 1st century. He even tops it off with the dismissive, “and go”. So the united murmurs are now silenced.

All illusion of a codification of labor freely offering itself for a reasonable return is gone. It has been replaced by a landowner that has used who knows what means to acquire that land, claiming he can do with what he owns however he pleases, and claiming to be “good” as he does in verse 15. That the laborer would dare question this new order is offered as proof that they are all “evil” and underserving of even a subsistence wage. This lesson may not have been obvious even to the ones hearing it at the time. They would have been accustomed to hearing such shaming from their employers and accepted it because they didn't want to end up like the one who was banished. That may however, have been the point, that when one is singled out and punished, that is exactly when you need to continue to support each other in speaking up against oppression.