We continue our deep dive into THE HEART OF CATHOLIC PRAYER.
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At its most elemental level, of course, “Give us this day our daily bread” is a prayer asking God to meet our elementary bodily needs including food, drink, shelter, medicine, work, love, etc. Christian prayer has great sympathy for those in need, but not so much for those praying out of mere renegade appetite. Contrary to the “health and wealth” prosperity gospel preacher, the gospel counsels have tended to radiate a general suspicion of hankering after more than you actually need.
This doesn’t mean we should offer “modest” petitionary prayers, but rather that we should offer petitionary prayers which seek to glorify God rather than our own appetites. When the goal is God’s glory, Jesus urges us to Think Big, “For truly, I say to you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, “Move from here to there,” and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you” (Matthew 17:20).
When it comes to the whole “O Lord, won’t you give me a Mercedes-Benz” school of prayer, James sums up the general biblical attitude, “What causes wars, and what causes fightings among you? Is it not your passions that are at war in your members? You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions” (James 4:1-3).
Prayers prayed for the glory of God rather than for the delectation of our appetites can and do result in stunning acts of provision and grace from God. Whole orders in the Church, such as the Dominicans or the Sisters of Providence have essentially functioned on the assumption that God will provide what is necessary and have achieved a global impact.
That said, at the end of the day, petitionary prayer is ultimately ordered toward our eternal good and not merely to our temporal good. The same Jesus who taught us this prayer and told his followers that to feed the hungry is to feed him (cf. Matthew 25:31-46) is the Jesus who said “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4). Therefore, the prayer for our daily bread is pregnant with significance in the Eucharistic tradition of the Church. As the Catechism says:
This petition, with the responsibility it involves, also applies to another hunger from which men are perishing: “Man does not live by bread alone, but . . . by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God,” that is, by the Word he speaks and the Spirit he breathes forth. Christians must make every effort “to proclaim the good news to the poor” (Deuteronomy 8:3; Matthew 4:4). There is a famine on earth, “not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord” (Amos 8:11). For this reason the specifically Christian sense of this fourth petition concerns the Bread of Life: The Word of God accepted in faith, the Body of Christ received in the Eucharist (cf. John 6:26-58). (CCC 2835)
Hebrew (and its cognate Aramaic) is a language without degrees of emphasis. You don’t say “God is very very holy.” Instead, the way you emphasize is to repeat, for instance saying, “Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might.” In a similar way, the pedagogical style of the Hebraic teacher is to rhyme ideas rather than words. So, for instance, Jesus’ teaching “Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you” (Matthew 7:7).
Something like this is also going on in “Give us this day our daily bread.” Strictly speaking, you could simply say, “Give us bread each day,” but instead Jesus teaches us to emphasize our moment-by-moment dependence on God. Instead of some vast abstract theory about a God who inks a “once saved, always saved” contract with us and then leaves us alone to do as we please until whisking us off to heaven, this petition reminds us that we can make no lifetime guarantees of fidelity to God in his absence. Apart from him, says Jesus, we can do nothing (cf. John 15:5). We are to live, day by day, in dependence on the day-by-day provision of God with only the light sufficient to see the next step. Thus, and no other way, do we learn humility.
One final tidbit about the petition “Give us this day our daily bread” is that the word translated “daily” (epiousios) occurs nowhere else in the New Testament. The literal translation of the word is “super-essential” and is, quite consciously, meant to remind us of the fact that, particularly in the profoundly Eucharistic New Testament, “bread” never means merely “the stuff you eat that is made of flour.” Rather, “bread” always has a Eucharistic connotation as well. This can be seen, for instance, in Luke’s gospel. The evangelist bookends the whole account with Christ’s birth at Bethlehem (“House of Bread”) and his being laid in manger (a feed box) at one end of the story while, at the other end, he tells us the tale of Christ’s revelation on the Emmaus Road when he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and the eyes of the disciples were opened to see him. All through the gospels, miracles involving bread and wine are directly connected to the source and summit of our Faith—the Holy Eucharist. Likewise then, the prayer for our daily bread is also a Eucharistic prayer. No wonder it is inseparable from the Eucharistic liturgy since here, supremely, we eat the true bread from heaven that Jesus came to give us in abundance.
There is a profound truth hidden in this. For with most petitionary prayer, there is no absolute guarantee that the answer is going to be “Yes.” Indeed, one of the greatest tragedies that could befall the human race would be for God to grant every prayer ever offered him. So God does not promise us that we will never miss a meal. There are times we may pray for our daily bread and yet not get what we asked for. God sometimes says “No.” Hunger and even famine have stalked Christians at times as they do the rest of our wretched race. Jesus fasted with us that we might, at times, fast with him and experience bodily hunger as one of the ways into his holy Cross. But there is one place where God has never, in all the history of the Church, said “No” to the petition “Give us this day our daily bread” and that is in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. There, every time the liturgy has been validly celebrated, God has sent his Spirit to transform mere earthly bread into the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ, the Bread of Life. Prayed in that context, this petition is, without any possible comparison, the prayer God always answers with a resounding “Yes.”
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