Daily Bread, The Great Banquet, and the Kingdom of God

At the heart of [his prayer for daily bread] stood a central biblical symbol of the kingdom: the great festive banquet. Which God has prepared for his people— The whole point of the Kingdom…isn’t about shifting our wants and desires on to a non-physical level, moving away from the earthly to the supposedly “spiritual.”

It is about God’s dimension coming to birth within ours. The Kingdom is to come in earth as it is in Heaven. Daily needs and desires point beyond themselves, to God’s promise of the kingdom in which death and sorrow will be no more. But that means, too, that the promise of the Kingdom includes those needs, and doesn’t look down on them sneeringly as somehow second-rate.

Those who feel deeply threatened by God knowing all our desires will naturally want the Lord’s Prayer to be about “spiritual issues.” If I’m ashamed of my desires, and would prefer God not to know them, then it will be much more comfortable for me if the ‘daily bread’ for which I pray is for the soul, rather than the stomach. ”

N.T. Wright, The Lord, and His Prayer, Eerdmans, 1997.