February 26, 20232
THE BREAD OF TOMORROW  - Deuteronomy 8:2-3:
“You shall remember all the way which the LORD your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, … and fed you with manna, ... that he might teach you that someone does not live by bread only, but one lives by every word that proceeds out of the LORD’s mouth.”
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In the cross-hair of our Lenten meditations there used to be the mystery of the cross and the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, regarding our personal repentance and the renewal of our personal faith. Exactly that is why we have a recurring preparatory period of around forty days and forty nights before Good Friday and Easter in every year. We tend to lose heart and our focus on Heaven in our dealings with this busy world. However, if we keep yearning also for the World to Come, which is Heaven, then maybe we will not ever fall too deep into despair.

Once upon a time, on a sad day, Mohandas Gandhi was shot dead by an ultra-nationalist in New Delhi, on January 30, 1948. (75th) Among his most quoted sayings is there that “God dare not appear to a hungry man except in the form of bread.” Gandhi said this, when, as the chief editor of a weekly journal, the Young India, he met workers of a clothing factory, in Lancashire, England, in 1931, and was saying that “It is good enough to talk of God whilst we are sitting here after a nice breakfast and looking forward to a nicer luncheon, but how am I to talk of God to the millions who have to go without two meals a day. To them God can only appear as bread and butter.”

However, some people used to quote Gandhi also as a tool to challenge the popular image of the Good God, that if God dared to appear in a bitterly suffering world, that he might appear to the hungry only in the form of bread. This challenge carries the sentiment, that an extant God must intervene and not let the poor go hungry.

Nonetheless, it should be clear, that it was God, the ultimate owner of the land, who gave the fertility to the ground, who gave the energy to the plants to grow with the rising Sun, who gave the necessary rain, who created the rivers to irrigate the land, and also God gave the sound reason in the human mind, the body strength and the muscles to the people, as well, for organized farming. Just take a look at the Earth from space, and you can see a blue and green beautiful Garden, where all is provided by God, even the air we breathe. 

Through the millennia of the recorded human history we learned that human sufferings on Earth were mostly caused by human activities or by human negligence, despite all the almost unlimited resources we were granted by the divine providence. Most hunger and famines and humanitarian catastrophe were caused by humans, by waging brutal and bloody wars, scorching the fields, burning the warehouses, sinking supply and grain ships, destroying God granted reaches and livelihoods.

In the legendary telling of the Book of Exodus, Israel received a foretaste of the  Kingdom of Heaven, when there were no means to do farming in the desert, though also there was no need for that, because in the form of the so called manna, God gave them the symbolic Bread of Tomorrow, the falling bread from the sky, without toiling the ground. It meant the temporary lifting of the biblical curse, which was placed on Adam and on his descendants, that “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life.” 

However, God had nourished the Israelites in the desert not for forty days but for forty years, and an old sample of that manna falling from the sky, was preserved in the Ark of the Covenant, placed inside of the Jerusalem Temple.  Also Jesus, in the name of God, multiplied the bread and some fishes to feed the 4000. They were exhausted and hungry, so Jesus called his disciples to him and said, “I have compassion for these people; they have already been with me three days and have nothing to eat. I do not want to send them away hungry, or they may collapse on the way.”

The God in Heaven and the Son sent to Earth understand that we need food to survive, and the obvious abundance in the creation should make us understand that we are very well provided. Beyond the divine providence, the fate of the poor and the needy depends mostly or entirely on us. The abundance of the resources on Earth is granted so richly, that Jesus had to warn the disciples that praying for earthly things is a bit of a sign of lack of faith, as it is written, that “Therefore I tell you that don’t be anxious, saying, ‘What will we eat?’, ‘What will we drink?’ or, ‘With what will we be clothed?’ For the pagans seek after all these things; for your heavenly God knows that you need all these things.”

This also put a little more light on the real meaning of the requesting bread in the Lord’s Prayer, because most Bible scholars agree today, that the translation from Greek into English should be read as "Give us today the bread of tomorrow", where tomorrow means obviously the Kingdom of God, which is Heaven, the hoped World to Come, the Olam Ha Ba in Hebrew, and the Bread of Tommorrow is the soul nurturing Word of God.

The ordinary and perishable daily bread has been already granted in astonishing abundance, there is no need to pray for it, though we must be grateful for it. It is just a matter of sharing of the bread to abolish hunger and famines, like if you please, for ever, minus one day. Instead of that we have to pray for the non-perishable Bread of Tomorrow, aka the daily Word of GOD, which nurtures our souls for the eternal life.

That is why Jesus quoted the Torah after forty days and forty nights of starving, that “someone does not live by bread only, but one lives by every word that proceeds out of the LORD’s mouth.” Even after the long starvation the Bread of Tomorrow precedes the perishable earthly bread in spiritual importance, at least.

It is clear, because Jesus added, that God knows, that you need the necessities, but “you seek first God’s Kingdom and the righteousness; and all these things will be given to you as well. ” What can we say? Jesus is completely right. If the neighbors love and help each other for the sake of the love of God, where the love of God is in the center of the community and the whole society, then there will be no more homeless people without roof, and there will be no more poor and hungry without resources and food.
The Gospel solution is the very sharing of everything, and it really and factually ruled the Jerusalem assembly of the Jesus followers, as it is written, that “ Great grace was on them all. For there was no one needy among them … (because) all who believed were together, and had all things in common.”  Let us pray for the Bread of Tomorrow, aiming always for Heaven, as the symbolic elements of the Holy Communion give us a great foretaste, that the Spirit of God recreates us as one in our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom may praise and gratitude be given through our Lenten Season of 2023 and every day, for ever.
Amen