The Prayer as Manifesto and Covenant (Lk 11:1-13)
7th Sunday after Pentecost:
For Luke, this episode has to do with learning how to pray—the assumption being that this is no conventional matter, despite the fact that The Prayer has been turned into the church’s most widespread mantra. Here Jesus teaches us what to pray for—which has little to do with our personal anxieties and desires—and then exhorts us to practice fierce persistence and insistence on those matters of divine sovereignty and human justice (see HARP, chap 7).
That the Prayer is the one text of scripture most people know by heart is both blessing and curse. Blessing because it could be our compass of true north, vocalized once a week or more. Curse because we are rarely mindful of its actual content, and too often treat it as a kind of ritual recitation we hope will offer us some sort of magical advantage.
The Prayer has power, but it lies in the fact that these words summarize the key storylines of the Hebrew scriptures, and thus represents both a catechism of biblical faith and a manifesto of liberation. But to recover this requires defamiliarization on one hand, and a deep dive into the left side of the Bible on the other. Indeed, decolonizing this Prayer might be the most important thing we can do in our churches (as theologian Remita Marie Green has done in her recent book).
The Prayer begins with Jesus’ revolutionary assertion of parental intimacy in addressing the Creator (though it’s past time for our churches to adopt “Mother/Father”). Each of the following phrases then alludes to a major thread in the biblical cosmology and story, which deserves careful study and meditation:
- May your name be holy. Exodus 3:13-14 is the primal revelation of YHWH as the unnamable God, who cannot be undomesticated into the patron of either empire or person.
- May your kingdom come. I Samuel 8 is the most fulsome articulation of the political vision of Israel’s tribal confederacy to reject every form of hierarchical regimes of kingship that proliferated in the ancient near east.
- Give us each day our daily bread. Exodus 16’s story of the manna lies at the root of the Bible’s Sabbath Economics vision (see HARP, chap 2).
- Forgive us our sins for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us. This alludes to the redistributive economics of Jubilee release (Lev 25, Dt 15).
- Do not bring us to the time of testing. Here is another invocation of the manna story, which is not a magical intervention but a test to see if the people will follow God’s instructions on how to gather the gifts of Creation (Ex 16:4).
Luke’s version of the heart of the Prayer reads as follows: “Forgive us (Gk aphes) our sins (hamartias) for we ourselves forgive (aphiomen) everyone indebted to us (opheilonti)” (11:4). This portrays sin and debt as equivalent concepts (we see the same correspondence in Luke’s story of the anointing woman in 7:35ff, where her “sin” is correlated with a parable on “debt”). In Aramaic (the oral language of Jesus), khoba dealt was a versatile term that represented both financial obligation and a moral failing; forgiveness, in turn, was akin to the remission of debt. In the Koine Greek of the N.T., debt and sin are controlled by the same verb, aphiemi—which in HARP I characterize as a “Jubilee verb” connoting various kinds of “release.”
In sum, the root memories of manna (demonstrated in Jesus’ wilderness feeding), of Jubilee (cited in his Nazareth sermon) and of non-hierarchical politics (captured in his recruiting phrase “kingdom of God”) are all reiterated in the Prayer. This is what we are exhorted to learn “by heart.” If these visions are merely utopian (which is how they are typically dismissed in 90% of North American churches), why are we being instructed to pray for and about them above all? Conversely, if our rote chanting of this sacred catechism is performed obliviously, are we praying in vain?
The now-famous Prayer is followed in Luke by a parable about persistence (11:5-8) which remains ironically obscure in our churches. But the latter is meant to help interpret the former, precisely to prevent magical thinking! It is one of two parallel stories—both unique to Luke—compare
prayer to fierce persistence for justice (the other is 18:1-8, featuring a righteous woman, which is the gospel lection for Oct 15). To understand this Sunday’s story of village mutual aid, we need social context. (Right: William Holman Hunt, “The Importunate Neighbour,” 1895).
In ancient Israelite village life (and common to traditional cultures around the world), what economic anthropologists call “generalized reciprocity” was the cornerstone of community (see HARP, pp 15, 39, 81). This culture of cooperation and sharing obligated neighbors to provide for each other and for marginalized persons or guests, especially in times of crisis or communal projects. It was understood that this mutual aid would circulate, so to refuse it was to undermine the village covenant of solidarity. Thus the “twist” in this tale is not the alleged “importunity” of the asker, but the unconscionable refusal of the one being asked (v. 7). Jesus’ deconstruction of this scenario restores balance by reminding us that it is not “friendship” that secures an eventually positive response to the request, but the “shameless persistence” of the expectation (12:8; the Gk anaideia is used only here in the N.T.).
Literally, the asker is without shame here, as his request is well within the bounds of village mutual aid (something incomprehensible to us as modern people shaped by transactional capitalist individualism). The fact that his unexpected visitor arrived late at night implies that the traveler was distressed, since it was considered too dangerous to travel after dark. The neighbor is obligated help the one offering hospitality in this hour of need, who helps him transcend shame by insisting he meet his covenantal village obligation (see HARP, pp. 112-114).
This parable reminds the reader that God’s commitment to Sabbath Economics is indeed covenantal, which gives us the right and responsibility to invoke tirelessly in prayer the realization of this vision with “shameless persistence.” This realization of course entirely relies on our fidelity to the discipleship of mutual aid. So when we pray, we are reminding ourselves of our covenantal obligations, not God!
Jesus follows this teaching with a double “clarification” (Lk 11:9-13 is Q material also found in the Sermon on the Mount in Mt 7:7-11). It warns us off the temptation to see this scenario as a theological allegory (i.e. we must pester and persuade a hard-hearted and unresponsive God). He reiterates YHWH’s radical gift cosmology (“you need only ask, the divine door is never closed,” Lk 11:9-10). Then he concludes the teaching by returning to the parental metaphor that launched the Prayer, contrasting the compassionate care that “evil humans” have for their children to the “how much more” attention of God (11:11-13).
When we intone the Prayer, we are invoking God’s vision to overthrow the hegemony of kings and plutocrats; every day should be “No Kings Day” in our churches! And we are committing to liberating the hungry and
Perhaps we Christians would do well to fast from saying the Prayer together for a season, during which we commit to learning its catechism while discussing how we are fulfilling its covenantal commitments “on earth as it is in the heavens”!
Only one more week to use the 20% off HARP (using the discount code SOJO20) at my page on Bookshop.org!! This week we began our online Zoom series entitled “Reading Luke in/under Plutocracy.” The two cohorts got off to a good start, and Chris made it all run smoothly. Pray for the group as we wrestle with RCL Lukan lections in eight sessions through October. I send greetings from Saskatoon, Saskatchewa, where Elaine and I are visiting family and friends.
–Ched
