The Same Low Sound — Exodus 16:2-15 · Proper 20, Year A
from Monday To Sunday Hosted by Joe Stein
Nobody in Sunday's gospel got underpaid. The workers hired at dawn agreed to a denarius and received a denarius, in front of witnesses. They complained anyway, and Matthew writes the grievance down word for word: "you have made them equal to us." The Greek verb there is gongyzo. It's onomatopoeia, the low continuous noise a crowd makes before it has organized itself into sentences, and it's the same verb the Greek Old Testament uses for Israel in the wilderness in Exodus 16. Matthew had a neutral word available for a payroll dispute. He used the wilderness word instead, which tells you which story you're standing in. Put the two halves together. In Exodus they murmur before the bread, and the sound comes out of an empty stomach. In Matthew they murmur after the coin, and the sound comes out of a full hand. Hunger and envy make the identical noise. If you recorded both and played them back you could not tell which was which, which means you cannot use the noise as evidence about yourself. Also in this episode: why manna is named after a shrug, what the omer was quietly protecting, Paul running a cost-benefit analysis from a prison cell and finding no losing column, and what fifty thousand self-storage facilities have to do with a bread that was designed to spoil. Proper 20, Year A. Exodus 16:2-15, Psalm 105, Philippians 1:21-30, Matthew 20:1-16. mondaytosunday.life
Embed this episode
No transcript yet.