Daily Reading for August 2 • The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost
For Christ is our Bread because Christ is Life, and bread is life. “I am,” says he, “the Bread of life.” And, a little above he says, “The bread of God is that which comes down from heaven.” Then we find, too, that his body is reckoned in bread: “This is my body.” And so, in petitioning for “daily bread,” we ask for perpetuity in Christ and indivisibility from his body. But, because “bread” is admissible in a carnal sense too, it cannot be so used without the religious remembrance of spiritual discipline. For the Lord commands that bread be prayed for which is the only food necessary for believers.
From On Prayer by Tertullian, quoted in Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: New Testament IVa, John 1-10, edited by Joel C. Elowsky (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2006).