The danger with the prayer for bread is that we get there too soon.
We come to prayer, aware of urgent needs, or at least wants. It’s tempting to race through the Lord’s Prayer, as far as ‘on earth as it is in heaven’, so that we can then take a deep breath and say, ‘Now look here: when it comes to daily bread, there are some things I simply must have.’ And then off we go into a shopping list. To do this, of course, is to let greed get in the way of grace.
When that happens, greed defeats its own object. If we don’t spend time adoring our Father in heaven, seeking the honour of his name, and praying for his kingdom, all our own desires and hopes will simply present themselves to us in a muddled and jumbled fashion, coming bubbling up to the surface in what C. S. Lewis, contemptuous of the later writings of James Joyce, called ‘steam of consciousness’.
Now don’t misunderstand me. There is something perfectly valid in what you might call ‘steaming in the presence of God’. If you feel as though you’re boiling over, at least have the grace to come and do it in the presence of your Father in heaven. But, as the regular practice for our cooler moments, I suggest that we owe it to ourselves, not to mention to God, to pray the prayer in a more integrated manner.
We find the true depth of this petition by going back once more to the life of Jesus himself.
They said a lot of things about Jesus during his lifetime, by no means all complimentary. One particularly juicy phrase sticks out: he was, they said, ‘a glutton and a winebibber’. You can just see Jesus’ opponents rolling that one round their tongues with relish. But do you know where the phrase comes from? It’s actually a quotation from Deuteronomy 21, in which the Israelites are told what to do with a stubborn and rebellious son. The parents are to bring him to the elders of the town, and say, ‘This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a winebibber’, and they must stone him to death. So there was more to the charge against Jesus than just that he went to too many parties. It was a way of saying: he is being profoundly disloyal to our traditions; he deserves to die.
But Jesus was following the agenda he set out in the Lord’s Prayer. He wasn’t a rebellious son; he was loyal to the one he called ‘Father’. His eating and drinking with his motley collection of friends was a deliberate sign of the kingdom. His parties weren’t simply a matter of cracking open another bottle for the sake of it; and the prayer to the Father for daily bread was part of his wider and deeper agenda.
At the heart of it stood a central biblical symbol of the kingdom: the great festive banquet which God has prepared for his people. This picture goes back to the vision of the land flowing with milk and honey; to the Psalmist, saying, ‘Thou shalt prepare a table before me, in the presence of my foes’; to the children of Israel, being fed with quails and manna in the wilderness; to prophecies like that of Isaiah, that
On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples
a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines.
And he will destroy on this mountain
the shroud over all people;
he will swallow up death for ever.
He will wipe away the tears from all faces,
and the disgrace of his people
he will take away from all the earth.
(Isaiah 25.6–8)
The banquet, the party, is a sign that God is acting at last, to rescue his people and wipe away all tears from all eyes. Jesus’ parties, and his feeding of his followers in the wilderness, were intended, for those with eyes to see, to pick up this whole theme and celebrate it. As so often, the most powerful things Jesus said were in actions, not words.
Why then did they criticize him? Because, first, he was celebrating the feast of the kingdom with all the wrong people. He threw great parties for the most notorious of sinners. He went to eat with Zacchaeus, while the respectable burghers of Jericho tut-tutted on the pavement outside. And, in one famous passage, he explained these odd celebrations by telling stories – about lost sheep being found, lost coins being discovered, and about two lost sons being confronted by a Father’s love. The angels, he said, were having a party over what was going on, so it was only right that he should, too (Luke 15.1–2, 7, 10, 23–4, 32). Jesus was re-inventing the kingdom of God around his own work; and at the heart of it was the great sign of welcome to all-comers, welcome to the party, to the Messianic Banquet, to the renewed people of God. Jesus was offering all and sundry the daily bread that spoke of the kingdom of God.
But if Jesus was celebrating with all the wrong people, he was also, from his contemporaries’ point of view, celebrating at exactly the wrong time. The Jews of Jesus’ day kept various fast days, commemorating moments of great sadness in Israel’s history. But Jesus refused to fast on those days. Instead, he threw parties. By way of explanation, he spoke of the wedding-guests being unable to fast as long as they had the Bridegroom with them. He was celebrating the great wedding-banquet of the kingdom of God. You can’t look miserable and keep fasting while that’s going on. Jesus was celebrating the strange presence of God’s kingdom. And the prayer he gave his followers was a prayer for the complete fulfilment of that kingdom: for God’s people to be rescued from hunger, guilt and fear. ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ means, in this setting, ‘Let the party continue.’
