Question 104

The fourth petition—“It is known,” says Archbishop Leighton, “to be the ordinary course of skilful orators to place the meanest part of their speech in the middle; and in this let the ear of any understanding mind be judge whether it sounds not much better that this request pass in the middle than if the prayer should have ended with it, whereas now it begins spiritually and closes so.”

Give us this day our daily bread—The first step to be taken toward the full understanding of this petition is to ask what exactly it meant in the mouths of the first disciples who offered it. Now, to answer that question we have only to recall the new and peculiar circumstances into which their Master had brought them by the call He had addressed to them, and then to reflect on the extraordinary “ordination charge” He had subsequently given them. For what is expressly stated of some of the disciples may be assumed concerning every one of the twelve—they had left all and followed Him. And it was to men in that impoverished condition that their Master issued this injunction, Provide neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in your purses, but offer this as your daily prayer, Give us this day our daily bread. At His call they had cut themselves off for ever from their wonted means of livelihood, and, as they enter on their new occupation for life,—that of preaching the gospel of the kingdom,—their Master commands them to cast themselves on this new means of subsistence, on daily and special prayer, and on the fruit of their Messianic labours in the land. But prayer for daily bread does not supersede provident habits. Nothing, indeed, could better bring out the spiritual, and, so to say, elastic nature of our Lord’s injunction than the fact that before long we find the little company possessed of a common purse, held in the hand of a recognised purse-bearer, whose duty it was to receive such gifts as were offered to him, to lay them out on buying what was needed by his colleagues, and in relieving such deserving poor as they came across.

a competent portion of the good things of this life—A competent portion is a comparative expression. It varies with the varying circumstances and characters of men. “Cedars,” said old Ezekiel Hopkins, “require more sap than shrubs.” By that metaphor he means that what would be straitness and want to one man would be abundance and richness to another. Men of birth, and position, and employment, and opportunity, when they are also men of piety, and offer this prayer, they offer it for far other and far nobler things than wheaten or barley bread. They offer it for all things that are needed to support them in, and equip them for, the eminent life into which God hath lifted them. For deprived of the means of doing their work and fulfilling the duties and opportunities of their office would be to them the taking away of life itself. A cedar may thus stretch forth its branches, seeking showers that would drown and destroy a less noble and less stately tree.

Matthew Henry says that “Nature is content with little, grace with less, but lust with nothing.” And in another place, “If you seek first the kingdom of heaven, you shall have food and raiment by way of overplus, as he that buys goods hath paper and packthread given him over and above into the bargain.”

“This only grant me, that my means may lie
Too low for envy, for contempt too high.
Some honour I would have,
Not from great deeds, but from good alone.
The unknown are better than ill-known:
Rumour can ope the grave.
Acquaintance I would have: but when’t depends
Not on the number, but the choice of friends.”—Cowley’s Wish.

his blessing with them. “The Christian custom of saying grace at meals, after the example of Christ (Matt. xiv. 19, xv. 36), and which prevailed also generally in the ancient Church (Acts xxvii. 35), has a high moral significancy; it rescues the natural enjoyments from the stage of mere sensuousness, and elevates it into the sphere of the moral” (Wuttke).

Note.—The original word here rendered daily is a remarkable word. Remarkable in this respect, that it occurs but once in all the New Testament, and the most careful search has failed to discover it in any other Greek writing. How then can we be sure what it means? For we usually arrive at the meaning of a word in one passage by studying its use in other passages. But how are we to know what a particular word means when it is used but once in all the language in which it is found? There is, indeed, another way of coming at the meaning of a word, and that way is by searching out its etymology, and interrogating the root from which it springs. But here, too, our best scholarship is at fault; for learned men are not agreed as to the parentage of this singular and isolated word. At the same time, from the context, from the analogy of Scripture, and other things, the vast majority of translators and commentators have come to render this unique term by the familiar word daily. They believe that our Lord meant simply, in the first intention at any rate, daily bread for the bodily life of His detached and itinerant disciples. At the same time, no man with much of the mind and spirit of Christ in him will be content, in offering this prayer, to limit himself to bread baked in any earthly oven. No spiritual man, however scrupulously and jealously grammatical he may be in his interpretation of the written word, could read this petition in Scripture or offer it in public or private prayer without far other bread coming up before His mind than simply the bread needful for the body. Jerome, the great translator of the Bible, was so impressed with the spiritual bearing of this petition, that he rendered it super-substantial or transcendental bread. And with such passages before him as Deut. viii. 3, Job xxiii. 12, Jer. xv. 16, Matt. iv. 4, John iv. 8, 31–34, vi. 35, 51, he is not to be blamed for leaning in his version to the mystical and spiritual interpretation.

Uses

1. What is the first inference? That we seek not great matters for ourselves, neither make them the matter of prayer to God, nor the end and design of our labours and callings among men.
2. What is the second inference from hence? That having food and raiment, we must therewith be content and be thankful.
3. What is the third inference? That we ascribe not our success in the world to our own skill and industry, for the wisest and most industrious do sometimes labour in the fire, and put their gains in a bag of holes, but to God’s free donation to us, and to His blessing upon our endeavours (Flavel’s Catechism).

Questions

1. Point out the ambiguity in the first quotation from Matthew Henry above.
2. Explain and illustrate Ezekiel Hopkins’ metaphor: Cedars require more sap than shrubs.
3. What do you know of the translator’s difficulty with this petition? How is it met in the Vulgate, and wherein does that rendering differ from ours?
4. Read Bacon’s Essay Of Riches.