Our Father 7: Give us this day our daily bread

First of all, we have called God our heavenly Father: we, then are God’s children, who can approach God with confidence in his love and protection. And then we pray: hallowed be thy name; thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And these requests too are about how we situate ourselves in relation to God, not requests for anything to change except in ourselves. We are not, for instance, asking that God’s name be made holy when it wasn’t before. God’s name just is holy – we’re not asking for anything new to happen to God or his name but rather to how we are to see this name: as holy and powerful. God’s Kingdom has come in Jesus, and will come fully at the end of time; by praying for it to come we are asking that we might be subject to God’s rule. And finally, we ask that what is already the case in heaven may come also to be the case, for us on earth, asking that his will be done – in and through us – on earth as it is in heaven.

It is only after establishing all of this that we turn to our own needs and desires:  beginning with the request for daily bread. And at first sight it might seem odd that it is this way around. After all, if God is our almighty, and perfectly loving Father, wouldn’t we expect his first concern to be our welfare, rather than his own prestige? When Jesus gives us the pattern of all Christian prayer, why does he not encourage us to launch in immediately with our wish list?  But this is the right way to order our prayer – not because God is some petty tyrant insistent on being addressed correctly, only interested in us if we flatter his ego.  Rather, it reminds us of our dependence on God, and reminds us that the God on whom we depend is trustworthy. We can be confident that God will hear our prayer for forgiveness of our sins (and strengthen us to forgive others) that he will not lead us into temptation, and that he will deliver us from evil,  just because he is our Father in heaven whose name is worthy of being held holy; the one whose coming Kingdom will be for our good, the one whose will is done in heaven and should be done on earth. And yes, we can pray for our daily bread for the same reasons. But when we ask for our daily bread, what is it we are asking for? Many of us will pray the Our Father daily, multiple times every day if we regularly say the rosary. But what does the word “daily” mean here in this daily prayer?  It’s not as obvious as it might seem at first sight.

We might be talking about daily bread, but the Greek word used at this point, in both Matthew’s and Luke’s gospels in their account of the prayer that Jesus taught us is far from being an everyday word. In fact, the only place it makes its appearance in the New Testament is in the Lord’s Prayer, and it is vanishingly rare in non-biblical Greek of the period too. This is both deeply exciting – and rather frustrating.  Maybe the Aramaic word that Jesus used when he was instructing his disciples and that gets translated into Greek in the gospels, was a quite commonplace one – or maybe he invented it. In either case, of course, we don’t know what he said, and therefore it’s more than usually hard to know what he meant (or at least it would be if we didn’t also have the tradition of the Church to go on – more of that a little later.) But to say the least, “daily” is not the only and perhaps not even the most obvious translation of the word that appears at both Matthew 6.11 and Luke 11.3.

That word is epiousios, and as I’ve said, it only appears in this one context in the scriptures. Obviously, there are other times when the NT authors refer to things happening daily, and there are other, more common and unambiguous  Greek words that they use for this, when, for example, Luke speaks of Jesus’ enjoining his disciples to take up their crosses daily and follow him), and so it’s not obvious why these don’t appear in this petition of the Our Father if it is talking about daily bread. So let’s look at the word in more detail.  The first part of the word, the preposition epi, has a range of meanings including on, beyond, over, and rather less frequently, near. The second component  - ousion -  is related to the noun ousia, meaning something like substance, or being (it’s this word family that is at the heart of so many acrimonious debates in the early Church, as, for instance at the council of Nicaea whose 1700^th  anniversary we are celebrating this year, when the argument turned on whether one should say that the Second Person of the Trinity was homo-ousious with the First – of the same substance or being, or merely homoi-ousious – of a similar substance or being; the Council decided in favour of the first which is why – long story short -  we say in the Creed every Sunday that the Son is consubstantial with the Father).

It seems reasonable, therefore, to understand epiousion literally as something like above being or beyond substance and certainly many who wrote in Greek in the early Church wrote as if the phrase in the Our Father means something like bread beyond the bread we are used to,  the bread which is more than we are used to, bread that is out of this world. By which they didn’t mean fancy artisan loaves from the farmers’ market, but rather something more like super-natural bread, bread beyond our earthly experience. What such supernatural, supra-mundane bread might be is clearly deeply mysterious – and we’ll come back to this - but at any rate it sounds as though we are dealing here with bread that is precisely not humdrum, daily, day to day bread.

It is though possible, invoking that rather less common use of epi as “near” to think of epiousion as meaning something like near-being, so that it could be thought of as something like the bread that is near at hand, and, by extension the bread that we need to have near at hand, the bread we need to be given for our immediate purposes, the bread we need for today, our daily bread. To be honest, that does sound like rather more of a stretch – but it was a stretch that was made, rather early on in the history of the Church, and this is hugely significant.

As we know, the Lord’s Prayer does appear twice in the NT, and, when St Jerome came to translate the Bible into Latin, he decided not to make an exclusive choice between these two interpretations when it came to translating epiousios.

