Is Anyone Praying for “Our Daily Bread” Anymore?

A Contextual Reflection on Luke 11:3
by Doug Greenwold

The Disciple's Prayer

While it is known as The Lord's Prayer, contextually this prayer might well be called the Disciples' Prayer. It was customary practice for rabbis to craft a special prayer for their disciples. Such a prayer was something that each band of disciples coveted as part of their identity as a learning community. These corporate prayers were intended to be a succinct summary of each rabbi's distinctive approach to interpreting God's Word. The desire for such a prayer helps to explain the Disciples request when they came to Jesus one day and asked: Teach us to pray just as (rabbi) John also taught his disciples (Luke 11:1).

Another Remez

In incorporating daily bread into His distinctive Disciples' Prayer, Rabbi Jesus was drawing upon a well-known remez that reached deep into Israel 's history. As explained in last month's “Reflection,” a remez is a “hinted meaning” back to something that everyone knows and understands and for which no further explanation is needed. In this case, Jesus is making an intentional reference back to the wilderness of Zin, the site of daily manna, something the Disciples well understood. Therefore, to continue to unfold the intended contextual implications of praying give us this day our daily bread , we need to go back to the Wilderness of Zin and contemplate that desolate scene.

That Terrible Wilderness

The Wilderness of Zin is where the Israelites spent the vast majority of their 40-year desert experience. If you have ever been there or seen it from the air, you are immediately struck by how barren this region is. The Bible refers to this place as that great and terrible wilderness (Dt 1:19 , 8:15 ). These early Hebrews complainingly describe this environment to Moses as no place for seed, or for figs, or of vines, or of pomegranates; nor is there any water to drink (Numbers 20:5b).

Daily Manna or Die

This geographical context explains why the morning arrival of millions of pints of manna was absolutely essential for the survival of this embryonic nation. In this arid setting, there are no safety nets for food, no alternative sources of supply. Without God's daily provision of manna, this people group would have quickly perished from the face of the earth. That is the corporate historical context that Jesus intends us to evoke in our hearts and minds when we ask for our daily bread.

Total Sustenance and Dependence

In this Wilderness of Zin setting, daily manna symbolizes a conscious, continual posture of always acknowledging being totally dependent on the Lord for everything. In giving us that daily bread remez , it's as if Jesus intends us to be praying,

“Lord, please provide our community of faith with the necessities we require this day,and Lord may we live today acknowledging our need to be totally sustained by You because we are indeed truly dependent upon You for everything.”

That is the community's posture of heart, mind and soul that is best imported into the words our daily bread each and every time that remez phrase is recited in the Disciples' Prayer. And it is that contextual backdrop which frames the question raised in the title of this “Reflection” – Are we even asking for our d aily bread in the spirit in which Jesus intended?

Importance of Bread

In our twenty-first-century Western culture, we have lost the first-century significance of bread. In Bible times, bread was absolutely essential for every Middle Eastern meal. People did not have forks and spoons to eat with when they reclined to eat. Rather people used a piece of bread torn from a loaf for dipping into the various common food bowls set before them – one piece of bread for each dip of food. Bread was the vehicle that brought food from the table to your mouth to sustain your life.

Insignificance of Bread Today

In Western culture today, bread has become insignificant. When we have a protein breakfast, generally the focus of our attention is on the omelet and/or the meat, but not the toast that comes with it. When we stop for fast food, our mind and our stomach is usually much more focused on what's between the two pieces of bun than it is on the bun itself. When we only have a salad for lunch as part of being weight and health conscious, often times we intentionally avoid bread. How does all this affect our understanding of what it means to ask our Father for our daily bread?

