01.07. Give us this Day our Daily Bread

Chapter VII. Give us this Day our Daily Bread THE first point to notice in this clause of the Lord’s Prayer is its moderation. In the prayer which is prompted by our natural instinct we ask for everything we happen to want: we put ourselves first; we are immoderate in our desires; we seek to bend the divine will to our own wishes. In all these respects, as has been already noticed, the Lord’s Prayer puts human instinct under the strongest check. This prayer for the supply of our own needs is not allowed to be uttered till it has been postponed to prayer for the honouring of the divine name, the coming of the divine kingdom, and the doing of the divine will; and till, in all these respects, the law of heaven has been taken for the law of human conduct. It is only to state the same fact in other words, to call attention to the suppression of individualism which lies in the very words us and our, words which prevent us praying for anything for ourselves which we cannot equally request for the whole society; and, once more, the same principle finds expression in the word bread. It is bread/ and not anything we may happen to like, that we are allowed to pray for. This, then, is the prayer of the Christian Church, the prayer which the existing Christian Church here in England to-day is continually repeating. Yet it certainly is not an exaggeration to say, that though there are among us always true Christians praying this prayer in spirit as well as in letter, yet a vast number of repetitions of the Lord’s Prayer must be blank hypocrisy; for it is hypocrisy if the prayer of our lips is a quite different thing from the prayer of our hearts. Yet the prayer of our heart is expressed in what we actually show ourselves to want and to expect in our ordinary life. Listen, then, to two praying Christians, who are discussing the marriage of their son and daughter, and in the process are making a number of assumptions as to what is the minimum of wealth on which life can be reasonably conducted.

Look at that other person furnishing a house, or providing for a dinner-party. Think, in short, of all the things which in ordinary conversation Christians are ready to say they can t do without. Think of the money spent in a single rich household on a single article of luxury like champagne, or a single article of dress. Now, things which are the actual wants of actual people are the prayers of their hearts. And if they cannot possibly be expressed in a petition for daily bread, then I fear, their saying of the Lord’s Prayer is nothing else than a more or less conscious hypocrisy.

What, then, can daily bread be explained to mean?

Surely it is all that is necessary for us to make the best of our faculties. It is nourishment; and everything may fairly be called nourishment which can be said to fertilize and liberate the energies of human nature, instead of cloying and clogging them. Once grant this, and it is obvious that very different things are meant by bread to different people. There is hardly any luxury which has not its use to stimulate this or that nature, or to meet this or that exceptional need. The question whether this or that article of diet or comfort can be used under the head of daily bread, can be answered only by answering the question Do I work the better for it and pray the better for it? And in answering this question there are two facts, closely allied, which have to be kept in mind. The first is, that comforts very soon reach the point where they begin to clog instead of liberating human energies. A venerable statesman has been often heard to remark, that the things people say they can t do without are like the pieces of thread with which the Liliputians bound Gulliver. Each of them could be snapt by itself, but taken together they bound him more tightly than strong cords. Nobody, therefore, can find out what he really needs for his work without constantly testing himself in giving up things. No one can consider a number of well-to-do Englishmen without perceiving that they are materialized; that is, that the supply of food and drink and comfort generally dulls their intellectual and still more their spiritual powers. In other words, the spirit in them is the slave of the flesh.

Here, then, comes in view the second fact. Fasting has been historically a principle of Christianity, and was so in Apostolic Christianity. Rightly stated, the principle of fasting is but the recognition that the flesh has in ordinary human life got the upper hand of the spirit, and that it is time for the spirit to take revenges upon the flesh, and to assert its mastery. Fasting, like every other principle, must have its methods and its rules and its order, or it will fail to take effect; but I am concerned only now with the principle, and it is this The Christian will, from time to time, deliberately deny himself in lawful comforts, and nourishments of the body, in order to assert spiritual vitality; in order to find out what he can do without; in order to maintain the principle that man doth not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.

Bread, then, is the nourishment necessary to make the body an effective instrument for fulfilling the spiritual purpose of our life, or, in other words, to enable us to make the best of ourselves. And what his bread ought to consist of the individual can never find out unless he has steadily in view the encroaching tendency of the flesh; unless he is prepared, on the one hand, to make courageous trials in doing without/ and on the other hand is prepared thankfully to accept anything in the way of holiday, or rest, or food, or drink, or comfort, which reasonable experience shows to be necessary to keep him in efficiency, and make him vigorous in profit able industry and in communion with God. The body is to be a serviceable instrument, and it is a good creation of God. It is to be the instrument and not the master, but it is to be kept as an efficient instrument, and nob maltreated any more than any other of the creatures of God.

