Daily Bread

In the Syrian Orthodox monasteries of Tur Abdin in south-eastern Turkey, whenever grace was said before meals, the people would join in saying the Lord’s Prayer. The Syriac spoken in these monasteries is about as close as you can get to the Aramaic of Jesus and his first disciples. Before each meal, we would pray, ‘Give us this day our daily bread’. 

The word ‘daily’ translates a curious word in Greek ‘epiousion’. It’s a term whose meaning has never been fully clarified. As one of the great early biblical commentators, Origen of Alexandria, noted in the third century, it is a very rare word. It is found in the context of the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew and Luke. There is another instance in an ancient papyrus, where it is also unclear what it means. It has puzzled translators for centuries. The Old Latin translation offers the word ‘daily’. Jerome, in his Vulgate’ translated it as ‘super-substantial’, which was a way of describing the ‘heavenly’ bread, the Eucharistic bread, the bread of life. The Syriac offers two slightly different translations: ‘perpetual’ and ‘necessary’. In the Coptic tradition, the word used suggests the bread to come, the bread ‘of tomorrow’. 

The range of meanings offered here suggests to me that the little Greek word ‘epiousion’ is a word which seeks to acknowledge the precariousness and fragility of our lives. But is there an echo here of the way in which each aspect of the prayer of Jesus focusses our minds on the promise of the Kingdom of God? We pray ‘Thy Kingdom come’, and the rest of the prayer illustrates what the coming kingdom might look like: ‘thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day the bread of tomorrow. And forgive us our debts as we forgive the debts of others’. That is a much literally translation of the text offered in the gospels. The promise of the Kingdom offers us the hope of a world in which there is justice, including economic justice. 

But there is another word, which also helps us to understand the character of the bread which God offers to us. We say, “Give us this day our daily bread’, not my daily bread, our daily bread. To pray this prayer demands of us an attitude of solidarity. This accent on solidarity was something that Rowan Williams talked about in his Bampton Lectures last year. He explored the significance of ‘solidarity’ particularly in Catholic Social Thought and Christian Ethics, and he argued that this accent on solidarity necessarily stands in opposition to political tribalism and the fragmentation of the human good into diverse and competing programmes. This accent on solidarity alerts us to the central importance in the Christian moral vision of human dignity. And it is this moral vision that inspires us to feed the hungry and to share the world’s resources more equitably.

When we pray, Give us this day our daily bread, our hearts are stirred up in solidarity with others. If we really mean these words when we pray them, then our attention will inevitably turn to the poor, to those who have no daily bread, to people who suffer hunger. 

In his sermons on the Lord’s Prayer, St Gregory of Nyssa invites his listeners to reflect on just how much Christian doctrine is compressed into this little phrase. We say to God: Give us bread. ‘Not delicacies or riches, not magnificent purples robes, golden ornaments, precious stones, or silver dishes. Nor do we ask him for landed estates, or military commands, or political leadership….. We do not say, give us a prominent position in assemblies or monuments and statues raised to us, nor silken robes and musicians at meals, nor any other thing by which the soul is estranged from the thought of God and higher things; no – only bread!’

Gregory is reminding us that our hearts will not be satisfied with the accumulation of more and more wealth. Our hearts will only be satisfied with the bread of life. And when we pray ‘Give us this day our daily bread’, we are praying not simply for our own flourishing, but the flourishing of all human beings.  We come here today, seeking bread to eat – and yet in this Eucharist we discover not just the scraps of food which provide us with sustenance. We discover that we are honoured guests at Christ’s table. The table is laid for us bountifully and abundantly. The flowers and Harvest decorations remind us of this abundance. In this eucharist, all our hunger, our neediness, our longing, our desire, is satisfied. We discover that the depths of God’s grace are inexhaustible, abundant, overwhelming. Never scarce.

Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.’  And if our hearts are transformed by those words of Jesus – then we will be compelled to live our lives in solidarity with others, for the bread which we break is a sign that all bread should be shared.