Followers of Jesus have been making that request for a couple of millennia now.  The question of prayer – what is it, what does it mean, how do we do it – has been grist for the theological and spiritual mill for centuries, resulting in a dizzying array of ideas, forms, and practices.  Whether it’s the contemplation of the hermit in the desert or the raucous and rowdy tent revival, Christian prayer has taken an astonishing variety of expressions, from the sublime to the suspect, from the majestic to the manipulative.

One of the most urgent questions that has vexed persons of faith is that of its “effectiveness:” Does prayer work?  While some spiritual masters might chide us that such a question dangerously misconstrues the very meaning of prayer, the Lord himself seems to have promoted an understanding of prayer as efficacious.  If we have sufficient prayer, he tells us, we can move mountains (Mark 11:25).  Prayer has the power to exorcise particularly nasty demons (Mark 9:28-29).

So it would appear that the Gospels – as well as the Psalms and other parts of Scripture – put a high premium on prayer’s effectiveness.  Fervent and faithful prayers, the Good Book assures us, are answered.

An honest faith, however, cannot help but acknowledge that such a teaching often crashes against the rocky shores of much human experience.  True, many of us can bear witness to answered prayers, for which we are grateful, from which we have drawn strength and a deepened faith.  But we must also painfully reckon with the reality that countless prayers have gone heavenward from good-hearted persons with no apparent “answer.”  Loved ones, despite passionate supplications, have died.  Families and relationships have crumbled.  Tragedies, personal and social, have taken their toll.  Some slaves have not been delivered from their Egypts.  Countless poor have not heard the good news.

A certain evangelical zeal would respond unflinchingly that anything short of fully answered prayer is evidence of insufficient faith on our part.  Lord, we believe – help our unbelief.  On the other pole of certitude would be those for whom apparently ineffective prayer bears witness to the Void.  In between are those left with thorny existential doubts that our faith is in fact a mysterious wrestling with an oft-elusive God.

Lord, teach us, …

That very question is posed in the eleventh chapter of Luke’s Gospel.  It is an entrée to Jesus’ giving what we know as “the Lord’s Prayer.”  Those famous words, so central to our church tradition, entreat us to make supplication – “Give us…, forgive us…, lead us not… .”

In fact, Luke’s Gospel contains some of the most compelling teachings on prayer from the mouth of Jesus – including the matter of the “effectiveness.”  Two passages in particular seem to make a strong case for prayer bearing the desired fruit.  Both are in the form of stories that Jesus tells.  The first, often titled “The Friend at Midnight” (11:5-8), comes immediately after the Lord’s Prayer.  Jesus presents the scenario of “a friend,” whose own pantry is empty, banging at a neighbor’s door in the middle of the night, pleading for bread to offer to a guest.  At first, the neighbor refuses, given that it is late and the family is all in bed.  But he eventually gets up and gives the bread because of his friend’s “boldness” in continuing to knock and plead.  Jesus then tags on the moral of the story: “So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened” (vv. 9-10).

In case the disciples didn’t get the point the first time around, Jesus comes back to the topic a few chapters later, with the tale of the judge and the widow (18:1-8).  This story, which the evangelist specifically calls a parable, is prefaced with the advance moral, “to show them that they should always pray and not give up.”  The brief parable includes two characters:  a judge “who neither feared God nor cared about men,” and a widow who was being denied some non-specified justice against a threatening oppressor.  The judge’s stubborn refusal of justice is chiseled away by the widow’s relentless complaint, and he finally grants her justice – not from any decency but from weariness.  (In fact, the Greek text literally says the judge is afraid the widow will give him a black eye!)  Jesus goes on to speak about God bringing justice to those who cry out.

Both stories seem on the face of it to be examples of persistence in prayer:  Keep praying, don’t give up, don’t grow weary – eventually God will answer.  Prayer “works,” but only if we persevere.

Such a vision of prayer is inspiring and empowering.  It can bolster our faith and raise our flagging spirits.  And yet, I confess, it doesn’t entirely sit well with me.  When I unpack the teaching, I confront some unsettling questions.

Does it mean, for instance, that if we don’t pray hard enough, the prayer won’t be answered?  If a loved one dies of cancer, are we partly to blame for the paucity of our prayer?  Do these teachings insinuate that if only we had prayed harder, God would have granted the requested healing and our loved one would have lived?

