17th Sunday in Ordinary Time (C)

Readings:

1. Genesis 18:20-32
   Psalm 138:1-2, 2-3, 6-7, 7-8 Response: “Lord, on the day I called for help, you answered me.”
2. Colossians 2:12-14
3. Luke 11:1-13

Reflections on the Gospel Reading

Today we listen to a sermon on one of Luke’s favorite topics.  Luke takes various words of Jesus and arranges them to bring out Luke’s understanding of prayer.  From this emerges an image of God, both Parent and Friend, who is attentive to our prayers and eager to answer them.

Background

As we have seen, Luke uses the literary framework of a journey to Jerusalem to arrange various sayings of Jesus and stories about Jesus that he found in his sources.  Some of these sources used the name “Jesus” and others (generally considered to be later in origin) used the name “Lord,” the title applied to the risen Jesus in early Christian worship and prophecy.

It appears to be significant that from the beginning of the story about Martha and Mary (Luke 10.38) to the beginning of the account of the crippled woman healed on the Sabbath (Luke 13.10) – a space of more than 125 verses – the word “Jesus” does not appear in Luke’s Gospel, but the word “Lord” appears fifteen times.  This seems to indicate that Luke is drawing upon sources that were written down or uttered nearer to his own time (about the year 85) and reflect an explicit belief in Jesus as Risen Lord that was not present in Jesus’ hearers.

Within this context, in today’s gospel reading Luke presents the Lord (not calling him Jesus) as pausing for prayer on his journey to Jerusalem.  When he is finished praying he gives those who are following him along the way three instructions on prayer:  1) the Lord’s Prayer; 2) a parable about a man’s response to his neighbor’s midnight request; and 3) a series of sayings on the effectiveness of prayer.¹

Both Luke and Matthew have taken the Lord’s Prayer and a series of sayings on prayer from a common written source (Q), which had been in existence for a decade or more at the time they were writing.  (Tuckett 1996, 100-102)  Matthew places the Lord’s Prayer in chapter 6 of the Sermon on the Mount (chapters 5 through 7) between instructions on almsgiving and fasting.  Matthew places the sayings on prayer in chapter 7 in a different context.

Luke, on the other hand, does not place the Lord’s Prayer in his Sermon on the Plain (Luke 6.17-49).  Instead, he inserts it into the journey to Jerusalem and joins it to the sayings on prayer with a parable in between.  Only Luke has the parable about the friend awakened by his neighbor at midnight.  This parable, then, is the key to Luke’s understanding of the Lord’s prayer, which precedes the parable, and of the sayings of Jesus that follow it.²

The Friend at Midnight

The central part of the parable is a very long and extremely complicated sentence.  The Lord describes a situation and asks if any of his hearers would act like that.  The expected reply was:  “Of course not!”  One could paraphrase the parable as follows:

Suppose you and your family are asleep lying on mats in a single room.  A friend wakes you up in the middle of the night.  He calls out loudly enough for the neighbors to hear him.  He is asking for some bread so that he can extend hospitality to his friend who has just arrived from a journey.  Would you reply: “Don’t bother me; the door’s locked; we’re all in bed; I can’t get up to give you anything.”?

Both Jesus’ and Luke’s audiences would have replied: “Of course not!  No one would do such a thing!  It’s unheard of!  If he had any sense of the right thing to do the man inside would get up right away and give his friend what he asked for.”  Luke comments on this expected response by having the Lord say that the man inside will certainly do it, if not for friendship then because of “his anaideia.”

The interpretation of the parable and the understanding of Jesus’ or Luke’s teaching on prayer depend upon whether “his” refers to the man outside or the man inside and whether the Greek word anaideia means “persistence” or “shamelessness.”

The Persistent Man Outside

Many, perhaps most, modern biblical scholars read this parable in conjunction with Luke’s parable of the widow and the corrupt judge (Luke 18:1-8), “a parable about their need to pray always and not lose heart.”  After that parable Luke’s Jesus refers to God’s “chosen ones who cry to him day and night.” (NRSV)  These scholars think “his” in this Sunday’s parable refers to the man outside and translate anaideia as “persistence” in the sense of boldness or impudence. (BAG, 54)  In that reading, the man inside gives in to the man outside because the man outside keeps calling out and won’t let the man inside get back to sleep.³

Why, according to these scholars, did Luke present the Lord as recommending persistence in conjunction with the Lord’s Prayer?  Probably, Luke was concerned about the second petition of the Lord’s Prayer – “Your kingdom come.”   Many early Christians expected the risen Lord to return in glory very soon.  When the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in the year 70, many thought that Christ’s return was imminent.  Luke was writing about the year 85.  Like all the other Gospel writers, Luke dealt with this problem by shifting emphasis from the imminence of the second coming to its certainty.  He seems to be saying:  God certainly will answer our prayers for the coming of the kingdom in due time.  Don’t give up.  Keep praying:  “Your kingdom come.”

