To be able to say the first sentence that we have discussed – ‘Deliver us from the evil one’ – requires such a reassessment of values and such a new attitude that we can hardly begin to say it otherwise than in a cry, which is as yet unsubstantiated by an inner change in us. We feel a longing which is not yet capable of achievement; to ask God to protect us in the trial is to ask for a radical change in our situation.
But to be able to say ‘Forgive as I forgive’ is even more difficult; it is one of the greatest problems of life. Thus, if you are not prepared to leave behind you every resentment that you have against those who were your overlords or slave drivers, you cannot cross. If you are capable of forgiving, that is of leaving behind in the land of slavery, all your slavish mentality, all your greed and grasping and bitterness, you can cross. After that you are in the scorching wilderness, because it will take time for a free man to be made out of a slave.
All that we possessed as slaves in the land of Egypt we are deprived of – no roof, no shelter, no food, nothing but the wilderness and God. Earth is no longer capable of feeding us; we can no longer rely on natural food, so we pray ‘give us day by day our daily bread’. God gives it even when we go astray, because if he did not we should die before we could reach the border of the Promised Land. Keep us alive, O God, give us time to err, to repent, to take the right course.
‘Our daily bread’ is one of the possible ways of translating the Greek text. This bread, which in Greek is called epiousion, may be daily, but it may also be the bread that is beyond substance. The Fathers of the Church, beginning with Origen and Tertullian, have always interpreted this passage as referring not only to our human needs but also to the mysterious bread of the Eucharist. Unless we are fed in this new way, mysteriously, by divine bread (because we depend now for our existence on God alone) we will not survive (Jn 6:53).
God sent to his people the manna and gave them water from the rock, struck by the rod of Moses. The two gifts are images of Christ: ‘Man shall not live by bread “alone but by every word that proceedeth from the mouth of God.’ This is what Christ recalled from the Old Testament (Dt 8: 3) to confound Satan.
This ‘word’ is not simply words but first of all the Word that resounds forever, upholding all things created, and then also the Word incarnate, Jesus of Nazareth; furthermore, it is the bread of which manna was the image, the bread which we receive in communion. The waters that ran and filled the brooks and the rivers at the command of Moses, are the image of that water which was promised to the Samaritan woman and of the blood of Christ which is our life.
~Archbishop Anthony Bloom, Living Prayer
