Catechism: Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread

By Rev. William M. Cwirla

The Lord’s Prayer The Fourth Petition

Give us this day our daily bread What does this mean? God certainly gives daily bread to everyone without our prayers, even to all evil people, but we pray in this petition that God would lead us to realize this and to receive our daily bread with thanksgiving.

From Luther’s Small Catechism © 1986 Concordia Publishing House. Used with permission. All rights reserved. www.cph.org

Let’s talk bread. Bread is the most basic of foods. The “staff of life.” In Jesus’ day a couple of little loaves of bread and a few dried fish carried you through the day.

Ponder that humble loaf of bread. It starts as seed sown in the soil. The farmer harvests the seed. The miller grinds it. The baker bakes it. The trucker ships it over roads from bakery to grocery store. The grocer sells it, and you buy it with money earned from your labors—unless you bake your own bread, but the point is still the same. There are lots of people involved, and lots of work, too. Bread is hard work.

Everything has to fall in place. Good weather, decent roads, sound economy. When things fail, bread becomes scarce and bread lines form. Luther was right. “Bread” embraces everything we need to support this body and life, right down to good neighbors. So when we pray, “Our Father in heaven...Give us this day our daily bread,” we are praying for everything we need to support body and life.

We pray not only for ourselves but for others, too. The Our Father is never prayed in isolation. Give us this day our daily bread. We’re in this together. Bread is community food. God doesn’t give out bread on an equal basis. He gives some more, some less. Those who have an abundance get to share with those who are lacking. The poor are a picture of the poverty of our faith; the generous wealthy a picture of our lavishly good Father in heaven.

In the Bible, bread goes back to Genesis 3. Bread is post-Fall food. Before the Fall into sin, fruits and nuts were the diet. They involved no work; nothing died. Embryonic life. Just pluck, pick and eat. But after the Fall, food became work:cultivated plants and weeds and unyielding soil, grain and baking and sweat. “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your bread until you die.”

In the wilderness, the Israelites gathered bread from heaven. Manna. The name is a question: “What is it?” They’d never seen anything like it. Bread you didn’t work for. Free bread. Bread that came down from heaven each day. Daily bread in the wilderness.

Jesus multiplied bread miraculously. Five little loaves fed five thousand hungry men, along with their women and children. The people wanted to make Jesus king, and who could blame them? Bread in abundance and plenty of leftovers. Food for nothing. The end of world hunger.

Give us this day our daily bread. God gives daily bread without our prayers, even to the wicked and unbelieving, just as He causes the rain and the sunshine to fall on the good and the evil alike. So then, why bother to pray? Why pray for daily bread when you have to bake it or pay someone else to bake it for you?

Prayer isn’t chiefly about getting stuff from God, even when we pray “give us.” It’s about keeping things in order—the Giver and the gift. In praying “Give us this day our daily bread” we are acknowledging the Father as the Source and Giver of our bread and all that the word “bread” entails—good weather, a plentiful harvest, a sound economy, peace, good neighbors, decent roads, the farmer, the miller, the baker. The Father is the Source and Giver of all these things, without any merit or worthiness on our part. He is the Giver and we are on the receiving end of His gifts. That’s why we pray, “Give us this day our daily bread” over the bread we for which we worked.

Jesus said, “I am the Bread of Life, living Bread come down from heaven.” Eat of this bread, and you will live forever. Ordinary bread we eat to our death. Even the manna in the wilderness, the bread from heaven, could not save the Israelites from death. “And the bread that I give for the life of the world is my flesh” (John 6). Jesus gives His Body for bread in His Supper. He takes ordinary, earthly bread and makes it something extraordinary and heavenly: His Body given into death for your life. Eat this Bread and you will live forever.

Give us this day our daily bread. On Your table and on ours. And for this daily bread, we give You thanks and praise, O Father in Heaven.

Rev. William M. Cwirla is the pastor of Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Hacienda Heights, California, and the President of Higher Things. He can be reached at wcwirla@gmail.com.