This should help us to understand the interesting difference, in this clause of the prayer, between Matthew’s and Luke’s versions. The Greek is tricky, but Matthew’s seems to mean ‘give us today our bread for tomorrow’; while Luke understands it as ‘give us each day our daily bread’. They both probably reflect different aspects of what Jesus intended. Matthew, in line with Jesus’ whole agenda, means ‘give us, here and now, the bread of life which is promised for the great Tomorrow’. Give us, in other words, the blessings of the coming kingdom – right now. Matthew, writing his gospel, saw this prayer partially answered in the feedings of the five thousand and the four thousand; more fully in the Last Supper; and, most fully of all, in Jesus’ death and resurrection.
But Luke’s version is not to be sneezed at as merely one-dimensional, just praying for boring old bread. The whole point of the kingdom, as we saw in the previous chapter, is that it isn’t about shifting our wants and desires on to a non-physical level, moving away from the earthly to the supposedly ‘spiritual’. It is about God’s dimension coming to birth within ours, which is after all what Advent and Christmas are anticipating and celebrating. The kingdom is to come in earth as it is in heaven. Daily needs and desires point beyond themselves, to God’s promise of the kingdom in which death and sorrow will be no more. But that means, too, that the promise of the kingdom includes those needs, and doesn’t look down on them sneeringly as somehow second-rate.
This clause of the prayer thus becomes a window on four central issues in our own praying.
Consider, first, what to do with the muddled jumble, the steam of consciousness, that I spoke of earlier. Clear your mind to pray, and what do you find? A buzz of fears and hopes and wants and puzzles; behind that, perhaps, some deep sadnesses; some real anger – and, I hope, some real joy, some true delight. What are we to do with all these devices and desires?
One of the most telling prayers in Cranmer’s liturgy comes at the start of his great Communion service: Almighty God, to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid . . . All desires known. How do you react to that? You can tell a great deal about your spiritual health by enquiring whether you see those words as a promise, or as a threat.
Those who feel deeply threatened by God knowing all our desires will naturally want the Lord’s Prayer to be about ‘spiritual’ issues. If I’m ashamed of my desires, and would prefer God not to know them, then it will be much more comfortable for me if the ‘daily bread’ for which I pray is for the soul, rather than the stomach. But Jesus doesn’t leave us that option. Jesus does, of course, warn his hearers not to spend all their energy working simply for the food which perishes, but to strive instead for the food which lasts to eternal life. But he doesn’t make this point by denying them food for the stomach; he provides for them at that level, and points, through that, to a deeper provision for deeper needs and desires. In his knowledge of their needs, for bread and all else besides, is no threat, but only promise.
Scripture, says Paul, is given so that by its encouragement we might have hope. Scripture is full of stories of people who brought their deep natural longings into the presence of God, and found them answered by being taken up within his purposes. Naomi longed that her daughter-in-law Ruth might have a husband; God, answering that longing, made Ruth the great-grandmother of King David, the man after his own heart. Hannah longed for a child; God gave her Samuel, who would become his mouthpiece to Israel. The disciples, in Acts 1, were longing for Israel to become the world’s great nation; Jesus answered that culture-bound, political hope in a totally unexpected way, sending them out as his royal ambassadors to announce him as the new worldwide King.
‘Give us this day our daily bread’; this clause in the Lord’s Prayer, then, reminds us that our natural longings, for bread and all that it symbolizes, are not to be shunned as though they were of themselves evil. Of course a genuine glutton must repent of desiring, and grabbing, more bread than is wise or good. But God knows our desires in order that we may turn them into prayer; in order that they may be sorted out, straightened out, untangled and reaffirmed. If we truly pray this prayer, with due weight to each clause, we are taking the first steps from the chaos of our normal interior life towards an order and clarity which will let the joy come through to the surface.
The kingdom-prayer isn’t a prayer, such as some religions would advocate, for our desires to be taken away or annihilated. In bringing them into the prayer within the setting of the earlier petitions for God’s honour, his kingdom and his will, it asks for our desires to be satisfied in God’s way and God’s time. And, since God himself is most truly the deepest object of our hunger, this clause asks that we may be fed with God himself. And there can be no question of God failing to answer this prayer. ‘Breathe through the heats of our desires thy coolness and thy balm.’
