Lord's Prayer (3) - God Gives

THE LORD’S PRAYER

(3) GOD GIVES

"Lord, teach us to pray"? asked the disciples of Jesus. And he replied "In this manner pray" and he went on to give them what we call the Lord's Prayer

There is no evidence of it being used either in private prayer or public worship in the pages of the New Testament, though it quickly became established within the life of the church.

However, it is interesting to note that Jesus was not giving us a magic formula, which should be used word for word, but rather a pattern or model for all prayer.

If you look at the Lord's Prayer you will note that there is a distinct pattern in the ordering of the clauses of that prayer.

We have already noted that it starts by focusing our attention away from ourselves towards God our Heavenly Father. A Father who cares and to whom we can turn in childlike trust and whom we call "Abba" - Daddy or Papa. A God who knows each one of us intimately but also a God who is transcendent. A God whose fatherly character is separate from anything we may know in this life, though we may see Him obliquely reflected in parenthood.

We have also noted that the clause "Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven", is a prayer whereby we choose to surrender ourselves to God's reign in our lives and thereby open ourselves up to become human channels of his influence in the life of the world today.

Now, the pattern of prayer moves away from being focused upon God and becomes focused upon ourselves, including our present, future and past needs.

Today we shall be thinking about the present, namely our daily needs as expressed in those words "Give us this day our daily bread".

On the surface, these words appear to be possibly the most easily understood. However, the library of books which have been written by scholars more than bears testimony to them being some of the most difficult to understand.

As Professor Christopher Evans has said, they are the most difficult of all to understand as to meaning because it is the only clause in the Lord's prayer to contain an adjective, namely "daily". The problem is that the word “daily” does not appear in any Greek literature of the time and was also unknown in common Greek speech so we don't know for sure its exact meaning.

Now I don't want to bore you with the linguistic difficulties of interpretation, though I shall return to it at the end of the address. For the present, let us try to flush out the meaning of the clause "give us this day our daily bread".

Firstly, "give us".

As I have mentioned before, the words “I”, “me” and “us” are not to be found in the Lord's prayer. It is "our Father" not "my Father". It is "our trespasses" not "my trespasses". It is "our" protection from evil not "my" protection from evil, and it is “our daily bread" and not "my daily bread".

The emphasis is upon "us" and "our" rather than upon “me” and "my" which so often is dominant in our prayer life. Intercession is about praying for others - and that is what we are talking about today. Whereas Petition is about ourselves.

Intercession is essentially unselfish prayer which is not focused upon self, and this is one of the reasons why intercessory prayer often appears to be unanswered, namely that it is selfish in intent.

I often recall a hospital ward I used to visit when I worked as a hospital chaplain in Liverpool. There were 56 beds in that ward lined against outside walls and with a double row in the centre separated by a passageway.. Usually there was only a Sister on duty, assisted by a Staff Nurse and four nurses in training.

On this particular day, there was a very demanding woman who was full of complaints about the nursing care she was receiving. She spoke as if she was the only person in the ward and was blind to the needs of those around her. As far as she was concerned, the nursing team were there for her and no one else and it did not matter if others, some of whom were much more seriously ill than she was, were neglected.

Sometimes we are like that woman in that ward and forget that other people exist. If we do not get what we want, we think that God has failed to answer our prayers. But to give us what we want, may deny others of what they need. There can be no selfish children in the family of God. We are part of one great family. This sense of family I have always found stronger in the north than in the south of England and it is reflected in their daily conversation where they will talk about "our Clifford", "our Jean", "our Andrew" or "our Robert".

Secondly, the prayer is for our daily bread.

We are encouraged not to look into the distant future but to leave that with God. "Don't worry about the morrow, today has enough worries of its own”, says Jesus. Some people seem to spend so much time trying to look at what might be around the corner of their lives that they become anxious and usually depressed. Just relax. Just as God has looked after us in the past so he will look after us in the future. For the present, concentrate upon today and our "daily bread".

Cardinal Newman put it so well in his hymn:

"I do not ask to see

The distant scene - one step enough for me.”

Thirdly, we pray give us this day our daily bread.

It does not say caviar. What I want to stress is that we are praying for the bare necessities of life and not the luxuries of life. Sadly the luxuries of today have an awful habit of becoming the bare necessities of tomorrow. How our forebears managed to live without microwaves, refrigerators, deep freezers, and central heating is often hard to imagine! But they did!

As Gregory of Nyssa of the fourth century observes: "So we say to God: give us bread. Not delicacies or cakes, nor magnificent purple robes or golden ornaments or precious stones or silver dishes. Nor do we ask him for landed estates or military commands or political leadership. We pray neither for herds of horses and oxen or other cattle in great numbers, nor for a host of slaves. We do not say, give us a prominent position in assemblies or monuments or 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 - but only bread". And he concludes "cling only to what is necessary".

It is when we go beyond that, that desire and covetousness begins to creep into our soul.

I fear we have lost sight of the bare necessities of life.

Our Lenten Hunger Lunches are held on Fridays at the time when Jesus was dying upon the cross to help us to identify ourselves with his suffering for us. I was suggesting these should be absolutely basic - they are Hunger Lunches, to which a person replied they could not live only on that! But that is the whole point; it is a practical way for only six days in a year to try to identify with those who live permanently in a state of hunger. We also demonstrate our concern by donating the money we would otherwise have spent on lunch at home, towards Christian Aid and their work in relieving hunger.

Fourthly, let us reflect upon the word "give us our daily bread".

This does not mean that once we have prayed, we should sit down and fold our arms and wait. The food is not going to appear ready made upon our tables; God is not going to spoon feed us; prayer is not an easy way for getting God to do for us what we can do for ourselves.

This clause reminds us that without God, there would be no such thing as food at all. As the former Dean of St. Paul's W.R. Matthews observes, "The paradox that all depends upon God and yet, in a sense, all depends on us is solved in practice. Earnest and honest prayer for anything leads not to inactivity or stagnation, but energetic and hopeful labour".

I said earlier that this passage is most difficult to interpret because no one knows for certain what exactly the word which we translate as "daily" really means.

St. Jerome of the fifth century, when he translated the Bible into Latin, commonly called the Vulgate and the one that is used by the Roman Catholic Church, offers us two translations.

In the Lucan version of the Lord's Prayer he uses the word "daily bread" but in his Matthean version he uses the word "substantial bread".

By this translation he is not referring to our material needs but to our spiritual needs. In other words, the daily bread of life is not enough to sustain a truly human life. "Man does not live by bread alone". He needs also the nourishment of the spirit.

Doubtless he also had at the back of his mind the words of St. John's gospel where Jesus talks about himself as being “the 'bread of life' which comes down from heaven that a man may eat thereof and not die".

Little wonder that St. Augustine, in his commentary on the Lord's Prayer, took this to refer to the sacrament of Christ's body which is received daily in the Eucharist.

Incidentally, it is this thought which has been picked up by our liturgical revisers. You may recall that in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, the second Lord's Prayer followed upon the reception of communion, whereas in the Alternative Service Book it precedes it. In other words, when we pray "give us this day our daily (or substantial) bread", we are looking forward to the following act of communion, which is itself a foretaste of the heavenly banquet in the future.

Next week we shall consider the clause "And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those that trespass against us".