On Prayer 6

But how elegantly divine wisdom has arranged the order of the prayer, so that after heavenly things, that is, after the name of God, the will of God, and the kingdom of God, it should make room for petition for earthly needs too! For the Lord had declared, “Seek first the kingdom, and then these things too will be added to you.” Though we should rather understand “Give us this day our daily bread” spiritually. For Christ is our bread, because Christ is life, and the bread of life. “I am,” he says, “the bread of life”; and a little before, “The bread is the word of the living God, which came down from heaven”; then, because his body too is reckoned in bread: “This is my body.” So, in asking for daily bread, we ask for perpetuity in Christ and inseparability from his body. But since this saying is also admitted in a bodily sense, it cannot be done without reverence and spiritual discipline. For he commands us to ask for bread, which alone is necessary to the faithful; “for the nations seek” the rest. So he impresses it by examples and goes over it again in parables, when he says, “Does a father take bread from his children and give it to the dogs?” And again, “Does he give a stone to his son when he asks for bread?” For he shows what sons expect from their father. The one who knocked at night, too, was asking for bread. And rightly he added, “Give us this day,” since he had said before, “Do not think about tomorrow, what you will eat.” To this he also fitted the parable of the man who, when his crops came in, thought of enlarging his barns and of long years of security; that very night he dies.