By Father Thomas Esposito, O. Cist.
Special to The Texas Catholic
My ideal translation of this phrase would be “Give us our ‘supersubstantial’ bread today.” That would sound gloriously awkward at Mass, and ‘supersubstantial’ would be a liturgical tongue twister for children trying to say the word quickly five times in a row. That translation, though, grants immediate access to the mystery at work in the first petition of the Our Father prayer.
What sort of bread does Jesus invite us to demand? In the context of the Sermon on the Mount, surely Jesus intends us to think of ordinary, everyday bread. He wants us to trust wholeheartedly in his providential care for us, a care that extends to the constant necessity of food. A few verses after the Our Father, he exhorts us not to worry about what we will eat or drink (Matt 6:31); he wants us to ask for our daily bread from him so that we would not yield to anxious worry.
Yet, a verse of Scripture can bear multiple meanings, given that the authority behind every written word is the infinite Author of life and love. And Jesus rebukes Satan earlier in Matthew’s Gospel by quoting Deuteronomy 8:3: “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes forth from the mouth of God” (Matt 4:4). The petition for bread, then, is meant to generate in us a greater hunger for the divine Word, always available to us in Scripture.
After those possibilities comes another way of understanding this petition. An adjective modifies the word “bread” in both Matthew and Luke’s versions of the Our Father prayer: Jesus wants us to ask for our “epiousios” bread. The word “epiousios” has the distinction of appearing exactly twice in all of ancient Greek literature; the Lord’s prayer in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke! No one really knows what it means or how to translate it. But I find a beautiful mystery in the etymology of the word: “epi,” “on, upon, above,” plus “ousios,” “being, substance.” In the Vulgate, the Latin translation of the Bible, “epiousios” is translated in Luke’s Gospel as “cotidianum,” “daily,” while the translation in Matthew’s Gospel is the literal “supersubstantialem”…my preferred translation in English!
But what exactly is “supersubstantial bread?” Put another way, what sort of bread would be considered “supersubstantial” in the Israelite and Christian traditions? The biblical evidence is clear: The manna nourishing Moses and company in the desert for 40 years is called “bread from heaven” (Exod 16:4), and Jesus refers to himself as “the living bread come down from heaven” before he boldly declares that “the bread I will give is my flesh for the life of the world” (Jn 6:51).
I suspect that in the Gospel words, at the very center of the Our Father prayer, Jesus has hidden an allusion to the Eucharist. The Church instinctively fosters this connection in the liturgy: We recite the Lord’s Prayer together at Mass as a prayerful lead-up to the reverent reception of Jesus in the Eucharist.
Each of these possible meanings of bread — the daily food for our bodies, Scripture, and the Eucharist for our souls — is enclosed in the petition for our bread “today.” This simple word “today” represents the infinite and endless “now” in which God perennially dwells, far beyond our limitations of time as divided into past, present, and future. “Today” is the gift of the present moment, our ability to pause and experience in our here and now some semblance of God’s ever-present reality. In receiving this daily eucharistic bread, which Ignatius of Antioch calls “the medicine of immortality,” Jesus gives us the privilege of gaining access to the eternal “today” in which he always dwells. Limited mortal creatures that we are, this access is only temporary, which is why we must ask for this timeless gift from one day to the next. In this way, “today” unites our physical needs, embodied in natural hunger, with our spiritual needs, allowing us to ask for and receive our supernatural — and supersubstantial — bread from our provident and loving Lord.
Father Thomas Esposito, O.Cist., is a monk at the Cistercian Abbey of Our Lady of Dallas and teaches in the theology department at the University of Dallas.
Cutline for featured image: Jesus and his apostles at the Last Supper, depicted in a stained glass window at St. Aloysius Church in Great Neck, N.Y. in this undated file photo. (OSV News photo/Gregory A. Shemitz)
