Our Father Reflection 6: “Give us today our daily bread”

Matthew 6 v 9: This is how you are to pray: Our Father in heaven, …, give us today our daily bread…

Matthew 6: 24 - 34

After teaching us to pray to our “Abba” confidently, Jesus is teaching us the Our Father as the pattern for all our prayer. He is showing us seven things to ask: the first three have all been to do with God (“hallowed be your name”, “your Kingdom come”, and “your will be done”) So far in the Our Father we have not even mentioned ourselves – Jesus is teaching us to put our Father first and get our priorities right! We are to “seek first the kingdom (of God) and his righteousness”, before “all these (other) things will be given you besides.” (Verse 31).

But of course out of his love for us, our Father does want to look after our needs, so Jesus now teaches us to trustingly ask four things for ourselves: Daily bread, forgiveness, help with temptation, and deliverance from the evil one. This week we pray for “our daily bread”.

After he gives us the Our Father, Jesus teaches us in Matthew 6 not to be a slave to money (verse 24), and not to worry about the things we need to eat, drink or wear (verse 31). He says unbelievers are seeking (longing for) these things. Instead we are to trust that “our Heavenly Father knows that you need them all”. “The trust of children who look to their Father for everything is beautiful” (Catechism 2828).

We also trust our Father for another kind of bread every day: “ ‘Man does not live by bread alone, but . . . by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God’… For this reason the specifically Christian sense of this fourth petition concerns the Bread of Life: The Word of God accepted in faith, the Body of Christ received in the Eucharist” (Catechism 2835).

Let’s pray with a childlike trust like Jesus for all our needs, both physical and spiritual!