Wednesday
Wednesday
Give Us Our Daily Bread
Give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread.
Proverbs 30:8
In the second half of the Lord’s Prayer, the possessive adjective changes from your to our, as we turn from God’s affairs to ours. Having expressed our burning concern for God’s glory, we now express our humble dependence on his grace. Although our personal needs have been relegated to a secondary place, they have not been eliminated. To decline to mention them at all in prayer, on the ground that we don’t want to bother God with such trivialities, is as great an error as to allow them to dominate our prayers.
Some early commentators could not believe that Jesus intended our first request to be for literal bread. It seemed to them inappropriate. So they allegorized the petition. Early church fathers like Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine thought the reference was either to the invisible bread of the Word of God (Augustine) or to the sacramental bread of Holy Communion. We should be thankful for the greater, down-to-earth understanding of the Reformers. Calvin called the spiritualizing of the fathers “exceedingly absurd.” Luther wrote that bread was a symbol for “everything necessary for the preservation of this life, like food, a healthy body, good weather, house, home, wife, children, good government and peace.”
The prayer that God will give us these things does not, of course, deny either that most people have to earn their own living or that we are commanded to feed the hungry ourselves. Instead, it is an expression of our ultimate dependence on God, who normally uses human means of production and distribution through which to fulfill his purposes. Moreover, it seems that Jesus wanted his followers to be conscious of a day-to-day dependence. The Greek adjective epiousios in “our daily bread” was so completely unknown to the ancients that Origen thought the evangelists had coined it. Whether it means “for the current day” or “for the following day,” it is a prayer for the immediate future. We are to live a day at a time. To say grace before meals acknowledges this. It is a valuable Christian habit.
For further reading: Deuteronomy 26:1–11