Our Daily Bread - Part 4 - Kenneth Bailey

Concluding thoughts on

Give us this day our daily bread

From Kenneth Bailey in Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes....

"Fear of not having enough to eat can destroy a sense of well-being in the present and erode hope for the future. I am convinced that the Old Syriac is correct and at the heart of the Lord's Prayer Jesus teaches His disciples a prayer that means, 'Deliver us, O Lord, from the fear of not having enough to eat. Give us bread for today and with it give us confidence that tomorrow we will have enough.'"

There are more treasures in these words.

1. In this petition we ask for bread, not cake.

Consumerism and the kingdom of mammon and materialism have no voice in this prayer. We ask for what sustains life, not for the frilly extras.

2. We ask for ours, not mine.

Mother Teresa in Calcutta gives us this example:

I will never forget the night an old gentlemen came to our house and said that there was a family of eight

children and they had not eaten and could we do something for them.

So I took some rice and went there. The mother took the rice from my hands, then she divided it into two and went out. I could see the faces of the children shining with hunger. When she came back I asked her where she had gone.

She gave me a very simple answer: 'They are hungry also.' And 'they' were the family next door and she knew they were hungry also....she knew, in her suffering, that next door they were hungry also.

The woman might not have known the Lord's Prayer, but she understood that there was only our rice, and not my rice.

The prayer for our bread includes our neighbors. It is our Father and it is our bread.

3. Bread is a gift. The one who prays this prayer affirms that all bread comes as a gift. It is not a right and we have not crated it. All material possessions are on loan from their owner - the God who created matter itself. This perspective on the material world is critical for the joyful life portrayed in the Gospels.

Give us this day our daily bread