Today’s reading from Numbers 11:4-15 begins a bit like a menu or a recipe book. The freed children of Israel lament their liberation because now they have no meat, fish, cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions, or garlic to eat. Their fare is rather more bland: it is simply this mysterious flaky, whitish-resin colored manna that is left with the dew-fall each night by the Lord, and which is like coriander (cilantro) seed, and which tastes a bit like unleavened cakes baked with oil when cooked. Nevermind that the later Jewish tradition called the manna the “bread of angels” (Cf. Ps 78:23-25), here the Israelites have had enough of it and would rather return to the “fleshpots of Egypt” (Cf. Ex 16:30), the slavery wherein they could cook what they liked. A God that would offer them to consume what the Egyptians offered (even if they were thereby consumed) seemed to be far more meaningful to them than a God that liberated them only for them to be limited to the seemingly poor (and yet miraculous!) fare that descends like the dewfall in the desert.
We Catholics still use the term panis angelicus, the “bread of angels,” except that for us the true bread of angels is no longer the manna but the very poor fare that our Lord transforms into his body and blood at each Mass. How he does so remains as mysterious as the gift of the manna that the Spirit provides like the dewfall in the desert. People still complain today about the poverty and tastelessness of the unleavened bread that we continue to bless in the western Church as Christ himself did at that first Eucharist, that last Passover supper that he celebrated with his disciples. Would that the Lord had turned not only that wine and that unleavened bread into himself for us, but also the roasted lamb and the other fare at that supper! But he did not. He himself is the lamb, but for our fare in this vale of tears that we travel through to the promised land, he offers us only himself, through the bread of angels that is now not only from him, but is he himself, and through the water from the rock, now turned to wine become his blood, which he also gives for our salvation. The rich fare will come in the promised land. Let us not try to grasp after it prematurely and disobediently while we are still on the journey, but let us rejoice that this poor fare is not poor at all, because it is Christ given over to us, that we might be given over to him, too.