“Jesus
was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples
said to him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.’” From the
Gospel for today, the Gospel according to Luke, chapter 11, verse 1.
In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit. Amen.
Today’s reading is the first in Luke’s
Gospel in which Jesus explicitly mentions prayer as part of his teaching. Before
chapter 11, there are a few references to Jesus at prayer, but they don’t say anything about the content of the
prayers. But today’s reading reveals what prayer meant to Jesus, and what it
can mean to us.
The first thing to note about today’s
reading, is where it is located in the Gospel. This teaching on prayer occurs
in the 11th chapter, a little short of halfway through the Gospel.
This is not accidental. Putting the teaching on prayer here tells us that we
can understand the preceding chapters as preparation for Jesus’s teaching on prayer.
First, a short summary of the contents and
structure of Luke’s Gospel before chapter 11: the first three chapters are a
narrative of the births of John the Baptist and Jesus. There is some teaching
by John and some of his history. In chapter 3, Jesus is baptized, and “the Holy
Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove.” In chapter 4, we have
the story of the Temptation of Jesus. The chapter begins, “Jesus, full of the
Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the
wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil.” In the following
chapters, Jesus heals the sick and the mad, preaches in synagogues and
elsewhere, calls his first disciples and the apostles, offers many teachings,
raises a widow’s son from the dead, forgives a sinful woman, offers teachings
in the form of parables, miraculously feeds a large crowd, and so on and on.
All this before he says a word about prayer, although on a few occasions he has
been seen praying. So although prayer is present before chapter 11, there isn’t
much said about it. In chapter 5, all Luke says is that Jesus “would withdraw
to deserted places and pray.” In chapter 9, Jesus was seen “praying alone, with
only the disciples near him.” This is the incident when Peter announces that
Jesus is the Messiah. A few verses later, in the story of the Transfiguration, “while
he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became
dazzling white.” So, after ten chapters, and these few references to prayer and
the Holy Spirit, we finally get to Jesus’s teaching on prayer, in chapter 11.
But the references are themselves part of the preparation for the teaching on
prayer.
“He was praying in a certain place, and
after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, ‘Lord, teach us to
pray.’” Only at this point, after having seen Jesus pray a number of times, and
after many remarkable healings and teachings and other events, are the
disciples ready to hear Jesus’s actual teaching on prayer. In other words,
there is a long moral preparation in Jesus’s preaching and teaching, and a long
exposure to the reality of the spiritual world, the divine world, through the
miracles at Jesus’s hands. And this reality becomes visible in Jesus himself,
when Peter and James and John see him transfigured, when he was praying on the
mountain. In that incident, prayer and teaching and miracle, moral preparation
and divine reality, combine in the person of Jesus, and are visibly united.
Then, and only then, are the disciples ready to hear about prayer, and only
then, or rather, not very much later, are the disciples ready to ask about it.
And they do, at the right moment, and Jesus sees that they are ready.
Jesus begins straightforwardly, with a
simple list of statements and requests which is a model for all subsequent
Christian prayer. Jesus acknowledges God as Father and as holy. He asks for the
coming of his Kingdom, for daily bread, for forgiveness of sins, and for the
Father’s help in the avoidance of evil. That’s it, in Luke’s Gospel, the full
content of the prayer. It is simple, clear, uncomplicated. It is a model which
we all can use in our own daily prayer, and we can hear this pattern in our
prayers in church as well. It is a model of petitionary prayer, a prayer of
requests to the Father.
But it’s not only petitionary. The prayer
for forgiveness appears to be contingent on our forgiveness of others. And
there’s an alarming awareness that the Father may bring us to a “time of
trial,” to who knows what dangers. So the prayer reminds us that we must be
prepared to forgive as well as be forgiven (there’s a hint that the Father may
not forgive unless we do), and that the Father is completely free to test us in
ways we may not be ready for. Even the petition for our daily bread is a
reminder of the sovereignty of the Father, in stating our clear dependence on
him for everything, including bread and forgiveness and freedom from danger of
every kind. This is what the holiness of the Father, and the Kingdom of the
Father, actually mean in this prayer.
Then Jesus tells the somewhat odd story of
the reluctant friend finally giving in and providing bread to a persistent
friend. What is the message here? That the Father is reluctant to give the
daily bread that we ask for? That friendship is less important than
persistence? It is clear that the theme here is persistence, and not
reluctance. But the story is another reminder of the sovereignty of the Father,
that he is not compelled to grant our requests.
But grant them in some way, he does. Jesus
goes on to say, “Everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searchers finds,
and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.” Receives what? Finds
what? The door opens to what? There is more to find here than bread and forgiveness.
But before we can answer this question, we need to look back at a few incidents
in the life of Jesus.
The Holy Spirit descends on Jesus at his
baptism. The Holy Spirit fills him and leads him into the wilderness to be
tempted by the Devil. In the Spirit, Jesus retreats into desert places to pray.
In the Spirit, he prays alone, but close to his disciples. And during prayer on
the mountain, Jesus is transfigured. The prayer of Jesus, filled as he is with
the Spirit, and led by the Spirit as he is, is transfiguring, and this effect
is visible. The last line of today’s reading says, “How much more will the
heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him.” The Holy Spirit is
what we are given when we ask, the Spirit is what we find, it is the Holy
Spirit whom we meet when the door opens. The Holy Spirit transfigures us in
prayer as it transfigures Jesus.
The Lord’s Prayer, then, transcends its
own content. Our Lord’s teaching leads us from its simple petitions, to
awareness that the acquisition of the Holy Spirit is the goal of our requests.
The same Spirit that comes upon Jesus in baptism, in the wilderness, in prayer
on the mountain, is the same Spirit that can come to us in prayer. Every time
we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we are asking, not just for bread and forgiveness,
but for the Holy Spirit to come into our lives and to transform us, to
transfigure us, to become the Spirit-filled beings the Father has made us to
be.
“Jesus
was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples
said to him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.’”
In
the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
