The man wondered why he was there. His wife had dragged him along – “A family day out,” she’d enthused, “with the kids.” He wondered, and he worried. How was he to feed that family today? He should be working. Not perched on a craggy hillside listening to a preacher. His ears pricked up. “Give us this day our daily bread,” the man was saying. “Yes please,” he thought, “but easier prayed than done.” His mind wandered again. “At least this man seems to know what real life’s about, living hand-to-mouth,” he thought, “not like those religious rich men in their comfy houses and posh robes.” He shuffled to get more comfortable on the stony ground, and was drawn in again by the speaker. “Do not worry,” he was saying, “look at the birds… look at the flowers… your heavenly Father knows what you need too.” “He’s speaking straight at me,” the man thought. “I always worry, but we do always seem to have enough… Maybe his ‘daily bread’ prayer would help calm my mind.” Later, as they strolled home, his wife thought she detected in her husband a lighter step.
Not many of us will have started today not knowing where today’s food will come from. For many this is reality, however, across the world and tragically in this country too increasingly. The English, wrote a foreign visitor in 1833, were ‘still convinced that extreme inequality of wealth is the natural order of things.’ Sometimes it seems little has changed since then, and this country is hardly alone.
Current escalating food costs are sharpening our attention to such things. It may sharpen our attention too to that long-baked prayer, ‘give us this day our daily bread.’ Most of us probably tot up the cost of our shopping basket more carefully these days. We sit with the man on the stony hillside. We’ve added bountifully more layers of what we ‘need’ on top of basic bread. But we haven’t changed that much really over 2,000 years. We still worry. We still wonder how everything’s going to work out. May we find that our daily bread is provided. May we play our part in nudging the world closer to bread justice. May we, like the man, walk with a lighter step.