The problem with this reading of the parable (that translates anaideia as “persistence”) is the image of God it projects.  If the man inside is being compared to God, it appears that God can only be swayed by constant badgering.  This is contrary to the simple confidence recommended in the sayings that follow the example of the midnight request:  “… ask and you will receive; seek and you will find; etc.”

This is also contrary to what Matthew’s Jesus says as an introduction to the Lord’s Prayer:  “When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard because of their many words.  Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.” (Matthew 6.7-8 NRSV)

Honor and Shame and Hospitality

Another problem with the interpretation that “his” refers to the persistent man outside is that the root meaning of the Greek word anaideia is “lack of shame” or “shamelessness.” (BAG, 54) This is a difficult concept for twenty-first century Americans to understand.  In the ancient Mediterranean world “honor” meant “a person’s (or group’s) feeling of self-worth and the public, social acknowledgment of that worth.” (Malina 2001a, 48) Honor was always a positive concept.  Shame, however, can be either negative (loss or diminishment of honor) or positive (“sensitivity about one’s own reputation, sensitivity to the opinion of others”).  “[A] shameless person or group is one who does not recognize the rules of human interaction, who does not recognize social boundaries.” (Malina 2001a, 49)

To understand what is meant by “shamelessness” in this parable we have to reflect on the importance of hospitality to friends, relatives and neighbors in ancient Israelite society.⁴  Hospitality (or loving kindness) to a traveler friend of one of the villagers was the duty of the whole village.  It was a matter of honor for each and every male in the village.  Honor, including the lack of its opposite – shame, was the highest value in ancient Mediterranean society.  If a traveler were not well received, he would go on to other villages and speak of the poor treatment he suffered, bringing dishonor or shame upon the village that failed to treat him properly.  Thus, in Jesus’ parable, both the man inside and the man outside would do anything in their power to avoid appearing shameless, that is, not properly attentive to the demands of honor.

The Honorable Man Inside

Other biblical scholars think that the point of the parable is that the man on the inside acts out of concern for his own honor.  He does not want to appear to be shameful to the rest of the village.   Essentially, the man with the midnight visitor plays the trump card in ancient Israelite society.  He does not pound on the door until it is easier for his friend inside to comply than to put up with the disturbance.  In fact, in the parable he does not knock on the door at all.  Rather, he calls out to the man inside in a voice loud enough for the neighbors to hear.  He only has to ask once.  That is enough to expose the potential shamelessness of the man inside who “gives in to avoid public exposure as a shameless person.” (Malina & Rohrbaugh 2003, 273)

If the man inside does not respond by sharing the bread he has so that the man outside can extend the village’s hospitality to the wayfarer, the whole village will be abuzz in the morning with the story about how the friend inside failed to act in an honorable way.  He and all his family will be humiliated.⁵

Funk, Hoover, et al. capture this sense of the parable in their translation.  “I tell you, even though you won’t get up and give the friend anything out of friendship, yet you will get up and give the other whatever is needed because you’d be ashamed not to.” (1993, 327)

Luke’s Lord is saying that God is like that.  God is a friend who will gladly respond to a friend’s needs when requested to do so.

Luke reiterates this point in the series of short sayings about prayer:  “Ask and you will receive, seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.”  Why?  Because God is a Parent beyond all parents and cares for his children.  These sayings are not so much advice on persistence in prayer as encouragement to boldness and confidence.  The reason God responds to prayer is not that we pester God.  God acts like a Parent because that is who God is.  It is the honorable thing for God to do.

Compare today’s first reading from the Book of Genesis in which Abraham bargains with God to spare Sodom where Abraham’s nephew Lot is living.  Notice how Abraham appeals to God’s honor right from the start.  Arguing for God to spare the city for the sake of fifty innocent people, Abraham says:   “Far be it from you . . . to make the innocent die with the guilty so that the innocent and the guilty would be treated alike!  Should not the judge of all the world act with justice?” (Genesis 18.25, emphasis mine) Once Abraham made his point, it was only a question of how far God would go.  God owed it to God to be just.

