Vigils Reading

From the treatise “On Prayer” by

ORIGEN

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[Jesus] says, “My Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the

bread of God is He who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world”.

The true bread is He who nourishes the true Man, made in the image of God;

and the one who has been nourished by it will come to be in the likeness of Him

who Created him. And what is more nourishing to the soul than the Word, or

what is more honorable than the Wisdom of God to the mind that holds it? What

more rightly corresponds to a rational nature than truth?

But if someone objects to this and says that He would not have taught us

to ask for “daily bread” if He meant something else, let him hear that even in the

Gospel according to John sometimes He speaks about it as though it were

something other than Himself, and sometimes as though He were Himself

“bread.” An example of the first is, “Moses gave you bread from heaven, not the

true bread, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven”. An example

of referring it to Himself is what he says to those who said to him, “Give us this

bread always”: “I am the bread of life; he who comes to me shall not hunger,

and he who believes in me shall never thirst”.

Now all food is called “bread” in Scripture, as is clear from what is written

about Moses, “For forty days I neither ate bread nor drank water”. How

manifold and varying, then, is the nourishing Word, since not everyone can be

nourished by the solid and vigorous food of divine teachings. That is why, when

He wishes to offer food for an athlete, suitable for the more perfect, He says,

“The bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh”, and a little

further on, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you

have no life in you..”. This is the “True food”, the “flesh” of Christ…

Just as the corporeal bread distributed to the body of the person to be

nourished goes into his being, so also “the living bread which came down from

heaven” and is distributed to the mind and the soul gives a share in its own

power to the person who provides himself food from it. And thus the bread we

ask will be “daily” in the sense that it will be “for our being.”

Moreover, just as the person nourished becomes empowered in differing

ways according to the quality of the food…so also it follows that the Word of God

is given either as milk suitable for children or as vegetables fit for the sick or as

meat special for those taking part in the contests. And the different ones, each

nourished in proportion to how he places himself in the power of the Word, are

able to do different things and become different kinds of people.

Therefore, “daily bread,” that is, “bread for being,” is what corresponds

most closely with a rational nature and is akin to Being itself. It procures at one

time health, vigor, and strength to the soul; and since the Word of God is

immortal, it shares its own immortality with the one who eats it.