Nor Bear Any Grudge

At Sinai, in the year after Egypt, God gave Moses a chapter for the whole congregation. It is one of the oddest lists in the Bible. Leave the corners of your field unharvested. Do not keep a hired man's wages overnight until the morning. "Thou shalt not curse the deaf, nor put a stumblingblock before the blind." Do not "go up and down as a talebearer among thy people." Use honest weights and measures. And in among all of that is the line about the grudge.

A grudge is like a file kept in a drawer, and you know if you have one. It has a sentence in it that you have practised in the car. Some of us are carrying files older than our children.

The verse before ours names what should happen instead: "Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart." The next words send you to the person to tell them plainly: "thou shalt in any wise rebuke thy neighbour." So the order is this: do not carry it in silence, take it to them, do not pay them back afterwards, and love them. A grudge grows in the gap where the second step was skipped.

Our verse speaks of "the children of thy people," meaning fellow Israelites, and sixteen verses later the chapter widens the circle: "the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt." The reason reaches back into the hearers' own story. That is why it belongs on a list with field corners and honest scales: all of it comes from the God who brought strangers out of Egypt.

So take out the file. Go to the person, or bring it to the Lord first if they cannot be reached. Again and again this chapter says, "I am the LORD," and the God who gave the command has rescued you too. He can help you close that file for good.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 234 is Comfort Like a Mother (Isaiah 66:13).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two