Today is one of these Sundays where the topic of our Gospel is quite obvious, isn’t it? We have three moments in our text: The teaching of the “Our Father”, the story known as “The parable of the friend at midnight”, and a list of sayings. All of these passages are about prayer, which is a major theme in Luke’s. So let’s have a closer look at what it is all about, starting with the beginning!
1 – The Lord’s prayer:
At the reading of the Gospel, you may have started thinking about how familiar it all was, although maybe not so familiar. Indeed, we have in Luke’s what we can call “a shorter version” of the Lord’s Prayer, compared to Matthew’s version which is much more familiar (Matt 6:9-13). So it may be confusing to have two versions, immediately we start wondering which one is the “correct one”, but I also like it because Jesus probably taught the prayer several times and gave us the freedom to say the prayer differently. He does not want us to be trapped in formality. Words matter, of course, but it’s more of a guideline, an example, certainly not a magic formula. We talked about that last week when we talked about the rosary: When we pray we need to hold on to something. It can be a string of beads, a sacred image, a few sentences, a sacred word as we do in centering prayer. It’s a great help to have written prayers, but it can also be a trap if we start thinking there is only one way to do it, when we can keep adapting and recreating prayers.
Actually, we generally think that the Lord’s Prayer is Jesus’s very original teaching, but it’s really not. Rather than creating, Jesus actually quotes parts of a Jewish prayer very well known at the time, the kaddish that focused on sanctification of God’s name, coming of God’s kingdom, daily needs etc. What’s really new is the opening of the prayer with the words “Our Father“, because that’s something people didn’t say at the time. What Jesus wants his disciples to do is to enter a closer, intimate relationship with God. Now these days a lot of people don’t like it when we talk about God as a “Father” because of all the evils of patriarchy. But Jesus may have built this image of God as a Father to oppose the culture of his time, especially the Roman culture where the Pater Familias, the father, was all powerful. Yes, God has authority, yes God is all powerful, but mainly Jesus shows us God as a Father who does what a Father is supposed to do: Gives life of course, nurtures (gives the bread, protects (from evil), holds the family together (forgives our sins). It’s in Luke that we find the parable of the Prodigal Son, that describes the extravagant generosity and benevolence of the Father. In fact in Luke’s Gospel what we call now the Lord’s Prayer, doesn’t start with the line “Our Father” but something that would be better translated as: “Father!“. “Abba” in Hebrew is even closer to the word “Daddy“, it’s the first letters children are able to pronounce (A, aleph, and B, bet, from which we have our “alphabet”). It’s a cry. Every prayer is cry towards heaven, a cry for help sometimes, a cry of adoration, a cry of joy. So it’s a little bit sad we often think that our prayers have to be beautiful, elaborated, smart, when Jesus tells us they should be as urgent, as simple and as pure as the cry of the infants.
2 – The story
Then Jesus tells a story that helps us to get closer to how he wants us to understand prayer. We know that Jesus liked to tell stories, he had scary stories and he also had stories that were funny. The one we have just heard is known as “The parable of the friend at midnight” but if you want my opinion it would be more real to call it “The story of the grumpy neighbor“. I think that’s what people clicked with when they heard Jesus and we still do, right? It’s like a universal truth that we all have a grumpy neighbor, and if you don’t, well watch out because you might be it! People would have laughed when Jesus told that story because they knew exactly what he was talking about. Now from what I read, most theologians seem to think that it’s not very reasonable to compare God to a grumpy neighbor, and they try to explain the parable differently, they say Jesus didn’t mean to make a comparison. On the other way around, I think that maybe we actually need to sit a little bit with this idea that “God cannot be bothered” or that “God is asleep”. First of all because it’s biblical, there are different passages in the Old Testament talking about God who needs to wake up (See Psalms 44,78), but mostly because this is our experience! When we pray, it’s a common experience to believe that God is not listening or that we shouldn’t be bothering God with our “little problems”. And so what is it that Jesus responds to that? Well, it does not matter how you feel about it or what you believe, you have to keep insisting. Keep asking, Keep knocking, be “persistent” which can even be translated “shameless“. Be shameless in prayer.
I think it’s very important to hear that once again today. We see how Jesus was encouraging people to persist and even to “pester”. Saying God won’t listen or God has other things to do are bad excuses not to pray. In substance, Jesus says: Even if your grumpy neighbor ends up helping you, how much more God is going to help you. And actually I like it that Jesus chooses an example of someone “asking (bread) for a friend“. Jesus constantly invited people to pray for themselves but also for friends, and even their enemies and the whole world. For the people at the time who probably felt like they had very little power, Jesus was actually telling them that he had much power, in prayer we can move heavens and we see that many times in the Old Testament too, our story with Abraham this morning is just another example. Our prayer for the world can change the world. We have been constantly taught in our churches that God is everywhere, every time but it’s very confusing because it is also our experience, and Jesus acknowledges this experience, that God seems to be far away, indifferent or not listening. The thing is that, contrarily to what many teach in church, there is also this idea in the Bible that if people forget about God or don’t obey God, God will leave them, not necessarily as a punishment, but just as a consequence. And so there are places, physical or spiritual, where it is possible that God is not present. Actually, if we don’t pray God remains far away and we experience the darkness of a world without God. If we do pray we invite God back in those dark places inside of us and in the world, those God forsaken places. We ask God to shine his light in our nights. So again Jesus insists that we have to keep praying no matter what.
3 – The sayings
Now a pitfall is that from Jesus’s story, we understand it that we have to keep insisting to get the one thing we want so that God will give up at some point. And a lot of people seem to think that prayer work like that, that God is going to be so tired with us that he’ll give up in the end. Well, first of all, I think God has probably much more endurance than we do. And also Jesus makes it clear in the last sayings that God is not going to give us anything that can hurt us, we know that we sometimes ask for the wrong things. The aim of prayer is also to redirect our wants and desires, to learn to discern God’s will and to learn how to accept God’s will. When Jesus says that we “will be given“, that we “will find“, or that we door “will be open“, I take it that God will respond, which is not exactly the same thing as saying that our prayers will be “answered“, like a wish can be granted. Again, it’s not magical, prayer is not about manipulating God. Prayer is about making room for God to manifest himself.
In the end, Jesus promises us that God will always give the Holy Spirit, gives himself to us. And that’s also why we shouldn’t lose courage. We also know that sometimes we ask for good things too, “real good things” health, reconciliation, a relief from poverty, world peace, and yet we don’t receive them the way we want. It’s true that our prayer can move heaven and earth, and yet we also know that there is always brokenness, sin and death in this world, and we have to hold together those realities.God’s will is to heal and save the world but it cannot be done on our agenda, the hope it that when we reach that point where things cannot be changed in our time, prayer will change us instead. Wisdom, faith, strength, that’s also the gift of the Holy Spirit, that we can become this place where God is present in the world, that we can be empowered to do God’s will for us, that we also be an answer to other people’s and even God’s own prayers. Maybe indeed we could move from the place “How is God going to answer my prayers?” to wonder what we will do to answer the prayers of the world and to respond to the will of God for all, to answer God’s prayer, our Lord’s own prayer.