give us our daily bread

Jesus went to a certain place to pray, and when he returned, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray the way John taught his disciples.” Jesus proceeded to teach them.

The words of his teaching are famous amongst Christians; we call them “The Lord’s Prayer.”

In the midst of that prayer, however, is something startling and less famous. Jesus teaches the disciples to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread.” Like almost every other phrase in the New Testament, this line is translated from the ancient Greek. However, unlike almost every other phrase in the New Testament, scholars have little idea what this phrase actually means. That’s because the word that is translated “daily” only exists in two places in all of the ancient Greek literature, biblical and otherwise. That word, Greek transliterated “epiousion,” occurs only in The Lord’s Prayer. (It has two occurrences, because it appears in both Matthew’s and Luke’s versions of the prayer.)

So we could say Jesus taught his disciples to pray for “epiousion” bread; or to pray for “what we don’t know that we need.”

It reminds me of the wandering Israelites, who cry out to God for sustenance. God delivers “manna” in the wilderness, which in the Hebrew literally means God delivers “what is it?”

God seems to be in the habit of gifting us with things we don’t even know we need and feeding us with unusual things that defy our naming. God feeds us with “what is this stuff?”

Might we learn to pray, “God, each day give to us the things you see that we need, even though we don’t know what they are”?

“Give to us each day our epiousion bread.” Want more? Click here to read Luke 11:1-13.
To listen to the sermon, click here.