[AI translation] The great prayer that the Lord taught us is only seven short petitions, but it contains everything, the whole of human life with its small and great things, spiritual and material problems, inner and outer needs of life. It is truly a total prayer. These seven petitions are like the seven colours of the rainbow of the spectrum, on which the light is diffracted when it is refracted through the prism. The whole light of human life is contained in this rainbow of the seven petitions of the Lord's Prayer. No one can say that my needs were not thought of by Jesus, that my concerns were left out. This prayer can be said as much at the cradle as at the coffin. This prayer can as easily float up from the altars of great cathedrals as from a sick room in the night. It can be prayed at a wedding as well as in prison. And it is prayed in all these places and on all these occasions. Indeed, all the colours of our lives can be found in it.Behold, even the care of daily bread. I admire God's greatness not only in knowing and directing the course of the stars, but perhaps even more in the fact that the hairs on the heads of tiny people are held accountable to him. To the God who holds the universe in the palm of His hand, not the most minimal need of life of an individual human being escapes His notice. The Jesus who gave His life to reclaim the lost kingdom of heaven also thinks of what His own should eat, what they should drink, and what they should wear here on earth. Jesus, who shed his blood to cleanse our souls from all sin, did not fail to care for the daily bread. He who saves souls from death takes the greatest problems to heart.
The very fact that Jesus speaks of prayer, and says, "Enter into thine inner room, and shut thy door, and pray" (Mt 6:6), shows how much He had the material things of the praying life before His eyes. This inner room you know what was there and then? The pantry of the house. The dwellings of that time had no other lockable room but the pantry. So Jesus says: go in there to pray, there where the smell of the most negligible life fills the air, there where the empty shelves remind the poor man most of his poverty, or where the full sacks remind the rich man of the poverty of others, there Jesus sends the man who prays to God.
God does not look down on the material side of life, in fact He sanctifies it so much that He Himself took on material form when "the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us." (John 1:14) Where the world is most clear, where the earth is most green, where all the evils of materiality are most palpable: in the human body, there God pleased to enter into time and the earthly world. Jesus' becoming man also means that the stomach problem and all the other material problems connected with it are the object of God's special care. God also takes our physical life seriously. No more seriously than by taking this body upon himself, by lowering himself among us to the point where the body is struggling with the problems of hunger, cold, thirst. He knows very well what it means to be human, what it means when the soul is ready but the body is powerless, what a great matter it is for man to have the care of daily bread. That is why He makes us pray this petition, "Give us this day our daily bread".
This is the generic word "daily bread". It does not only mean white or brown bread made from flour and water, baked in an oven, available in a grocery store or market, but also everything that this word means in a broader sense. It also includes the things we need to sustain our physical existence and well-being: the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the shoes we wear, the coats we wear, the jobs we hold in the world, the homes we return to when we go home to rest, the earnings we earn to live on. In general, everything we need to live an orderly life on earth. All this is part of the daily bread.
Someone might say, "But why should we ask God for that? Because in order to have what one needs for everyday life, one must not pray, but work. If you do your work well, you will have your bread as a result of your work. A person usually earns that particular "bread" for himself and for the people entrusted to him. So it is in the Bible: 'If a man will not work, let him not eat' (2 Thess 3:10).
Well, there is some truth in that. Working to earn my bread and praying to God for my bread are not mutually exclusive. In fact. They are very much together. Because in earning my daily bread, there are many factors that are not dependent on me. Sure, I work for it - but to work for it, I also need health, which is such a precarious thing, such a gift if I have it, and mental and physical ability, which again is a gift if I have it. You also need a decent standard of living: just think what the breadline meant in wartime, and that it is by no means a given that we can now work in peace. Then think how far that bread has to travel to reach our tables. What it takes, all of which is not up to me. Agriculture, industry and trade must function properly. It needs the labour and hours of many, many other people besides myself, and it needs good weather, rain, snow, sunshine, warmth, and a fair distribution of the weather. Moreover, my bread question involves the problem of export-import, transport, distribution, consumption, pricing, all the things of economic life. It is all part of the problem of our daily bread. Do we feel that, however hard one may work for his bread, it is still a gift from God to him? Without health, without physical or mental ability, without a well-functioning economy, there would be little result from hard work. Think of these factors independent of yourself when you ask God for your daily bread, because they are all part of the request: 'Give us this day our daily bread'.
