The Lord’s Prayer in St Luke’s Gospel: Sermon for Trinity VI

Preached by the Revd Professor Sarah Coakley in St Barnabas Jericho on 27 July 2025 (Trinity VI) at the 10.30am High Mass
Genesis 18. 20-32; Colossians. 2. 12-14; Luke 11. 1-13

‘Ask, and it will be given you; seek and you will find’ (Luke 11.9)

In nomine …

 Let me ask you, first, about an agonizing existential dilemma that surely all of us has confronted at one time or another, and confronts us again implicitly through our gospel reading. Who has not prayed most earnestly, and in desperation, for some outcome that God ostensibly has failed to answer? Who has not asked that a sick parent or spouse or lover not die, or that a beloved child not continue to walk in a path of self-destruction? Or – on the positive side of petition – who has not begged that a long-standing depression be lifted, or – indeed – that an appalling political situation of gross inhumanity such as we are now powerlessly witnessing in Gaza be alleviated? All these are prayers; all these are good prayers. And yet so often they seem to fall on deaf divine ears. No wonder that we often despair of prayer itself, then; no wonder that we question whether prayer has any meaning at all, or whether we are simply going through the motions when we mouth even the shared prayers of our liturgy. No wonder finally that we can even be tempted to stop asking altogether, to stop ‘saying it to God’, even when we are most urgently up against whatever ails us.

 But today’s gospel from Luke is addressed to us precisely in this dilemma of unresolved prayer. For not only has Luke received the ‘Lord’s prayer’, as handed down through earlier oral and written traditions, in a leaner form than we have it in Matthew (and so Luke’s alternative may therefore well be the more original version); but he also ‘frames’ Jesus’s teaching on prayer very distinctively by drawing on a double parable from the Jesus tradition about the deeper meaning of petition in prayer, and its relation to endurance and persistence.

Let us then together very briefly consider Luke’s particular theological insights here, and at three levels of meaning.

First, the way Luke opens the story of Jesus giving his disciples the Lord’s Prayer is distinctive to him, and different from the way Matthew handles it in ch. 6 of his own gospel. Here, in Luke 11, we are told that Jesus has just been off on his own praying – a practice that Luke’s gospel, in particular, often mentions. One senses here the curiosity of the disciples, and one in particular, who poses the question on behalf of the others: what is Jesus up to when he’s praying alone, exactly, and how can they get into that same magic circle of prayer? In particular, the disciples want to know what to ask for, and thus to be given the key to this mystery of prayer that Jesus exemplifies. But what Jesus then provides for them is something almost disconcertingly lean and minimal, perhaps disappointingly so. Indeed, especially in Luke’s version, the prayer really just divides into two very brief chunks: first, an intentional turning back into the very source of our being as ‘Father’ (pater, or abba), hallowing his name, and from there leaning into his Kingdom; and secondly, the request for three very basic but profound necessities: the gifts of bread, of forgiveness, and of freedom from destructive temptation. One can almost imagine the disciples thinking, ‘Is that all?’ For as one astute modern commentator puts it, ‘The Lord’s Prayer belongs to us and yet escapes us’ (François Bovon). So familiar has it become that we can fail to see that, at base, it is this simple turning back into God’s being and grace as the source and goal of all our longing and asking. We might perhaps call this Prayer then ‘the asking of asking’, an intentional but precipitous falling into God’s kingdom as the sole true locus and hope for all our needs.

But secondly, and as if sensing his followers’ puzzlement, Jesus – according to Luke’s framing– adds the crucial parable that explains what this is all about, what prayer fundamentally is. And this too is perhaps a little more subtle and puzzling than it might at first appear. For in fact it’s a parable with two halves, so to speak. First it’s about the irritating man who crashes on the door of a friend to ask for bread in the middle of the night on behalf of another friend; and no wonder he gets a grumpy response. Friendship seemingly meets its limits here then, because the parable goes on to underscore that, when the grumpy man finally gives in, and for the sake of some peace finally gives the nuisance person what he wants, it’s not because of their existing friendship but because of the ‘shameless persistence’ of the one disturbing him. From this we learn, then, that knocking, and asking, and nagging, and behaving precisely in this bloody-minded manner is actually the best, parabolic, way of thinking about prayer from the human perspective. This is already a little surprising, but certainly deeply instructive.

But then comes the second half of the parable, which adds a further twist. Now the comparison is with a human parent who is doling out the next part of a picnic when appealed to by his own child: not just bread now, but a fish or an egg. And what human parent, says Jesus, even a sinful one (as all human parents inevitably are), would in these circumstances give something counterfeit and dangerous, such as a snake or a scorpion?

In both halves of the parable, then, one half about old friends, the other about ordinary families, the force of its structure goes like this: ‘If this is how asking for things happens in the all-too-imperfect human realm … so much the more is it the case in the divine realm in relation to prayer’. For in the matter of the human ‘asking of all asking’, as we’ve called it, persisting and asking and asking again is the core, and costly core, of all prayer; and in the matter of the divine ‘asking of asking’, God himself, the true ‘Father’, never gives us anything counterfeit or harmful, Jesus assures us, but always mysteriously more, much more, than we can ask or imagine (as today’s collect also reminds us).

Is that the end of the story, then? Profound as this teaching is, does it yet fully satisfy the problem with which we started – the problem of so much unanswered prayer, so much suffering, even when we do so persist in our storming of heaven, even when we do go on asking and asking?

But here we come to a third level of Luke’s text, so profound and so distinctive, and the clue is hidden in just one crucial detail at the end. As Jesus says in Luke’s version of this parable, ‘If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?’ The implications of this comment are not spelled out here, but I think they are latent in Luke’s theology of prayer more generally.

The point is this: in the ‘asking of asking’ which is persistent prayer, what God is always already giving us is Himself, that is, the Holy Spirit which incorporates us into his own divine longing, his own Fatherly desire to draw us ever more deeply into that Kingdom for which the Lord’s Prayer yearns. When we ask and go on asking, then, we become harbingers of this Kingdom; we become co-operators in it. And so whatever it is that still agonises us, we must say, and continue to say, to God in the fulsome promise of his Spirit. And the deeper we go into this prayer which is animated by the Spirit, the more we are purified by it and the more we are also knit more deeply into each other in God (notice how the importunate friend in the night was already acting on behalf of another friend). The point is that God wants us, in our very Spirit-led persistence, to activate and extend his own mercy (recall the lesson of this morning’s reading from Genesis 18 here). And He wants us, in our attunement to the same Spirit, to find our prayers mingled with those others in the body of Christ who pray likewise and sustain us in our longings and sufferings.

‘Ask, and it will be given you, seek and you shall find’. This is a profoundly hopeful saying, but it’s a hard one too, as anyone struggling with unanswered prayer and unresolved grief will know all too well. But it is why prayer is also a life-long journey of longing into the divine life, in which there is no going back, but an ever-deeper exploration of the divine ‘asking of asking’, in which ‘everyone who asks’ will finally ‘receive’, as Jesus has promised us.

In nomine …

I acknowledge my indebtedness to: François Bovon, “Commentary on Luke” (Hemeneia series), vol. 1; Joachim Jeremias, “The Prayers of Jesus”; Luigi Gioia, “Say it to God”