Give us this day our Daily Bread!
The prayer Jesus taught His disciples to pray – which has been found on the lips of all His followers since – is both beautifully simple and utterly profound. It is the kind of prayer a child can memorise and use, while meaning every word. At the same time, scholars who have studied the Lord’s Prayer are convinced that we have not fully plumbed the depths of this unique prayer.
The Lord’s Prayer divides neatly into two halves. The first concentrates on who God is in terms of His important attributes: His fatherhood, His holiness and His sovereignty (Matthew 6:9-10). The second half touches on what the followers of Jesus are most dependent on God for: divine provision, divine pardon and divine protection (Matthew 6:11-13). And, it appears that Jesus has marvellously matched the two halves. It is because God is our Father that we may expect Him to provide our daily needs, because He is Holy that we must give account to Him for sin and plead for His forgiveness, and because He is Sovereign that we can expect to be protected from impossible temptations and delivered from the evil one.
The petition, “Give us this day our daily bread” suggests multiple implications for prayer: first, that as our Father, God is approachable, and we can make our requests directly to Him. In Matthew 7:7-11 Jesus illustrates, through the naturally loving response of earthly fathers, how much more willing and generous God will be to His children. Jesus uniquely called God “my Father”, and through Him we have been uniquely privileged to experience God as “our Father”. It is for this reason that the writer to the Hebrews could say: “Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need” (4:16).
Second, the request is not narrowly individualistic: the prayer maintains a corporate dimension throughout – “Give us this day our daily bread”. One of the characteristics of our globalised culture is its glorification of individual needs and preferences. Manufacturers and service providers constantly pander to this basic selfishness as a means to sell their products, and so it is not surprising that even God is sometimes expected to respond like a cosmic service provider who exists to meet my narrow, self-centred wants. Yet, humans are essentially communal beings, and Jesus teaches us to pray with sensitivity to our communal concerns.
Third, He encourages us to bring our present needs to God: “Give us today our daily bread”. Sometimes Christians have been criticised for being “too heavenly minded to be of any earthly use”. While Jesus taught much about our future hope and about storing treasures in heaven, He remained fully engaged in earthly realities. Throughout His public ministry, Jesus showed that the present concerns of the poor, the oppressed, and the weak were uppermost on His agenda, and so He responded swiftly when confronted with such needs. The thought that we worship a God who cares deeply about our immediate needs can both comfort us as well as compel us to imitate Him in our actions in the world.
Fourth, this petition to God is not a license to ask Him to provide everything that catches our fancy but only what is essential for our sustenance: “Give us today our daily bread”. The most basic symbols of sustenance in Jesus’ day were bread and water. Jesus qualifies it still further: “daily bread” or, as it may also be translated, “necessary-for-existence bread”. The closest background to this expression in the Bible is the manna that God provided for forty years when Israel wandered in the wilderness. It was most basic to their need, but totally sufficient for their sustenance.
The Lord’s Prayer then does not lend any support to what is now called Prosperity Theology – the extreme form of which suggests that material wealth may be directly proportional to true spirituality and intimacy with God. On the contrary, it shows us a God who, while not endorsing human greed, leans towards responding to our most fundamental physical and material needs.
In Palestinian society, when Jesus lived, there were some people who were enormously wealthy but the vast majority were poor. Modern societies, too, may show such extreme disparity. In South Asia, with its population of 1.6 billion people, over 500 million live on less than $1 a day. At the same time, the world’s most expensive home is a skyscraper in Mumbai which is estimated to have cost its South Asian owner just over a billion dollars!
It does make a difference to be aware of our world when we pray: “Give us. This day. Our daily bread.”
Ivor Poobalan, PhD
