Our daily bread

People sometimes wonder why in the Lord’s Prayer we should ask God to give us our daily bread when we get our bread from bakers.  But, of course, bakers don’t produce their loaves of bread by waving a magic wand over their ovens and saying abracadabra.  They make the bread from flour, and the flour comes from wheat and the wheat is sown by farmers.  But it is God who gives life to the seed in the first place and who gives the sunshine and rain to make it grow.  And God is the giver of all our food.

The word bread in the Lord’s Prayer means more than the loaf of bread which you have in your kitchen.  Some of you will know the expression, the ‘breadwinner’.  The breadwinner in a family is the person who works and earns money to keep the home going.  And so the daily bread for which we ask in the Lord’s Prayer includes everything we need to keep us healthy and well in body and soul.  The word “daily” here means “enough for today”; that is to say, we pray for the things we really need, necessities not luxuries.  So the Catechism in the Prayer Book explains this prayer “Give us this day our daily bread” in these words: “…I pray unto God, that he will send us all things that be needful both for our souls and bodies…” (1)