#03 Our daily bread...

[AI translation] We are inclined to think that this is the easiest request in the Lord's Prayer. After all, it expresses a human need that every person encounters every day. The problem of millions is bread! Not the spiritual bread, not the bread of the Lord's Supper, not what the Bible calls "the bread of life", but the real bread, the bread that nourishes the body, the bread made from flour and water, baked in the oven, and all that this word means in its broadest sense. That is, the things necessary for the maintenance of our bodily existence and well-being: food, clothing, livelihood, the fruits of our labour, the health of our bodies, in general, everything necessary to eat our bread day after day in peace and happiness! I say this because we tend to think it is the easiest question to ask because it is usually what most people ask and expect from God. Most prayers that aspire from earth to heaven ask God to provide the pray-er with this or that which will help him in his momentary need, to give him the signs of his providential protection, to help him with the care of his daily bread. General religiosity really only wants to use God to heal the sick, to stand by them in their difficulties, to give them some solution to their problems if they have no fire or job.Well, it is very good to have such confidence in God that one should lay all the problems of daily life before his Father, but let us not forget that the petition for daily bread is the fourth petition in the prayer that Jesus taught us to pray. The Lord's Prayer does not begin here, just as faith in God does not begin with "I'm in trouble, I don't have this, I don't have that, come on, help me, God."
In the Lord's Prayer, it is first of all that I have come into a filial relationship with God through faith in Jesus Christ the Saviour, that I have been brought into the great family of the Father's redeemed children; and as His child, it is now my chief desire and ambition that His name may be sanctified in me and through me in the world; His royal power over my life being established, His kingdom come; His will be done in all things in my obedient life given over to Him - and only after His redeeming rule over me, claiming my whole life, do I acknowledge, accept and strive to realize it: then comes the request, "Give us this day our daily bread". This request, then, is not the privilege of the religious man, but of the believer. Whoever has submitted his thoughts and actions to the will of God, whoever has placed his sins in His forgiving grace, whoever has entrusted his soul, his salvation, to the redeeming Jesus, can entrust his body and all his material problems, his daily bread, to Him! Of course, God is gracious enough to give strength to the righteous and the unrighteous, to raise His sun on the good and the wicked, but to claim, to ask, to expect Him to take the care of our daily bread from Him, is only possible if I am His from the beginning! The prerequisite of this request, then, is all that is contained in the first request concerning my three relations to God.
It is the privilege of a believer to pray for daily bread - yes! But even on the lips of a believer, this petition is heated and saturated with the spirit when he begs in great need. We can truly ask God for a piece of bread when we ourselves have none, have run out and have no idea where we will get it again! Today, the entire population of the capital is gratefully remembering 13 February ten years ago. Let's remember how, ten years ago, we spent weeks in the cellar, huddled together, our eyes wide with hunger, talking about what we would eat, what we would bake and cook, if we ever got out of here! Remember when, in the terrible roar of the earthquake and the sky around us, we could cry out, "Give us our daily bread, our life, our very life!" Let us remember when, ten years ago, on this day, tired, dishevelled, dirty, like hungry rats, we finally emerged from the ground and looked down the streets of what had become a battlefield: what a fervent cry for daily bread, for the chance to start life anew, what a gift a piece of bread was! I will never forget the taste of the empty soup served in the home of one of our presbyters. It was the best soup I ever had in my life!
And behold, thanks be to God's undeserved saving grace, He has brought us through the horrors of death, He has given us life again, we have bread again, sometimes even loaves! Thank the mighty and merciful God that today we no longer have to plead with the cries of a man drowning in the waves of mortal perils for daily bread and all that it means! But we needed that hard lesson! Would that we had learned from it what God intended it to teach us! What? First, that we live today and receive from His hand the gift of all that is necessary for life on earth. With this request we confess that all we have belongs to God. Behold, we are in His mighty hands, body and soul. I acknowledge with confidence that my daily bread, in its widest sense, is for me God's free gift and grace, as well as forgiveness of sins and eternal life. Even if you sit down at a well-prepared table with an abundance of bread, do not be discouraged. That bread is not yours: it belongs to God! And when you ask him, 'Give me this bread,' you do not speak empty words, you do not speak unkind untruths, but you make the most natural and confident request of filial trust to the Father, as if you were saying, 'Lord, all this is yours; you are my host and my bread-giver this morning and this noon! Come, then, give me what you have prepared for today, distribute it among us who sit at this table, let us live from your hand, let us be your guests today! Let us then try to look upon our bread as God has been here among us, for behold, here is bread on our table today! That's why I don't like the usual table prayer, "Come Jesus, be our guest..." Because it is not we who are hosting Him, but He is hosting us!
