Summary: When it comes to prayer, as with so many other important things in life, persistence pays off.
"Lord, teach us to pray." It's the request Jesus' disciples make of him one day, after observing him go off to spend some time in private devotion.
"Teach me to pray" is a request you may have made yourself, at one time or another in your life. Or maybe, when you were a child, your parents didn't even wait for you to ask. They took the initiative, teaching you how to kneel beside your bed at night, clasp your hands, bow your head and offer up to God whatever was on your heart. They literally formed your body into the traditional prayer posture. Or maybe -- depending upon your family's faith tradition -- your parents taught you certain traditional rote prayers, like the rosary, or the familiar, "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep."
That's the approach Jesus takes with his disciples, at first. He teaches them a rote prayer: the prayer used in churches of all Christian denominations, known as "The Lord's Prayer."
The version of that prayer here in Luke may sound a bit strange to you, but that's because it's the alternate version. The more familiar version of the Lord's Prayer is found in the Gospel of Matthew.1 Christians across the globe have been praying it for centuries.
And they keep praying it. It's a prayer both simple and comprehensive, a prayer that never runs out. It's a prayer for every time and season of our lives.
Some of you may have memories from high school days, of seeing hand-lettered signs in the locker room, taped up by helpful coaches to motivate their young team members. One of the most popular of these motivational sayings was this: "A winner never quits, and a quitter never wins."
On one level, that sign said nothing at all. Of course, quitters never win! It's perfectly obvious. How can you possibly win a game if you're no longer in it?
On another level, the sign speaks a deeper truth. If the goal of starting a game is to win -- which is not true for everybody, but let's assume it is -- then to leave the field before the game is over is to toss that goal out the window.
Jesus tells a little parable, here, to make a similar point -- not about football or baseball, but about prayer. It's a little story about a man who welcomes an unexpected houseguest late at night. Checking the pantry, he finds he's got no food to lay on the table. So he runs to the neighbor's house and starts banging on the door. He shouts through the door, explaining his dilemma. He knows his neighbor has at least three loaves of bread -- but it's late at night, the neighbor's already in bed, and the weary man refuses to get up and open the door.
Undaunted, the hero of our story just keeps knocking. Eventually, Jesus says, the neighbor will get up and hand over the bread loaves -- not out of friendship, but out of sheer annoyance. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, as the saying goes.
This parable makes a point similar to one made in a longer parable Jesus told a few chapters later in Luke.2 That longer parable is not about solving a hospitality disaster, but about winning a legal case. It's a case so important that it just may save a widow from homelessness.
If there's one thing that widow is not, it's a quitter.
Sad but true, but in those days, widows often had some trouble being taken seriously by people in power. The very word for "widow," in the Hebrew, literally means "one who is silent." In that place and time, men were usually the ones who spoke before a judge in the law-courts.
Jesus never reveals the nature of the legal case -- although most court cases had to do with property ownership. Most of his listeners, upon learning that the woman's a widow, would have assumed that was it: the case had something to do with inheritance.
No, this woman doesn't fit the stereotype of a widow meek and mild -- and silent. She's prosecuting her own claim with a vengeance. Most listeners would have understood her to be a bold, brassy, uppity woman: pushing the boundaries of conduct considered normative for her gender -- much like the obnoxious host in today's passage, banging on his neighbor's door in the middle of the night.
The widow may be lacking in money, but she has one other resource in abundance: let's call it chutzpah. She starts badgering the judge day and night. When the judge leaves his house in the morning, there she is on the front step. When he sits down in the judgment-seat, she's there in the first row. She follows him all the way home at the end of the day, and just when he's about to lay his head on the pillow at night, she starts pounding on the door.
She drives the man crazy. Finally, he says to himself: "Because this woman keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming." The word for "wear me out," here, is a vivid term. Literally it means: "so she will not give me a black eye." That's how tough and persistent this woman is. She won't leave the judge at peace until he pays her the attention she deserves.
So, what do these parables mean? In both cases, Luke tells us they're about persistence in prayer. Don't be shy. Don't worry about appearing to be obnoxious. Just keep banging on the door of the only One who's equipped to help you!
How many times, in life, do we get ourselves into trouble because we're not persistent enough? Our instant-gratification society notwithstanding, very few things that are worth having in this life drop into our laps without effort. Yet, because our culture keeps promising us we can have it all -- and we really deserve to have had it yesterday -- so often we find our confidence lagging when it comes to sustaining hard work over time.
There was a TV commercial some years back, put together by a well-known athletic-shoe company. It was back when the basketball player Michael Jordan was the hottest thing in sports.
In the commercial, Michael's talking about his athletic career:
"I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost more than 300 games. Twenty-six times I have been trusted to take the game-winning shot -- and missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."
Spoken like a true champion! When we watch sports heroes at work, and marvel at how effortless they make it all look, it's really not that way, you know. Behind every stellar performance on the court or the field, there are countless hours of drills and practice. There are successes, yes -- but also a great many failures.
Simone Biles is a case in point. In the 2020 Olympics, when she had her moment of psychological crisis -- suddenly losing her sense of where she was in time and space as she made her fantastic gyrations through the air -- she was wise to decline to compete. By exercising prudence, she may have saved her own life. Many fans thought her career was over. But Simone persisted. Over the next four years she trained hard. She got her head in the right place. And in the 2024 Olympics, she came away with three more gold medals. In doing so, she became the most decorated gymnast in history.
Maybe it's true that superior athletes are born; but in a sense, they're also made. And what makes them is persistence.
Very likely there have been other athletes -- maybe not many, but some -- with the strength, intelligence and coordination of a Michael Jordan or Simone Biles. But they never made it. They never broke through. They never excelled at the sport. And the reason they didn't was a lack of persistence.
They allowed obstacles to defeat them. Every person who takes on a difficult task -- one that must be sustained over time -- can be certain of crashing up against some obstacles sooner or later. It goes with the territory.
The auto-maker Henry Ford had a good perspective on this. He once said, "Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal." He knew it's a matter of focus.
Jesus says something similar. Earlier in the Gospel of Luke, he says "No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God."3
In using an old-fashioned ox-drawn plow, the task is simple: to plow a straight furrow. But it's not easy.
The ox doesn't know anything about walking in a straight line. That's up to the farmer. And the only way the farmer can do it is to keep his eyes fixed on some landmark -- a tree, say, or a large rock -- at the far end of the field. The plowman must be absolutely single-minded, or all his efforts will be for naught.
The host in today's scripture passage has that kind of laser focus. He keeps just one thought -- taking good care of his guest -- at the forefront of his mind. Because he's absolutely unrelenting, he walks away from his neighbor's door with the bread he needs.
The same is true of just about anything in life that's worth doing. A sleepy, grumpy neighbor may seem like an insurmountable obstacle, but our Lord teaches us that even one such as he will yield, sooner or later, to sanctified persistence. It's a lesson we'd all do well to take to
heart and start living out in our own lives. Especially our prayer lives!