So his version of the relevant petition in Matthew’s gospel is

Panem nostrum supersubstantialem da nobis (give us our supersubstantial bread)

While his rendering of the same plea in Luke’s gospel is

Panem nostrum cotidianum da nobis (give us our quotidian, our every day, daily bread).

It’s that second version that was taken up in liturgical Latin, and it is, of course, the version that we are used to today in English liturgy and devotion (and, as far as I’m aware in other vernacular versions of the Lord’s Prayer too).

So, at any rate if we take seriously not only the authority of scripture, but also the authority of the Church especially in her liturgy, we really are, I think, in rather an exciting position, though also a challenging one. We are being invited to see the Lord, in telling us how to pray, instructing us to ask our heavenly Father for bread that is at once everyday and beyond human ken, simultaneously daily and supersubstantial bread: bread that keeps us in being and bread that is beyond being.

We’ll think a little more about that in a minute, but first just one other thing to note about this petition of the Our Father. This is the plural form of the pronouns used here: give us, not me, our, not my, daily bread.  The whole of the prayer is, of course, addressed to our Father rather than my Father, and people often comment on this: it is the prayer of the Christian family, the prayer of the Church. But it is perhaps significant that this is emphasised again just now. If we are talking about daily bread in the most literal sense; the bread that is necessary for physical survival, then this is a reminder that we should not satisfy our own greed at the expense of our brothers’ and sisters’ needs, indeed that we should be as eager to satisfy their needs as our own. The Catechism of the Catholic Church is eloquent about this, and insistent that the “us” and the “our” here includes not only our fellow members of the body of Christ but of all humanity. And so we are told robustly:

The drama of hunger in the world calls Christians who pray sincerely to exercise responsibility towards their brothers and sisters, both in their personal behaviour and in their solidarity with the human family. This petition of the Lord’s Prayer cannot be isolated from the parables of the poor man Lazarus and of the Last judgement.  (CCC 2831)

But even if we’re thinking of supersubstantial, out of this world bread, the same applies. As many of the great spiritual masters and mistresses of the spiritual life in our tradition insist, there is such a thing as spiritual gluttony, and just as we shouldn’t gorge ourselves on luxury food while our brothers and sisters go hungry, there is something definitely amiss in our spiritual lives if we fixate on having fulfilling spiritual experiences at the expense of the sort of steady growth in closeness to God which will bring us to care more deeply for our brothers and sisters.   My relationship to God, and the prayer in which it is expressed is a deeply personal matter. Jesus, after all, not only gives us the words of the Our Father but does so in the context of telling us to go into our rooms and pray in secret. Of course, this is in part in order that we do not become like the hypocrites who pray on street corners, to be rewarded with human acclaim.  But, more positively, it is surely also in order that we may disclose to our heavenly Father who sees in secret our deepest desires and anxieties, joys and sorrows,  away from prying eyes, or even from eyes we fear may be prying. And, if we do this faithfully, we may hope that our heavenly Father who sees in secret will reward us.   But this does not mean that it is a private matter.  If God nourishes my relationship with him, however intimately, this isn’t just for my sake as an isolated individual: because we are not isolated individuals, but members of the body of Christ.

And that brings us – finally - to the question of just what this supersubstantial bread might be – and here I want to issue something of a spoiler alert. 

You might well be expecting me at this point to talk about the Mass: after all, we all know that when, after feeding the 5000, Jesus tells the astonished crowd that he is the bread of life, he is talking about the Eucharist - and don’t worry: I promise I will. But there are other possible interpretations, equally deeply rooted in our Catholic tradition, and, in fact, profoundly complementary to the idea of the Eucharist as our supersubstantial bread. 

There is a repeated emphasis in the OT on God’s people being nourished when God speaks to them. It happens to the great prophets: Jeremiah , for instance: “your words were found, and I ate them, and they became to me a joy and the delight of my heart”. (Jeremiah 15.16) But not only to the great prophets. Psalm 119, the longest psalm which is a hymn in honour of the Law and in praise of God for giving it to his people speaks of the word of God being as sweet as honey, and Deuteronomy 8.3, which Jesus quotes to the devil when he tempts him to turn stones into loaves, tells us that it is every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord, and not just physical bread, by which we must be fed.

And this idea of receiving nourishment from the word of God persists in the Christian tradition. In the monastic practice of lectio divina, or holy reading, the prayerful mulling over of the words of scripture is referred to as ruminatio, chewing the text, literally, as cows and sheep and goats chew the cud, until it yields its meaning for us as the grass yields nutriments.  Sacrosanctum Concilium, meanwhile, Vatican II’s constitution on the liturgy refers (art 51) to the faithful being nourished at the table of the Word during the Eucharist.

Which brings us (finally) finally to reflecting on the Mass, and we might move into this by first thinking about the place in the Mass that the Our Father occupies, almost immediately before we receive Holy Communion. Of course, the Church asks that we pray the whole of the Lord’s Prayer at this point, and we could spend a long time exploring why this is appropriate.  Most obviously, perhaps, we pray for mutual forgiveness before we go to the altar – as the Lord tells us that we should in the Sermon on the Mount: perhaps we will be hearing more about this in our next session.  But our text for this evening clearly has particular significance too when we are about to be nourished by the Eucharist, which is indeed traditionally and rightly referred to as the bread of life.