Theologically, these teachings suggest some odd notions about God.  Are God’s love, mercy, and healing conditional on our relentless effort?  Does God withhold the “answer to prayer” until we have successfully reached or exceeded some litmus test of persistence?  Is God somehow measuring our prayer until it reaches a magic point of sufficiency – like the Wizard of Oz demanding that Dorothy and her companions pass some grueling tests before their wishes are granted?

All of which would be a fairly stunted theology of grace.  But I suspect the Gospel is inviting us to a deeper engagement with Jesus’ teaching.

Part of our problem with these stories – and perhaps with some of our notions about prayer – is due in no small measure to a skewed approach to reading Scripture.  In particular, with Jesus’ parables, we tend to adopt a traditional notion that they are “earthly stories with heavenly meaning” – that is, the actual content of the parables are not in themselves significant; the point is to grasp the symbol, the analogy, the “deeper” meaning.  Jesus, we assume (or we are taught by our ecclesial authorities), was not concerned with such literal matters as seeds and harvests, tenants and landlords, money and debt, judges and masters.  He simply wielded these folksy, familiar elements from the lives of his Galilean peasant listeners to direct their attention to far more important matters of the Spirit, matters of eternal significance.

These two stories, for instance, are not really about bread or widows and judges.

Or are they?  Maybe we should take a second look at the specific content of each story.

The first story is freighted with enormous cultural, moral, and religious significance.  Hospitality was a fundamental tenet not only of biblical Israel but of many cultures and communities of the ancient Mideast (and still is today).  For the Jews, the ancient tale of Abraham and Sarah showing hospitality to the visitors (Genesis 18:1-16) held a sacred place in their historical memory.  In the Genesis saga, it is pivotal in making possible the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham and Sarah of progeny – literally, the Jews might not exist if the elderly couple had refused hospitality.   The Letter to the Hebrews evokes this story, recognizing that hospitality is a sacred act of welcoming the divine in human form (13:2).

As Jesus spins the tale, his listeners would recognize that the friend faces a crisis:  He is unable to fulfill the fundamental obligation of hospitality.  He must do whatever he can, take desperate measures, so as not to fail and fall into shame.  The listeners also realize that the neighbor in bed likewise has a cultural and moral obligation to act – the duty of hospitality is communal.  His refusal to help is brazen and unacceptable.  He is aggravating the crisis by his failure to assist in hospitality to the visitor – the very fabric of community is at risk. As biblical scholar Robert Tannehill notes,“The scene presupposes the importance of hospitality of village life. To be unable to offer a meal to a guest would be a matter of great shame.”  In fact, the word often translated “boldness” is in fact related to the Greek word for shame or more specifically shamelessness – recognizing the possibility of social shame as a crux in the story.

These sorts of situations may well have been common.  Under the double burden of taxation from both imperial Rome and the corrupt Herodian regime, many Galilean peasant families struggled to make ends meet.  Economic times were hard.  Surplus bread was scarce.  Meeting the moral obligation of hospitality was not easy – but no less obligatory according to cultural mores.

It is significant that Luke has Jesus offering this story as a gloss on “the Lord’s Prayer,” which itself evokes the image of “our daily bread.”  This is a critical clue in fully comprehending this teaching:  How do the prayer, with its core image of daily bread, and the subsequent story of a crisis of bread inform and relate to each other?

First, we must grasp the full import of the all-too-familiar image of “our daily bread.”  Most Christians tend to hear it as quaint shorthand for our “spiritual” needs, and perhaps our general material sustenance.  God will take care of us.  God will make sure we have what we need.

In the biblical illiteracy which much of the church suffers from, we often miss Jesus’ clear evocation of the manna story in Exodus 16.  Or, even if we vaguely recognize the echo of that wilderness feeding story, we still tend to miss the profound significance of why and how Jesus appropriated this story into the core expression of Christian prayer.

Exodus 16 is not simply about one episode of miraculous provision to ward off hunger for the Israelites escaping slavery in Egypt.  By evoking the manna story, Jesus is also re-asserting the broader covenantal economic vision of the Israelite community.  At the heart of the story is the very concrete instruction from God that each family is to gather as much as they need, no more, no less (vv. 16-18). They are strictly forbidden to take extra or to hoard any (v. 19).  The core principle – enough for everyone – is a building block of the new community God is forming in contrast to imperial Egypt.