The other lesson is to be content with what He gives! Jesus said, "Your heavenly Father knows well what you need before you ask Him!" Even if you are given a smaller place setting at the table of life, appreciate that even a small piece of bread is a gift from God. Before we complain, let's take a moment to remember how thankful we were for that little one ten years ago! Jesus teaches us to be modest, to be puritanical, because he asks us to have only one day's bread. He says: give us this day our daily bread. We are not talking about a week's supply, or a month's supply, but only one day's supply. God is not unfair to you that you have only enough to live on today. Tomorrow's care will be the object and gift of tomorrow's request! Accepted from the hand of God, a little is just enough!
Then the next lesson we need to learn is contained in that little word "we". Give us our daily bread. This "we" is a possessive pronoun. It means we ask for our bread, not what someone else has, not what someone else has worked for. Let us have the result of our own honest labour, the fruit of our own labour, and let us not have bread on our table to which we attach deceit, theft, sin and shame. Bread salted with the sweat of my brow: the best bread in the world. With this petition, we also ask God to guide our relations, to allow us to live a social and economic life in which everyone can earn a decent living after his work, and everyone can earn his own bread.
And finally, there is one more great lesson for us to learn. You know, to really pray this petition as Jesus taught us: plural! So, when we ask for our own sustenance on earth, at the same time always think of others. With this request, I enter into fraternal communion with all humanity. It is good, each time we come to this request of the Lord's Prayer, to remember that we are now praying in spirit with the hundreds of thousands and millions of others who, besides ourselves, also want to live on this earth. In that great collapse, the traces of which are still being cleansed by ten years of reconstruction, God judged precisely that the whole question of bread was centred on the first person singular, on the 'I'. My bread, the well-being of my family, my race, my social class, my people, my church, was the first requirement. What the other man, the other family, the other people should have of the goods of the earth was his problem, let him take care of it as he could. Well, now the great lesson is given to us to learn to think, plan, struggle and work for bread in the plural first person. In other words, I could say that God is raising us from "me" people to "we" people. That is why our flats are crowded, that is why we have that much-cursed co-tenancy, because God points us to one another, draws us together, so that we learn to bear with one another, to bear with one another in love, to learn to renounce our own selfishness, to recognise and even promote the other person's right to life, not only in theory but also in very close, very practical terms! God wills that I should notice the other person, that I should be forced to reckon with the fact that there are hundreds of millions of people living outside of me, outside of my family, outside of my kind, who also need housing, clothing, work, bread! There are many others besides me who want to get on the tram: they too must have a place on it, not just me.
With this request: "Give us this day our daily bread", Jesus is embracing in our prayerful love and responsibility the care of all the many people who are crowding around us. He prays that the other person, the other people, too, may live and live well, not just me. He wants me to take part in the struggle of humanity for existence by praying for the well-being and existence of humanity. This prayer is truly also said for others, on behalf of those who do not say the prayer with us. For we know that there is enough bread in the world, that God our Father is rich, let us not allow selfishness, ill will, to rob the weak of their chance of life. Let him give us all our daily bread today! If He distributes it, there will be enough for me, not just for others, and for others, not just for me: for all of us!
And so that all this may not remain just words, but may begin in reality: could we not regularly give someone else some of our daily bread? That is, by taking up someone else's care alongside my own and asking, "Give us this day our daily bread." Specifically, let someone else be included in this "we", this "our". Me and someone else, my family and someone else! Let us believe that we really have someone else's bread laid down with us! Let us not be afraid to give when someone asks, or when we can help someone without asking. It is enough, as it was enough for that little boy to feed five thousand people a day, because he gave it to Jesus to distribute among them. And it is recorded that "they all ate and were satisfied, and took up the rest of the food in twelve baskets."
God will not forsake the man who comes to him today, taking upon himself the care of others, with this petition: "Give us this day our daily bread."
Let us begin to ask:
Give us this day our daily bread, our daily food:
Take care of our lives, Our mortal bodies;
Give us good health, good strength, peace.
Canto 483, verse 8
Amen
Date: 13 February 1955.