|
John Schofield 24th February 2008 Lent 3 John 4.5-42 Our daily bread |
| If we only had John’s Gospel (but had the Lord’s Prayer as well, which, of course, John doesn’t give us), how would we understand ‘Give us this day our daily bread’? |
| Jesus is sitting by the well at Sychar, doing quite extraordinary things. He’s not only talking to a Samaritan woman. Worse still, he’s asking her for something to drink. He’s turning every expectation upside down, including Moses’ expectation that, despite the querulous nature of the people of Israel, God would provide them with water. But here’s God as one of us in need of water. And hungry too, but the disciples have that in hand. They’ve gone off to the local shop, leaving Jesus at the well. And when they get back, they find him compromised, alone with a woman, alone with a Samaritan. |
| A dangerous thing, leaving Jesus on his own! And also being alone with him! |
| But the disciples’ minds are on what they’ve been doing as much as on what they find. And so they urge Jesus ‘Rabbi, eat something.’ |
| And what a reply they get: |
| 32 ‘I have food to eat that you do not know about.’ |
| Naturally their response is, 33 ‘Surely no one has brought him something to eat? |
| To which 34 Jesus replies ‘My food is to do the will of him who sent me.’ |
| I wonder whether they remember that exchange later when a possibly even more obscure one happens |
| ‘I am the bread of life. 49 Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. 50 This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. 51 I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.’ |
| So what would daily bread be for John’s Jesus?… |
| ‘I am the bread of life.’ It could be that this is a request that Jesus be incorporated into the very heart of our being. Him as bread, our bread. |
| Or again ‘My food is to do the will of him who sent me.’ Another possibility. But then, why would Jesus tell us to say the same thing twice? ‘Your will be done.’ ‘Give us today the food to do your will?’ Maybe that’s a bit of a dead end. Though never give up exploring cul-de-sacs; they can be very illuminating. But neither let yourself think that your exploration is the only one possible. Test it against the mind of fellow members of the Body of Christ. |
| So how else can we interpret this petition, which has been called ‘the most obscure of the prayer’s clauses’? |
| There are, of course, two versions of the Lord’s Prayer in the New Testament, one in Matthew (6:9-13), the other in Luke (11:2-4). We’re so used to the Matthew version, which is that one that has been adopted for use in private and public prayer, that we tend to ignore Luke’s one. It’s even shorter, terser, more to the point. |
|
Father, * hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. 3Give us each day our daily bread. 4And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us. And do not bring us to the time of trial. |
| Pray this version of the prayer and we lose the familiar comfort of what we know. We’re brought up sharply against the future: ‘your kingdom come’; ‘do not bring us to the time of trial’. Almost a third of the prayer concerned with the end times. |
| So this could all be about bread for the end times, especially since the word we’re so familiar with as ‘daily’ doesn’t really mean daily at all. It means ‘of’ or ‘for tomorrow’, ‘of’ or ‘for the coming day’. |
| And given the concern for the coming of the kingdom and preservation from the time of trial, perhaps this is a prayer for the bread of the kingdom. There are lots of wonderful images of life with God as a heavenly banquet; and here we are asking for an anticipation of that now – expressing a longing for God to be God for us and with us in the very present moment, and as we face an unknown future as the kingdom comes in ways we may not anticipate and with trials we may find hard. |
| It raises the question: is the Christian project to be completed in, beyond or after history? Where and when will humanity’s final encounter with God happen? |
| God has a very strange grammar of past, present and future all wrapped up together, and partly because of this Christians have two entirely different approaches to the final inbreaking of God that the phrase ‘your kingdom come’ represents. |
| On the one hand there’s the apocalyptic approach: the Kingdom will come at the end of the ages, as or even after the second coming. There are dangers in this of just letting things be, of being content with the status quo because it’ll be alright in heaven. And the petition about daily bread, while having some sort of anticipatory element to it, loses its edge. |
| On the other there’s an emphasis on building the kingdom now. There are dangers here of identifying gospel and kingdom too closely with activist programmes, of forgetting that God is also judge. Here daily bread becomes a political programme. |
| How you think the phrase ‘give us today our daily bread’ relates to this difference is not just an academic question. It actually affects our whole approach not only to the Lord’s Prayer but also to how we are Christians. |
| Throughout much of the last century there was antagonism between those whose priority was saving souls and those who privileged the “social gospel”. This disagreement (almost conflict at times) wasn’t just about theology, it was also about how and where you encounter God. As daily bread, or as provider of daily bread? |
| Perhaps Jesus being in need of water at the Jacob’s well is a clue. |
| He has an urgent need in the present moment at that point. And maybe his prayer is about urgent need in the present moment. ‘Give us today the bread we need for tomorrow.’ Jesus knows that labourers receive their pay at the end of the day, and that ensures that there can be bread tomorrow – and if they aren’t hired, they and their families go hungry. Remember when he sends the disciples out in twos they have nothing spare, no extra rations. They are totally dependent on the hospitality of others. |
| In Jesus’ world, the need for daily bread is urgent. We in Esher have lost that sense. Most of our world has not. Affluent Christians must never forget that God is on the side of the poor, or that Jesus was an itinerant preacher, teacher and miracle worker entirely dependent on others. |
| And so is the petition to remind us also of our total dependence on God? |
| Our temptation is to reinterpret this petition, to allegorise it, to make bread stand for all our material needs. Whereas what we should probably be doing is to take it with all its original urgency, and transfer that urgency to identification with, and action on behalf of, those for whom subsistence is a daily concern. |
| An ancient Christian writing from the second century called the Didache is one of the first places where we find the use of the Lord’s prayer commended. The Didache tells us to pray it three times a day. Do you? And when you do, as I hope you will from now on, remember that Luke doesn’t ask for bread ‘this day’ or ‘today’ but ‘each day’. A paraphrase of Luke might go – keep on feeding us day after day. |
| Whenever you pray the Lord’s Prayer, remember that whichever of the ideas about the meaning on this phrase has caught your imagination today – and I’ve deliberately refrained from giving a definitive definition of the meaning of ‘give us today/each day our daily bread/the bread for tomorrow’ – each one of them probably contains truth. And let God mould your lives accordingly. |
|
|