Texts such as these distill what Jesus constantly inculcated in his disciples: a new way of being together. He does not allow himself to be served; instead, he is the servant at his disciples’ table. Hence the washing of feet before the last meal, which the evangelist John regards as so crucial that he tells of it instead of the universally familiar words of institution (John 13:1-20).
How different from the rabbinic tradition! And yet one must not be unjust to them, for when they say again and again that a disciple must serve his rabbi their intention was not to have dummies around them to make their lives easier. Their idea, rather, was that those who serve their teacher are constantly in the teacher’s presence, and that gives them the opportunity to learn the correct observance of the Law in practice. For as students accompany their rabbi through the whole day they see without interruption how their master observes the Torah, and so they themselves learn Torah. That is the background of the “serving of the wise,” and it is a very beautiful and moving background.
But we also see here the profound difference: in the Talmudic relationship of teacher and student everything revolves around the Torah. It is to become their way of life. The text of the Torah must be learned by heart. Its interpretation by great scholars must be studied. The practice of living the Torah every day must be rehearsed and memorized down to the smallest detail.
Jesus also taught his disciples and had them practice and internalize the right way of life, and the Torah was by no means absent, as we can see from the Sermon on the Mount. There we find a collection of rules for interpretation, for a right understanding of Torah, and also any number of tangible examples of how Torah is to be grasped and lived now, at the time of its eschatological fulfillment.
And yet for Jesus the Torah has a different position: it is transformed by the message of the arrival of the reign of God.5 Therefore Jesus does not first of all encourage the disciples he gathers around him to study the Torah; he begins instead by creating a new way of being together with them. Under the sign of the now-inbreaking reign of God, human community must also be renewed—finally to become what the Torah had always intended it to be.
And just here we find a third difference between Jesus’ disciples and those of the scribes and rabbis: for them what was crucial was the continuous communication of the traditional teaching and an ongoing close and ever-more-accurate interpretation of Torah. That demanded not only an orderly educational system but also a stabilitas loci, a stability of place in an established house of study—and both the house of study and the educational system required a secure means of support. Most rabbis were craftsmen.
Jesus, on the other hand, did not conduct an established educational operation in rabbinic style; instead, being his disciple meant following him into always-changing situations. But within this constant change, accompanied by its eschatological pressure, there took place a daily exercise, a daily inculcation of the new community of discipleship—involving, for example, the rule that disciples had to forgive one another seventy-seven times a day, that is, constantly (Matt 18:21-22). They could not and must not live together any other way in the reign of God.
There was no stabilitas loci with Jesus. He traveled throughout Israel with his disciples in an unstable, itinerant fashion, totally surrendered to whatever the situation of the approaching reign of God demanded at any particular time. Jesus had no place to lay his head (Luke 9:58).
Our Daily Bread
And what about a secure basis for life? Anyone who wants to know what it was like for Jesus’ disciples would do well to read the Our Father. It is not a prayer for everyone. It is a prayer for Jesus’ disciples and followers. It is their prayer. It distills the whole of what moves them.
In the fourth petition the disciples (in the usual translation) ask for their “daily bread.” This petition in particular seems to suggest that it is a prayer suitable for anyone. After all, people need bread, daily sustenance, always and everywhere in the world. And yet in that respect the fourth petition of the Our Father is much more concrete and situation-bound.
First, we must observe that “give us today our daily bread” is simply an attempt at translation of Matthew 6:11. Where our Bibles read “daily,” the Greek has epiousios, a word that is not attested anywhere in pre-Christian Greek literature. So we must reconstruct what it might mean.
There is much in favor of the suggestion that epiousios does not mean “daily” in a general sense but much more precisely bread for the coming day, the day after this one. In that case epiousios would be derived from epienai (cf. Acts 7:26; 16:11; 20:15; 21:18). Then Jesus’ disciples would be praying in the Our Father solely for bread for that evening and the next day. (In Israel the “following” day begins in the evening, when it grows dark.) Why do the disciples pray only for bread for the next day, for tomorrow?
They do so simply because they are traveling through the land with Jesus and in the morning they do not yet know whether anyone will take them in that evening and give them something to eat! Therefore they have to pray to their Father in heaven—since they have left their earthly fathers—for their bread for the next day. They cannot undertake to plan or set aside for the future. They have no time for it. But they may and should pray for bread for one day.
So nothing is prepared in advance for the long haul. The eschatological situation is so acute, the current preaching so primary that planning is impossible. The view barely extends to the next day. So we can describe the original meaning of the bread petition as follows: “Grant that today we will meet people who will take us into their houses and give us something to eat tonight so that our lives, our food are secured for one more day.”
More than that is impossible, but more is not necessary, because Jesus’ disciples are surrounded and sustained by the parental care of God. So their situation corresponds to that of Israel in the Old Testament wilderness narratives. With its exodus Israel abandoned the things that sustained its life in the Egyptian welfare state. A new social order of mutual solidarity was to be begun. In the extraordinary situation of the wilderness God fed his people with manna—according to Exodus 16—but the Israelites were not allowed to store up the manna. Except for the day before the Sabbath they could only gather what they needed for a single day. Exodus 16:4 speaks of the ration for the coming day. It is possible that epiousios is an attempt at a corresponding allusion to Exodus 16:4 in Greek.
But however things developed linguistically, we have a hard time imagining that Jesus could have formulated the petition for bread for the coming day—that is, for only one day—without having the manna story in mind. He knew that his disciples, who were now preaching the reign of God throughout the land “like sheep in the midst of wolves” (Matt 10:16) were, like Israel in the past, in a basically impossible wilderness situation. Moreover, the fourth petition of the Our Father corresponds in part to Jesus’ injunction in Matthew 6:34: “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.”