Thirty-First Sunday of Ordinary Time
by Fr. Jonah, O.P.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Let’s continue reflecting on the Our Father:
Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name;
thy kingdom come,
thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread…
In the original Greek of Matthew’s gospel, when you look at the Our Father, exactly in the middle of the prayer is a strange word: ἐπιούσιον (epiousion). What’s strange about it? Before the Gospels were written, it didn’t exist. The word appears nowhere else in the ancient literature that we have: not in letters, not in legal documents, not in business records—nowhere.
Even those of the Church Fathers who were Greek (who spoke, read, and wrote in Greek, and who weren’t all that far removed from the time the Gospels were written) didn’t know what it meant. The Church Father Origen (who was born less than a hundred years after the apostle Matthew wrote his gospel) concluded that the evangelists invented it.
At the heart of the Lord’s Prayer we are confronted by a word, the central word, and we’ve never seen it before. Here’s the phrase in which it appears with the rest of the words translated: give us this day our ἐπιούσιον bread.
There are various meanings that have been offered for ἐπιούσιον, but I want to focus on St. Jerome. What he does fascinates me. When translating Matthew’s gospel into Latin, Jerome renders ἐπιούσιον as supersubstantialem (super-substantial), but in Luke’s gospel, he uses quotidianum (daily).
There’s much to ponder here. What other bread in the Bible is given daily to the Chosen People? Manna, the mysterious bread with which God fed the Israelites every day for the forty years they wandered in the desert from Egypt to the Promised Land. It’s a particular kind of daily bread: the Israelites are commanded to gather only what they need for the day. The “daily bread” of the manna is sufficient for the day (see Exodus 16:16-36). With manna, God invites his people to trust him, to make an act of faith in him, that his love endures forever, that his mercies are fresh each day.
Moving beyond manna, what could super-substantial bread be? “I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the desert, but they died; this is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world” (John 6:48-51). Ἐπιούσιον bread is more than daily. It is also the bread of angels, the heavenly bread. It is the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ, the God-man.
Man’s real food is the Logos, the Word who became flesh, the Alpha and the Omega, the eternal meaning from which we come, the meaning that makes our lives coherent, the meaning to which we are directed. At the central point of our central prayer we find Jesus Christ: Jesus at the center of the prayer, Jesus at the center of the Church, Jesus at the center of history, Jesus at the center of our lives.
Know of my prayers for all of you.
In Christ,
Fr. Jonah, O.P.