There are a couple of thoughts here that are perhaps particularly pertinent in connection with that troubling but also thrilling question of how the bread we beg of the Lord when we pray the Our Father is both every day and supersubstantial. 

The first thing to say is, of course, that there is something awe-inspiring about there being even the possibility of the supersubstantial bread of life of the Eucharist being our daily bread in the literal sense that – insofar as our circumstances permit – we are able to eat of this heavenly bread daily. In the light of what we have already said about how our prayer for daily bread should always be in solidarity with those who are hungry, whether physically or spiritually, this can be a powerful reminder to pray with gratitude for the priests who here in Cambridge make it possible for us to go to communion so frequently, and to intercede for more priestly vocations. But it is also a reminder to ask for God’s blessing on those Catholics and those communities of Catholics who, for whatever reason – sickness, imprisonment, persecution, or simply a shortage of priests – cannot daily, or even very often, feed on the bread of life.

But there is something more to be said, too.

When, at Mass, the minister of communion places the Host on our hand or our tongue for us to consume, the words we hear -  the Body of Christ – have a double reference. They do refer to Jesus truly present under the appearance of bread, of course they do.  But they also refers to us who receive him; the Church, too, is the Body of Christ. As St Augustine of Hippo preaches to his new converts back in fourth century North Africa, “it is the mystery meaning you that has been placed on the Lord’s Table; what you receive is the mystery that means you”.[Sermon 272]  The implications of this are truly profound – and profoundly challenging.  As I once heard Bishop Alan Hopes say in a sermon he preached at Fisher House: next to the host in the Tabernacle, the holiest thing in all of creation is our neighbour – and for the same reason: both are the body of Christ. And if our brothers and sisters are as truly the body of Christ as the consecrated species at Mass, then it should be no more thinkable to treat each other with disrespect, with casual cruelty, to behave in any one of the innumerable ways in which we fail to give our brother or sister what is due to them, than it would be to act towards the Blessed Sacrament with irreverence. Even if we seem to ourselves and each other, humdrum, quotidian, every-day kinds of creatures, we are in fact, in Christ, supersubstantially precious.

But there is more.  In the sermon from which I’ve already quoted, St Augustine invites his listeners to reflect with him, not only on the mystery of bread and wine becoming the Body and Blood of Christ, but also on the process by which bread comes to be bread, and wine comes to be wine in the first place. It’s worth, I think, listening to him again in his own words.

What is this one bread? Is it not the "one body," formed from many? Remember: bread doesn't come from a single grain, but from many. So too, what we are to understand about the cup is similar and requires little explanation. In the visible object of bread, many grains are gathered into one just as the faithful (so Scripture says) form "a single heart and mind in God" [Acts 4.32]. And thus it is with the wine. Remember, friends, how wine is made. Individual grapes hang together in a bunch, but the juice from them all is mingled to become a single brew. This is the image chosen by Christ our Lord to show how, at his own table, the mystery of our unity and peace is solemnly consecrated. [Sermon 272]

It’s not just, then, that we should aspire to treat our brothers and sisters with an analogous kind of respect to that we give to Jesus in his sacramental presence when we genuflect to him in the tabernacle or adore him on the altar. It is also that, as members of his body, we are intimately, profoundly, radically united, not only with the Lord, but with each other: as grains of wheat coalesce to form a loaf, as the juice of individual grapes goes through the press to make wine, so we together make up the body of Christ.  

And I think this, too, helps address that question of how it can be that the bread we ask for in the Our Father is both every day and out of this world, and in doing so, perhaps at least hints at something that might be quite important for us to reflect on at this moment in the life of our Church.  Notice how Augustine refers here to the Eucharist as the “mystery of our unity and peace”. It’s no great secret, alas, that Catholics sometimes quarrel among ourselves, and one of the ways in which we are sometimes tempted to judge each other is according to something a little like a distinction between the “every day” and the “out of this world”.  

On the one hand, some of us might sometimes feel that others see our faith too exclusively in other-worldly, “spiritual” terms, and suspect that this might sometimes be a bit too convenient, an escape from our mundane responsibilities towards our brothers and sisters: after all, if what is really important is supernatural bread, the nourishment of prayer and sacrament, maybe we needn’t worry too much about those who lack physical bread.

On the other hand, some of us might sometimes worry that an exclusive concern for the physical needs of our neighbours may obscure what is most characteristic and most valuable about our faith – its promise of an eternal life with God which transcends all earthly fulfilment.  

But if Augustine’s vision of what it means to talk of the bread of the Eucharist is right, then we cannot but be concerned about our neighbour who goes hungry for daily bread, not because this is replacement for concern for the things of God, but because it is concern for one of the things of God. And, if Augustine’s vision is right, then our concern for our neighbours who go hungry, our awareness of their beauty and goodness which is the source of that concern, should inspire us to care more about, and praise and thank, the God who must be, who is still more beautiful and good, and to long therefore, still more, for the supersubstantial bread of eternity which he alone can give.