Manna, and Why "This Day" Matters

The bread petition is very short-sighted. It asks for bread for one day. Not for this month, not for this year, not for enough to feel safe. Matthew’s word is σήμερον, sēmeron, “today.”¹ I think those two small words, this day, carry more of the gospel than we usually notice, and the place to see it is the wilderness.

Bread for one day

Israel has left Egypt and is hungry. God says to Moses: “Behold, I will rain bread from the sky for you, and the people shall go out and gather a day’s portion every day, that I may test them, whether they will walk in my law or not.”² The test is not hard work. It is trust: will they take only what the day needs?

In the morning there is something on the ground, and nobody recognizes it. “What is it?” they ask each other, “For they didn’t know what it was.”³ Then come the strange rules. Everyone gathers. Some gather more and some less, but when they measure it, “he who gathered much had nothing over, and he who gathered little had no lack.”⁴ Nobody is to keep any until morning. Some do anyway, just in case, and by morning “it bred worms and became foul.”⁵

The bread of heaven cannot be stockpiled. It can only be received, and then received again the next day.

The double portion

Then the story turns. On the sixth day the people find that they have gathered twice as much, and Moses explains: “Tomorrow is a solemn rest, a holy Sabbath to Yahweh.”⁶ This time the bread kept overnight does not spoil.⁷ A few verses later God puts it plainly: “Behold, because Yahweh has given you the Sabbath, therefore he gives you on the sixth day the bread of two days.”⁸

To me this is the heart of the story. The God who would not let them hoard gives them a double portion so that they can stop. The same gift that teaches daily trust also makes room for rest. Rest is not a reward for having gathered enough. It is given with the bread, by the same hand.

Right after the prayer

Jesus says the same thing in plain words. In the same chapter of Matthew, a few paragraphs after he teaches the prayer, he ends his teaching on the birds and the lilies like this: “Therefore don’t be anxious for tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Each day’s own evil is sufficient.”⁹

He is not naive about tomorrow. He says plainly that it will bring its own trouble. He simply will not let it borrow against today.

The church heard this early. Cyprian of Carthage told his readers that a disciple “ought to ask for his daily food, and not to extend the desires of his petition to a long period.”¹⁰ Much later John Wesley thought God had divided our lives into days on purpose, “that we might look on every day as a fresh gift of God, another life.”¹¹

None of this is against planning. Joseph stored grain in the good years, “until he stopped counting,” and nobody in the story blames him for it.¹² What the manna is against is a certain kind of fear: the anxious gathering that tries to make us safe from tomorrow.

God’s beggar

Asking for one day at a time also keeps us honest about who we are. Augustine told the adults he was preparing for baptism: “When you say, Give us this day our daily bread, you profess yourself to be God’s beggar. But be not ashamed at this; how rich soever any man be on earth, he is still God’s beggar.”¹³

A full cupboard easily turns into the feeling that we no longer need to ask. This day takes that feeling apart. Whatever we have stored, we stand at the same door every morning.

It also keeps the petition small in the right way. This is bread, the thing we need, and not the thing I call the PlayStation prayer, where we ask God for what we want and skip our own part.

Hurry, and the Sabbath

I think this day is the prayer’s cure for hurry. Hurry is not the same as being busy. It is what happens inside us when tomorrow has moved into today and taken the best chair. We eat standing up. We half-listen. We pray, when we pray, with one eye on the clock.

Hurry and hoarding are close relatives. Both come from the feeling that there will not be enough, of time or of bread, unless we grab it now. The manna answers both. There will be enough for today. And one day in seven, there will be enough without us.

That is the hardest part to believe, and the most freeing. The Sabbath in Exodus is not a day off earned by a productive week. It is a gift that comes with the bread: “So the people rested on the seventh day.”¹⁴ The world did not fall apart while they stopped.

So when we pray give us this day, we stand where Israel stood each morning, with an empty basket, trusting that there will be something on the ground. It is not a comfortable place to stand. It is a free one. Tomorrow will have its own prayer, and we will say the same words again.

In Words Given, Day Fourteen stays with these two words and the manna.

An AI model helped me write this note, as it helped with the book. The quotations are checked against their sources; the conclusions are mine.

Footnotes

1. Matthew 6:11, in Michael W. Holmes, ed., The SBL Greek New Testament (Society of Biblical Literature and Logos Bible Software, 2010), github.com/Faithlife/SBLGNT. ↩

2. Exodus 16:4. Scripture on this site is quoted from the World English Bible, which is in the public domain. ↩

3. Exodus 16:15. ↩

4. Exodus 16:18. ↩

5. Exodus 16:19–20. ↩

6. Exodus 16:22–23. ↩

7. Exodus 16:24. ↩

8. Exodus 16:29. ↩

9. Matthew 6:34. The prayer is Matthew 6:9–13. ↩

10. Cyprian, On the Lord’s Prayer 19, trans. Ernest Wallis, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 5, ccel.org. ↩

11. John Wesley, Sermon 26, “Upon Our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, Discourse VI,” III.12, in The Sermons of John Wesley, 1872 edition, ed. Thomas Jackson, wesley.nnu.edu. ↩

12. Genesis 41:49. ↩

13. Augustine, Sermon 56.9 (Benedictine numbering; “Sermon 6” in the English edition), trans. R. G. MacMullen, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, first series, vol. 6 (1888), newadvent.org. He goes on: “The beggar takes his stand before the rich man’s house; but the rich man himself stands before the door of the great rich One.” ↩

14. Exodus 16:30. ↩