The Lord’s Prayer: Our Daily Bread

We’re now at a turning point in the Lord's Prayer. So far we’ve been getting our hearts and minds and wills in line with the great purposes of God. When we do that, we begin to have real power in prayer.

Now we turn from our concern with God's affairs—God’s name, God’s kingdom, God’s will—to God's concern with our affairs—our bread, our sins, our times of trial. The first thing we ask is, “Give us this day our daily bread.” Just about every word in this petition is worth thinking about.

We begin with the action word, the verb “give.” We’re boldly saying, “God, there’s something we want you to give us!”

Gifts are the language of love. I can’t imagine loving someone and not giving them gifts—or at least wanting to. Parents give to their children, and children in their own way give to their parents. Children understand that the real meaning of gifts is the love they express, not how fancy they are or how much they cost.

God loves so much that God gives everybody gifts! God makes the sun rise on the evil and the good. God sends rain on the just and the unjust. God feeds the birds of the air and clothes the grass of the field. How much more will God's own children be clothed and fed? If we, being evil, know how to give good gifts to our children, how much more will our Father in heaven give good things to us when we ask for them?

Next, Jesus suggests that the first thing we ask God to give us is bread. We all know what bread is. We all need it. We’d all die without it. What could be plainer than that?

Unfortunately, this apparently simple request is complicated by one word: “Give us this day our daily bread.” An honest translation might read, “Give us this day our [mystery word] bread.” You don’t find the Greek word our texts translate “daily” anywhere else in the New Testament. We can only guess what it means, but I think “bread” here means bread, the stuff we get in the dining room that can be smelled, tasted, chewed, digested—the  stuff on which our physical existence depends. On that interpretation, note the simplicity of this request: plain, old bread, not candy or cake. The basic staff of life, not luxuries or frills.

Note also the humility of this request. It’s a confession that despite our advanced technical know-how in agriculture, our deep freezes, and overflowing supermarkets, we still depend on God for what is essential for our survival. Should the sun stop shining or the rain stop falling or the seed stop growing, our technology and our tractors would be useless. It’s been said that at every harvest time the whole world is only a few weeks from famine. There’s no such thing as a man or woman of "independent means." You can't eat means. Even if such a person's stocks and bonds and savings accounts were 100 percent safe (which they never are) the failure of sun, rain, and crop growth would leave him or her with the grim prospect of eating the paper in the safe deposit box.

Now then, just because bread is so utterly material, utterly simple, utterly necessary for survival, it becomes a powerful symbol for a whole range of blessings, both material and spiritual, for which we must depend on God. Small wonder that bread plays the central role in the central sacrament of our faith, where it is the vehicle of the profoundest spiritual realities. Small wonder that preaching can be described as "breaking the bread of life." Small wonder that a banquet becomes the symbol of the kingdom. Jesus could utilize the symbolic power of bread to say, “I am the bread of life.”

Now to the dailiness. I’m convinced that in this petition, as in the whole prayer, Jesus evokes the rich Old Testament background he knew so well, in this case the story of the manna in the wilderness (Exodus 16). Here are the people of God in a barren desert, entirely dependent on God for survival. And God provides bread: a little white round thing left by the dew each morning. The Hebrews called it "What is it?"—that's what the word manna literally means—and some of them tried to hoard it. But it wouldn't work. No matter how hard they worked to gather the stuff, they only had enough for that day. If they tried to save it over, it spoiled.

God has never promised anybody a year's supply of bread. God gives us enough for one day. Fair enough! The only day we can live is today. How we distort and twist life when we try to live in the future or in the past! We destroy ourselves when we try to bear today the burdens we foresee for tomorrow or the burdens we remember from yesterday. Let the day's evil suffice for that day, says Jesus. We are promised strength to bear that much and food to survive that long. Of course we make plans and took ahead. But we pray for strength one day at a time. That prayer is answered day after day after day.

We can't get a year's supply of the Bread of Life either. Some of us try to live on the strength of a conversion twenty years ago or a good book we read last year. These things won't keep. You and I need to hear the gospel every Sunday, just to make it until the next Sunday. We are all of us daily beggars at the Lord's Table, for the bread that makes physical life possible and for spiritual food as well.

Now for the little words we skip over so easily: “Give us this day our daily bread.” When we pray that “our” bread may be given to “us,” we’re praying that all people may have enough to eat. And we obligate ourselves to do something about the shameful and stubborn problem of world hunger in our time. Those who have studied that problem say that the basic cause isn’t lack of know-how or the inability of the planet to provide for its population. The basic cause is the lack of the political will to do what we already know how to do. This prayer obligates us to attack that root cause of hunger.

 
       God feeds us generously—spiritually and physically. May we each do what we can to feed others in God’s name.