Chaplain Update 

We’ve continued through Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount this term in Chapel, with much of our focus being on what has become known as ‘The Lord’s Prayer’, which includes that famous request for daily bread from Matthew 6:9-13. Below is an edited extract from my Chapel address. You can subscribe to the TRAC Chapel podcast on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.

Bread is easy to come by. In Wagga alone, there would be at least 40-50 places where you could get a loaf of bread each and every day. In fact, bread is available in such vast quantities that bakeries throw it out each day. Bread is just there for the taking. When I was a poor theological student we used to have this giant metal container in the mail room at College which a local bakery would kindly fill with unsold loaves of bread. You opened the hatch to find countless loaves and you could just take them. So when we hear Jesus tell us to pray each day for bread, it seems a little unnecessary, especially if you’re gluten intolerant. Bread is just there in abundance. 

It also seems a strange request to pray when we consider what Jesus already told us to pray, ‘Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.’ (v10). These are such big, grand, cosmic visions of what we ask God for and then Jesus effectively says: ‘Oh, and don’t forget to ask for your vegemite toast in the morning, or a cheese toasty at lunch.’ It’s an odd shift; from the heavenly to the bakery. 

While it seems odd and ancient to us, it would have seemed just as odd to the ancient readers who first heard these words emerge from Jesus’ lips. Producing bread in Jesus’ day was a daily task that consumed your working life. Most people lived a subsistence lifestyle in ancient Israel. They did a day’s work, to earn a day’s pay, which would be spent that day in order to buy the necessary flour and oil etc to make bread in the home that day, along with any other food needed for the next 24 hours. So when people sat down that night in their homes to break that bread and share it for dinner, they were all too aware where that bread had come from. It had come from their hard labour that day, that had seen coins put in their hand that day, which they then put in someone else’s hand at the market later in the day, so they could have put in their hands the ingredients to make their bread by hand in their homes at the end of that day. There was no magic metal tub with bread in it for the taking, no bakery chucking out bee-stings, no supermarket lined with shelves of pre-made loaves, and no pantry in the home with extra loaves waiting to be eaten. 

Bread came to these ancient people by their own hands. As they digested their daily bread that night as they slept, ancient people would wake to another day to go earn some dough for themselves by their own hand. So the idea of asking God to give them bread from his heavenly hand might have seemed odd when they were so acutely aware of how bread actually ended up on their table each day. For us bread is just there, so why ask for it? For Jesus’ original audience bread was theirs, so why ask for it? 

Why ask for bread? Why not stick to asking God to send his kingdom and rescue these ancient people out of the daily grind of working each day for a loaf of bread? It seems Jesus wedges this line in here as a bridge from what he just prayed about – God’s kingdom come – and then moves next into the portion concerning the forgiveness of sins both for ourselves and others. The Lord’s prayer begins with the imminent arrival of God’s kingdom and then finishes by pushing us towards imitating life in that kingdom, as we forgive others and resist temptation because our sins are forgiven. There’s the imminence of God’s kingdom to begin the prayer, the imitation of God’s kingdom to finish, and in the middle there’s the prayer for the immediate, for bread.

For Jesus’ audience it could have felt like their life was just going to go on forever in this endless loop of daily work for daily pay for daily bread with no end in sight. It was depressing and it bred frustration and bitterness. However, Jesus wants them to lift their eyes up from the daily grind and see that God’s kingdom is here, that forgiveness of sins is on offer, that deliverance from the evil one can be assured. Jesus wants his readers to not burden themselves with worry and consternation about how they will get their next serve of bread or any other daily necessity. 

When we pray ‘Give us today our daily bread’, we are not praying for a magical bread bin, but reminding ourselves that whether we are striving each day for bread, or it just appears on our supermarket shelves; either way, everything we have is given. We may produce it but God provides it. We may strive for it, but God serves it. We may earn it, but God gives it. 

This is his world, his kingdom, his will is done. This line for daily bread in the middle of the Lord’s Prayer reminds us to free our minds of worry about the day to day of bread, so that we can pursue the day; the day of God’s kingdom. May we be content with whatever daily food, shelter and circumstances we have so that we can see God’s will be done, forgive everyone and resist the evil one. 

These should be our daily concerns. Of course, we still need to work and we still need to strive for others to be fed and provided for too, but we work for the Giver. God gives us our daily bread. The food on our table can rightly be called ours when we realise that we have received it from the Giver, not from our own self-sufficiency or abundance. It is a gift whether it was a small loaf kneaded by hand that night after a hard day’s work in ancient Israel, or whether it’s a big dirty jam donut from a bakery downtown in modern day Wagga. It’s a gift, given freely, to be received freely with thanksgiving to God. 

In a prayer that is jam-packed with our eternal needs being met—forgiveness of sins, deliverance from evil, entry into God’s kingdom—we pray for bread, because God meets our daily needs too. Therefore, there is no limit to the needs we can bring before God in prayer; from hunger to heavenly hope. As God’s kingdom comes we daily receive our needs in his kingdom, so that we can be content in his kingdom forever.

Mr Gareth Tyndall