The believer expresses in this the blessed assurance that he lives and receives as a gift from God's fatherly hand all that is necessary for life on earth. It is a declaration of confidence, as if the believer were to say, "Father, all things are yours; you are my host and my bread-giver this morning and this noon. Come, distribute to me what you have prepared for me today, distribute it among us who sit at this table, let us live from your hand, let us be your guests today. When you look at the bread on the table before you, remember that it is there as a blessing from God. Therefore our usual table prayer is: Come, Lord, be with us, what you have given, bless us! And, Whoever gave us food and drink, blessed be his name! If only we could feel during these short little prayers of blessing that it is indeed only the Lord's great mercy that we have bread at all.
It is good to ask God for that bread every day, because in this way, accepting it from the hand of God, it will be of greater value to us in a wonderful way. Everything that God touches with His word is mysteriously changed. The most striking example of this is the water of the cross, which is the same in nature as the water used in the kitchen for cooking or washing. So it is H2O. But by being permeated by the Word of God, when the word of Jesus is added to it, it takes on a new meaning, it becomes a carrier of the sacrament, like the water of the cross, which is the blood of Jesus, and so it is something other than just H2O. If Jesus includes the care of daily bread in our prayer, then for the one who asks for it with sincere, childlike trust, the bread becomes more nourishing and tastier as a blessing from the Lord than it would have been without it. I can tell you from experience: bread accepted as a blessing from the Lord's hand, even if it is a small piece, is more satisfying and more pleasing than even a larger piece of bread or loaf without the Lord.
There is another very important aspect to this request. The one to which the first person plural draws our attention. What Jesus means by this is that when I ask for my own sustenance on earth, I should always think of others. With this request, we stand in solidarity with the whole of humanity, and we pray in spirit with all the millions of others who, like us, also want to live and eat today and tomorrow. Here again, Jesus is underlining the great truth that my own well-being and happiness cannot be achieved without the well-being and happiness of others, or at the expense of it, but only together with it.
Today, in particular, we live in a world in which, if one wants to see well-being, one cannot achieve it by seeking only one's own, but only by seeking it for everyone else. Individual well-being is directly related to the well-being of another person, another country, another continent. Jesus wants me to take the other person's potential as seriously as my own. To reckon with the fact that outside of me, outside of my family, outside of my people, there are hundreds of millions of others who also need bread, clothing, housing, work, life. I must take into account the fact that many others besides me want to get on the tram, that they too should have a place on it, not just me, and that the millions of people in underdeveloped parts of the world who are starving should have access to the bread that I have.
With this petition of the Lord's Prayer, Jesus embraces in our prayerful love and sense of responsibility the care of all the many people who flock around us and pray for them. By praying this prayer we are also participating in the struggle for the existence and well-being of all humanity. We also say this prayer on behalf of others, on behalf of those who do not say it with us. No matter how many people live on this earth, there is still enough bread for them. Our Father is a rich God, and we ask that He not allow selfishness, evil, to rob the weak of the possibility of life.
But that all this may not remain just words, but may begin in reality, it would be good if we could try to regularly give someone else some of our daily bread. That is, by taking up someone else's care, the care of a specific someone besides ourselves, and thus asking the Lord for our daily bread. Me and someone else, my family and someone else. Maybe someone else's bread is laid down with me or with you. So let us not be afraid to give if someone asks, or if we can help someone without asking. Let us believe that there is always enough, just as once a little boy had enough to feed five thousand people from his one day's food, because the one day's food that his mother had packed for him he gave to Jesus to distribute among them. And it is recorded that "they all ate and were satisfied". (Mt 14,20) God does not abandon today those who come to him with the care of others, asking him, "Give us this day our daily bread".
Yes, today. If I have my bread today, let it be enough. What about tomorrow and next week? I do not know. I only know that I have a Father in heaven, Who will provide for me better than I can provide for myself. My Father is counting on me tomorrow at His table, I'm counting on Him. So we ask with our beautiful song:
Give us this day our daily bread, Our daily food:
Take care of our lives, our mortal bodies;
Give us good health, fruitful days, peace.
Bless our labours, all our cattle and livestock;
And with your java, let us live in moderation,
Looking to thee with gratitude, With mercy to others.
(Canticle 483, verses 10-11)
Amen
Date: 26 January 1969.
Lesson
1Kir 17,1-9