Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
But how elegantly does heaven's own wisdom lay out the sequence of this prayer, so that only after the heavenly concerns — namely God's name, God's will, and God's kingdom — does it then make space within the petition for what earth requires! For the Lord had already declared: "Seek first the kingdom, and then all these things will be added to you as well." [2] Although GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD ought rather to be taken in a spiritual sense. For Christ counts as our bread, seeing that Christ is our life, and bread stands for life. ("I myself," he declares, "am the living bread," and shortly before that: "the loaf sent down out of the heavens is God's own utterance, alive") — and further, because his own body too is figured under bread ("This is my body"). So in asking for our daily bread we are asking for perpetuity in Christ, and for undividedness from his body. [3] But even taken in the carnal sense in which this phrase is commonly admitted, it cannot be uttered without religious meaning and a spiritual discipline as well. For he bids us ask for bread, which alone is necessary for the faithful; the other things the nations go seeking. So too he drives it home with examples and reworks it in parables, when he says, "Does a father take bread from his children and give it to dogs?" Likewise: "Does he hand a stone to a son asking for bread?" He shows, that is, what sons should expect from a father. And that nighttime petitioner too was knocking for bread. [4] Fittingly, moreover, he added "give us this day," since he had already told us beforehand, "Do not be anxious about tomorrow, what you will eat." To this point he also fitted the parable of that man who, as his crops came in, planned to enlarge his barns and secure himself a long stretch of ease — and died that very night.