Newspaper Columns by Bishop Paul V. Marshall
What is the greatest violence done to Jesus?
Bishop Paul V. Marshall
September 2003
"Give us this day our daily bread." The familiar phrase from the Lord's Prayer may most accurately be rendered, "Give us today one day's worth of food." Like the rest of the prayer, it is something of a challenge, and shows us the distance Jesus perceived between his followers and the comfortable people.
The prayer is not the prayer of the fat cat, the arrogant, the complacent. It puts all who pray it in the same place as the Israelites who could take only one day's worth of manna in the wilderness: we must trust God again tomorrow. In this scenario, he who dies with the most toys was playing the wrong game.
If you know anyone who has recovered from addiction, you know that one of their spiritual survival techniques is to get through "one day at a time," which some parishioners have reported to me actually means one hour or even one minute at a time. They tend to report that they get what they need, but not a lot more, because complacency is their greatest spiritual danger.
Uncomfortable as it may be, it is an experience of grace to get by on just enough food or faith to live through the present moment. It is a gift of great value to know that one's hands are empty - deliverance from complacency and arrogance is no small gift.
The most frightening thing about this phrase in the Lord's Prayer is that it really does mean that the spiritual quest involves yearning, the sense of not having. "Thy kingdom come" is the plea of those who know it is not here yet. "Thy will be done" makes sense only to those who see how much it is not yet done. "Give us this day our daily bread" is the cry of those who do not have more than they need.
Nobody likes to think of themselves as poor, as lacking. Therefore most of us blunt that side of the religious message, using religion to assure us of what we have, of permanence, of control. Jesus works against that in these few shorts breaths of prayer: those who pray his words are forced to focus on how much they do not have, how temporary they are, and how much there is to do in the world.
Put another way, those who "hunger and thirst for righteousness" have something to look forward to, are people God can work with. Those who think they have or know it all are just in the way.
In this sense, the awareness of want is a gift. Those who do not think they have all the answers can learn. Those who sense their own incompleteness can grow. Those who are looking for something make the discoveries.
The greatest violence done to Jesus was not the cross, horrible as that was. The greatest violence done to Jesus is the work of those who twist his message into support for the status quo, those who have made a nice guy out of one of history's most consistently irritating figures. That violence keeps his message from getting through.
In teaching his disciples to yearn, to acknowledge their hunger, he was preserving them from greed and keeping them available for growth.
The problem with everything I have said here is that it embraces rather than avoids discomfort. The polite putdown in our culture is, "I'm not comfortable with that." We are not here to seek the comfortable thing, but the right thing. They are seldom the same. When I want to tell Jesus that his recommendation of hunger and yearning is uncomfortable for me, I hear him say, "Good."Return to the index of Bishop Paul's columns for the secular press
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