Now when we reflect, we cannot fail to see that, if over any large area of Christian society the principles embodied in this prayer were really respected, there would be plenty of God’s gifts for every one’s need.

Granted a society in which men would really pray Thy will be done on earth/ and Give us this day our daily bread/ and would live with even tolerable consistency in accordance with their prayer, in that society would be found a human life which, if it did not perfectly realize the kingdom of God on earth, would at least be a foretaste and convincing prophecy of it. It is a good thing to take a walk and meditate upon such a proposition. It fixes in our minds this conclusion the misery of the world is manufactured by man. Certainly To the flame that ruineth mankind, Man gives the matter, or at least gives wind.

II

Oddly enough, in the simple language of this prayer appears one of the most difficult words in the New Testament. The word translated daily probably means bread for the coming day. It has been recently suggested, that its occurrence side by side with to-day is due to the very early use of this prayer by Christians both morning and evening: that in the morning they said, Give us our bread to-day/ and in the evening, Give us our bread for to-morrow. The suggestion puts us at least on the right line of thought. The prayer is the prayer of those who are content to depend from day to day in trustfulness on their Father’s love. When our Lord in the Sermon on the Mount forbade us to be anxious about food or drink or clothing, what He forbade was anxiety, not providence. The birds of the air and the flowers of the field, to which He looked for examples, all in their unconscious way make provision. From the time the seed is sown provision is being made for the growth, and the flowering, and the fruitage, which are each in turn to come. When the birds build their nests they are making provision for the future of themselves and their race. But they do it all without any anxiety. They do each day the work of the day, and expect each day the supplies of the day.

Now granted a like providence, a like industrious workfulness, and the prayerful trust in God which is the spiritual counterpart of their unanxious happiness, and who can doubt that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the prayer, Give us this day our daily bread, would be found to be answered. In other words, the misery of the world, the destitution which we continually hear of, is due either to want of reasonable provision, or to idleness, luxury, and vice, or to prayerless, thankless want of trust. The prayer, Give us to-day our daily bread, is the prayer of men who are at once thinking and believing and working.

III

I said the word translated daily means properly the bread for to-morrow! But in old, days it was very generally translated super-substantial that is to say, the bread that is higher than material or in other words, spiritual bread, the bread of life. So the prayer became associated with the service of the Eucharist, with the continual feeding on the Bread of Life, which is Jesus Christ, very God and very man.

Now, the translation was no doubt wrong. The prayer is one for physical and not spiritual nourishment. But yet to the Christian it can never be without the deepest significance, that the bread of the Spirit is given us in common bread; that the original Eucharist was side by side with the love-feast, the highest things in closest connection with the most ordinary. Alas! the abuses of the Corinthian Church separated the Eucharist and the love-feast wide apart. Alas! that it should have been necessary to do so. But though it be necessary, as necessary it is, the principle must never be forgotten which is embodied in the fact, that it is common bread which is made to become to us the body of Christ; and that the communication to us of Christ’s own being, the communion of His body and blood, was made on the occasion and under the forms of a fraternal meal.

Thus common eating and drinking* are touched for the Christian with a sacramental meaning; and the sharing the good things which God provides for our nourishment is one chief means of realizing the unity of the Christian body which is in the one Spirit.

There is no real Christian meal which ought not to be consecrated with the thought of unity with Christ, and lifted by the sense of brotherhood and co-operation.

Give us this day our daily bread, the bread for the body, and through the bread for the body that life of the soul also which is communion with God and with our brother men. So let us pray Give us this day our daily bread.

(7s I it is the we of each household; the we of each parish, each town, in which all classes are mingled together; it is the we also of the whole Christian family. Our thoughts when we pray this prayer ought sometimes to go out to that unhappy community of Armenians recently butchered and hunted in their mountain homes, and massacred in thousands in the streets of Constantinople, and still subject to continual outrages and murders and forced conversions, while Christian Europe looks on and does nothing, because the nations of the Christian fellowship are so jealous of one another, that no one can be allowed to act without incurring the enmity of the rest. And we ask ourselves can we pray this prayer for ourselves and our families and our own country, without a feeling, deep-seated in our consciences, that somehow the terrible but health-giving judgments of God must fall upon a Christian Europe guilty of this horrible acquiescence? If we do find ourselves punished, and in our distress crying out to a God who seems deaf or powerless, there is one word of an ancient prophet which would certainly apply to us, Your sins have withholden good things from you.