Some Implications to Consider :

This Disciples' Prayer is a prayer that the community prays for the community. In the Middle East , the community is always more important than the individual. Consequently, a person would always sacrifice personal rights for the benefit of the community. Not so in the West! Here the individual always considers himself or herself to be more important than the rest of the community. As a result, community harmony is usually sacrificed for the sake of personal interests. This begs the question: What kind of lenses, filters and presuppositions are we implicitly bringing to the praying of this Disciples' Prayer?
The request to give us this day our daily bread is the only part of The Disciple's Prayer that deals with material things. As previously observed, “bread” is a necessity in the first-century village setting. Thus when it comes to material things, Jesus is encouraging His disciples to pray for today's community necessities, not today's niceties or creature comforts. When you reflect on your last 100 prayers for material things, how many of them were only for daily necessities? How many were for what the community of faith needs, not what your particular individual needs are?
Maybe we are not even praying for our daily bread any more. Could it be that we collectively feel that we are quite able to furnish our own bread? Thus, it may not even be in our consciousness that God is somehow still needed to provide us with our daily bread.
The nature of our prayers always reveal something about our (often flawed) view of God. If that is true, what might our we-don't-need-to-be-asking-for-daily-bread prayers be saying about our collective understanding of the scope and extent of God's Providence ? What might our prayers (or the lack thereof) also be revealing about us?
There is great wisdom as well as practical guidance to be found in God's Word in the sequence of the words and thoughts that unfold in a passage. This petition to give us this day our daily bread is not the first sentence of the Disciples' Prayer. Note the immediate thought development context that precedes this request as recorded in Luke 11:2-4.
- First, Jesus has us start by collectively coming to our Father. That usage – a form of “Daddy” – conveys an approachable, personal Father in an intimate family setting.
- Next, we immediately acknowledge hallowed be Your name, a phrase that reminds us of God's holy nature as well as our calling to revere and defend His Name.
- Then Jesus has us acknowledge your Kingdom come . This reminds us that as His disciples, it is all about His Kingdom, not our kingdoms (organizations, businesses, churches, etc.). It's all about doing “the Lord's work the Lord's way” – not doing our work our way.

Only with those attitudinal postures in place, and with our souls continually affirming these three spiritual realities are we then in the right posture to now corporately ask for our daily bread.

Some Things to Ponder

When it comes to material things, what have you/we been praying for lately – daily necessities or niceties?
Have you ever been in an economic position (like many in other parts of this world) where you were part of a community of believers who literally had to pray for God to supply your basic necessities each day? What was that like? How long did that last? What did that do to you?
When we do pray for our daily necessities, is a concurrent acknowledgement of total dependency and total sustenance resonating in our collective soul as the foundational source for then asking for our daily bread ?
How can we consciously cultivate our hearts and minds to be in a dependent posture of living each day as if we are all perpetually residing in the barrenness of the Wilderness of Zin when the reality is we live each day in the abundance of the West?
If the Lord's Prayer was indeed cast in the rabbinic tradition of prayers that uniquely capture distinctive aspects of a rabbi's teaching emphasis, what distinctive themes of Jesus' message and ministry do you find reflected in His Disciples' Prayer? (Ponder Matthew 6:9-13)

Such are some of the contextual challenges embedded in this remez that Jesus gave us when He instructed the Twelve to pray for our daily bread in His Disciple's Prayer .

May God's Spirit use this Reflection to both stir and soothe our soul.

Doing what we do because biblical context always matters.

(Written at the end of a two and one-half day fast when I was seriously thinking about food!)

This Lukan parable has historically been used in the church to teach about the need to be persistent in prayer. Would you agree with that interpretation and emphasis? Do we really have to badger God to get what we need ? Can that even be theologically defended? Or is one needful request sufficient? When this “Friend at Midnight ” parable gets placed back into its Middle Eastern community context, we find a very different teaching emphasis on prayer, one that seems to have very little to do with this traditional teaching of persistence in prayer. More to come…

Resources: For more information regarding remez , see last month's Easter 2007 Reflection The Last Words of Jesus: What Did He Say and Mean ?”

For breathtaking visuals of the Wilderness of Zin, see the extraordinary helicopter video footage found in Preserving Bible Time's The Coast, Shephelah and The Negev DVD from the Above Israel series, particularly the first three video clips from the “Negev” section of that DVD.

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