Progressive reflections on the lectionary #74

Monday 21st July 2025

Luke 11:1-13: The problem of prayer

This week I look at the passage in Luke’s gospel where Jesus teaches his disciples how to pray, but has some explaining to do about why even the most basic prayers sometimes fail to get an answer. I explain how I, as an open and relational theologian, address the issue of God’s apparent unwillingness to answer prayer.

“…teach us to pray like John taught his disciples…” comes the request in Luke’s story, the answer that comes is well known to most people, in one form or another. It forms the basis of what is commonly recited as ‘the Lord’s prayer’:

Father, may your name be revered as holy.
May your kingdom come.
Give us each day our daily bread.
And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.
And do not bring us to the time of trial. (Luke 11:2 - 4)

Matthew’s gospel has a fuller version of the prayer that is so well known, but this is Luke’s version, somewhat shorter and straight to the point.

There’s a lot to say about the Lord’s prayer, particularly the way it’s been hijacked by a certain way of thinking to include the idea of ‘trespass’, but that’ll have to wait. Because arguably the most interesting part of the passage comes after the prayer has been said.

Jesus goes on to tell a parable about the very basic stuff he’s been praying for - bread for today. In the parable the request for bread doesn’t seem to be working out, the person who is being asked for bread is not providing it. A pretty common experience, perhaps particularly when it comes to prayer.

‘The inconsistent triad’ is a theological problem that asks how, if God is both all good, and all powerful, there can be suffering in the world. Surely the universal experience of suffering is inconsistent with the idea that the divine both loves us and can do anything to demonstrate that love.

Either, we must surmise, the divine doesn’t care for us as much as we’d like to think, or alternatively God is unable to do what we ask.

In the parable Luke seems to have Jesus follow one of these paths, God is compared to the householder who, when asked to give some bread to a neighbour does so not because he is full of love and graciousness, but because he gets fed up with the persistence of the demand.

I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything out of friendship, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.
"So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.
For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. (Luke 11:8-10)

The last paragraph, here, is interesting too - mainly because it defies the reality of our experience. Everyone who asks receives? Really? Doesn’t it, at least, rather depend what is asked for? Everyone who searches finds? Is that true of our experience?

This does seem, at least, like an attempt to solve the problem of the inconsistency of God’s provision by saying that the key is to keep asking. Tell that to the starving children of Gaza, or of a dozen other nightmarish places around the world.

A more honest approach to the problem of God’s inconsistency is to approach it from the other direction - if God is consistent in the quality of love, then it must be power that’s the problem. In other words, God may be all loving, but if that’s the case then God cannot be all powerful.

This actually makes sense in more ways than one, if God is capable of exerting complete power (control) over us, then we cannot be said to be entirely free. Is a lack of freedom really compatible with pure love?

My answer to the issue of the inconsistent triad, as an open and relational theologian, is to say that God is not able to exert power or control over us. Prayer may be said to have power, in a number of ways, but persuading God, by sheer persistence, to exert unilateral power is not part of that.

Here, then, I depart from Luke’s apparent approach, and indeed from the approach of all ‘classical’ approaches to theism in general and Christianity in particular which sees God as the sort of remote, hard to please, ultimately powerful deity that Luke seems to depict. Such an approach is, I think, inconsistent with the God of the Bible, and indeed with the Jesus of the gospels.

At worst such an approach makes God a tyrant, who at a whim chooses who to heal and who to harm. At best the same approach might be said to make God a ‘deadbeat dad’ who cannot be trusted to rescue a child from a burning house (giving rise to the so called ‘babysitter paradox’ - I could trust a teenager to rescue a child from a house that is setting alight, but not the all powerful creator of the universe).

A God who is profoundly weak, on the other hand, and can ‘only’ exert the force of love (powerful though that undeniably is) is altogether more worthy of interest, and indeed, worship.

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Image: Photo by Chris Liverani on Unsplash