Conclusion

Recall that all the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer and all the sayings about prayer are in the plural.  This is not a question of individual personal prayer but of the communal prayer of the Church.  When two or more of us gather for prayer Jesus is in our midst (Matthew 18.20), and we address our prayers to the Father through him.

Thus, the second interpretation of the parable (the honorable man inside) is a commentary on the Lord’s Prayer, but not on the second petition: “Your kingdom come.”  Rather, it is a commentary on the address:  “Father.” When we begin the Lord’s Prayer with “Father” we are establishing the basis for confidence in prayer.  If God is like a Father or a Mother or an honorable friend, all we have to do is ask for what we need, and we will receive.

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Explanatory Note:

Q (from the German “Quelle” or “source”) stands for a lost written document made up mostly of sayings of Jesus which scholars have reconstructed from an analysis of passages in the Gospel of Matthew and Luke that are very similar to each other but generally not found in the Gospel of Mark.  Examples would be the Sermon on the Mount or the Lord’s Prayer.  These scholars hold that Matthew and Luke were written independently. However, each of the authors had access to written copies of Mark and Q.

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In preparing these reflections, in addition to the biblical texts, I consulted the following works:

BAG – William F. Arndt and F. Wilbur Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, A translation and adaptation of Walter Bauer’s Griechisch-Deutsches Wörterbuch zu den Schriften des Neuen Testaments und der übrigen urchristlichen Literatur (fourth revised and augmented edition, 1952) (Chicago:  The University of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 54.

Crossan 1991 – John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus:  The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant  (New York:  HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), pp. 293-294.

Fitzmyer 1985 – Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke X-XXIV : Introduction, Translation, and Notes.  Anchor Bible Volume 28A. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1985), pp. 896-918.

Fuller 1984 – Reginald H. Fuller, Preaching the Lectionary.  The Word of God for the Church Today  (Collegeville [MN]:  Liturgical Press, 1984), pp. 490-492.

Funk, Hoover & the Jesus Seminar 1993 – Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels:  The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus  (New York:  Macmillan Publishing Company, 1993), pp. 325-329.

Herzog 1994 – William R. Herzog II, Parables as Subversive Speach:  Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed  (Louisville, KY:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994), pp. 194-214.

Hultgren 2000 – Arland J. Hultgren, The Parables of Jesus:  A Commentary (Grand Rapids [MI]: Eerdmans, 2000), 225-234.

Johnson 1991 – Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke , Sacra Pagina Series Volume 3, A Michael Glazier Book (Collegeville [MN]:  Liturgical Press, 1991), pp. 176-180.

Latin Vulgate 1994 – Roger Gryson and Robertus Weber, Editors, Biblia Sacra Iuxta Vulgatam Versionem (Stuttgart:  Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994), p. 1629.

LaVerdiere 1990 – Eugene LaVerdiere, S.S.S., Luke.  New Testament Message, Volume 5.  A Michael Glazier Book  (Collegeville [MN]:  Liturgical Press, 1990), pp. 153-160.

Malina 2001a – Bruce J. Malina.  The New Testament World.  Insights from Cultural Anthropology.  Third Edition, Revised and Expanded (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001)

Malina & Rohrbaugh 2003 – Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh, Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels, Second Edition  (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003), pp. 271-273.

NRSV 1994 – New Revised Standard Version – Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Murphy, Editors, The New Oxford Annotated Bible containing the Old and New Testaments.  New Revised Standard Version.  (New York:  Oxford University Press, 1994)

Pilch 1997 – John J. Pilch, The Cultural World of Jesus, Sunday by Sunday,  Cycle  C .  A Liturgical Press Book (Collegeville [MN]:  Liturgical Press, 1997), pp. 115-117.

Tuckett 1996 – Christopher M. Tuckett, Q and the History of Early Christianity:  Studies in Q  (Peabody, MA:  Hendrickson Publishers, Inc., 1996), pp. 100-102.

Webster 2002 – Michael Agnes, Editor in Chief, Webster’s New World College Dictionary, Fourth Edition (Cleveland:  Wiley Publishing, Inc., 2002)

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