Second, this clause reminds us that God intends us to pray for specific needs. It is, no doubt, much easier to pray ‘God bless everyone’ than to pray ‘Please bring peace to the Middle East’. It may seem more ‘spiritual’ to pray for the conversion of the world than for a parking space near to the meeting for which we’re about to be late. Now of course we would trivialize Christian prayer if we thought it was only about praying for parking spaces, for our team to win the match, or for fine weather for the church fête. But, once we put the prayer for daily bread within the whole kingdom-prayer where it belongs, to turn then to the specific things we honestly need right now is not trivial. It is precisely what children do when they love and trust the one they call ‘Father’.
Third, however, we must of course lift our eyes beyond our own needs. It is impossible truly to pray for our daily bread, or for tomorrow’s bread today, without being horribly aware of the millions who didn’t have bread yesterday, don’t have any today, and in human terms are unlikely to have any tomorrow either. But what can we do about this, as we pray this prayer in church and go home to our Sunday lunch?
Well, obviously, we can give, as best we can. Obviously, we can become more politically sensitive and active, to support programmes not just for foreign aid but for a juster and fairer global economy. This is part of what it means to pray this prayer. But, in addition, we should be praying this prayer not just for the hungry, but with the hungry, and all who are desperate from whatever deep need. We should see ourselves, as we pray the Lord’s Prayer, as part of the wider Christian family, and human family, standing alongside the hungry, and praying, in that sense, on their behalf.
We offer ourselves, in this prayer, as representatives of this world (this is what it means to be ‘a royal priesthood’), turning into words the unspoken prayer from thousands of hungry folk in our own country and millions around the world, turning it into words that plead with our heavenly Father to feed the hungry, to care for the desperate. And when we have prayed in that fashion, the test of whether we were sincere will of course be whether we are prepared to stand physically alongside those for whom we have claimed to speak. This is, after all, a dangerous and subversive prayer to pray; but it’s the one Jesus taught us. And, this time, the danger with the prayer for bread is that we get there too late.
Fourth, all these aspects of prayer come together most obviously when we meet around the Lord’s Table, when by the power of the Spirit bread and wine become the vehicles and vessels of God’s own love in Jesus Christ. The Eucharist is, in a sense, both the highest form of prayer, and the first and most basic answer to our prayer. It forms a lens through which all the other answers come into focus.
The Eucharist is, first, the way in which Jesus himself taught us to remember him, to think of him. If the Lord’s Prayer is the prayer which summed up his own life and work, enabling his followers to breathe in his life and love and make it their own, the Eucharist is the symbol which did the same thing, pointing particularly to his dying and rising. As we do this in remembrance of him, we are taken back in heart and mind, and in sacramental time and place, to the very life of Jesus himself, as he feasted with his friends, as he celebrated one last kingdom-party. This is the kingdom-banquet, and we are the honoured guests. That, as we saw, is where this clause in the prayer began.
But the Eucharist is also the place above all where we can come with our own physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual needs, and lay them before the God to whom all desires are known. The drama of what we do here, coming with empty hands to receive bread – God’s bread, the bread of life, the bread of tomorrow which is Jesus Christ himself – this drama draws together in a deep and rich symbol the whole action by which we bring our muddled and jumbled selves into the light and love of God. We can bring whatever is on our minds and hearts to God in this action, without fear or shame, be our concerns never so agonizing or never so trivial, trusting that, along with the physical bread, the God we call ‘Father’ will give us all that we need, not least healing, forgiveness, support, and courage, in every other department of our lives.
So, finally, the Eucharist is the place where, precisely as the people of Christ, we have the responsibility to come on behalf of those in desperate need, not least hunger. Jesus celebrated the kingdom by sharing his feasts with all sorts of people. So should we. Here is a practical suggestion; it’s only a start, but it’s better to start somewhere than to leave everything at the level of grand general ideas. The next time you come to the Eucharist, bring with you, in mind and heart, someone you know, or know of, or have seen on television, who desperately needs God’s bread, literally or metaphorically, today. Bring them with you; let them kneel, in your mind’s eye, with you at the altar rail; and let them share the bread and wine with you. And, as you return, strengthened by God’s food, ask yourself what this new friend would mean when she or he prays, ‘Give me this day my daily bread’. Then ask how you might be part of God’s answer to that prayer.
After all, we ourselves are only at Jesus’ table because he made a habit of celebrating parties with all the wrong people. Isn’t it about time we started to copy him?