It is also at this point that the Sabbath is introduced – one of the most central and profound notions in Judaism. This story, with its seven-day cycle, becomes the bedrock upon which the later economic teachings are built:  the seventh Sabbatical Year, with its release of debts, freeing of slaves, and resting of the land; and the seventh-of-sevens Jubilee Year, with its redistribution of land (Deuteronomy 15, Leviticus 26).  The covenantal economics of biblical Israel also included the provisions of gleaning by those who were poor and extending economic care for widows, orphans, and (significantly for this parable) sojourners.

To ask God to provide us with our daily bread is also to acknowledge the holy vision of covenantal economics that is part of the liberation from the top-down, oppressive economics of Egypt – or of any worldly empire, founded on hoarding, inequities, slavery, and bondage.  (It’s no coincidence that the Lord’s Prayer also speaks of release of debts – another part of the sabbatical vision.)

All of that is embedded in Jesus’ simple image of daily bread.  So is it possible that when he goes on to tell a tale of bread, he is likewise implying that what is at stake is not just one hungry visitor, but the covenantal faithfulness of his people?  The midnight crisis of hospitality is, like the wilderness feeding, a “test” (Exodus 16:4).  Meeting the needs of this sojourner, especially in hard economic times of colonial rule, manifests whether God’s people can live out a spiritual and practical commitment to an economy of enough for everyone.  Or even that, faced with the political-economic vise-grip of Roman-Herodian oppression, Jesus is insisting that a return to covenantal, communal economics is the only hope for God’s people.

Are we reading too much into the text to suggest that the entire economic tradition of covenantal Israel is contained in this brief and simple anecdote?  It is worth noting that in Jesus’ “inaugural address” in Luke’s Gospel (4:16-19), he cites “the acceptable year of the Lord,” which is Isaian language referring to the Jubilee.  As John Howard Yoder and many other biblical commentators have noted, Luke is constantly citing aspects of the biblical Jubilee (parables of debt such as 16:1-13, the Zaccheus story in 19:1-10, and numerous teachings on wealth and poverty, just as some indications).  Luke understands the ministry and mission of Jesus to be no less than a new proclamation of Jubilee as part of the “reign of God.”  And the reign of God is the only authentic path of liberation from Roman oppression (really just another variation of Egyptian or Assyrian or Babylonian oppression).  So we must do all we can to feed the guest at midnight.  We must not allow anyone to go hungry.  We cannot let fear cause us to impede the flow of grace and the provision of enough manna/bread for everyone.

So what does this have to do with prayer?  Is it a matter of praying “hard enough”?  Or is it a matter of our prayer being rooted in the deep collective memory of God’s holiness, God’s gracious provision, and God’s insistence on covenantal justice?  Perhaps the provision of bread at midnight is not just a symbol to help us understand prayer – perhaps Jesus is reminding us that Christian prayer must always be linked to economic justice, to lives of discipleship that ensure enough for everyone, even in times of crisis and fear.

Nor is it coincidental or random that Jesus’ subsequent moral gloss includes the language “Knock and the door will be opened to you … to him who knocks, the door will be opened.”  Here again, we tend to read this as an open-ended notion of the efficacy of prayer: ask for anything, seek anything, pray for anything, and you will be satisfied – that is, God will respond by meeting your appropriately pious request.  But when we reflect carefully on the shrewd flow of this sequence – a prayer that includes a supplication for daily bread, a story about knocking on a door to plead for urgently needed bread, and a teaching about knocking on a door – a more focused and intentional meaning emerges:  True prayer is intrinsically a prayer for justice, which is intimately linked to a communal and covenantal practice of justice.  All our prayer, as followers of Jesus, must entail a prayer of enough bread for everyone; and our prayer-filled lives must be about ensuring enough bread for everyone.  (The prayer, after all, is not for “my” daily bread, but for “our” daily bread.)

Perhaps one could even make the radical suggestion that Jesus’ famous dictum, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you,” is not simply a description of God’s grace – it may also be describing what happens in a covenantal community rooted in prayer.  Here, too, Jesus is saying, part of prayer is nothing less than the imitation of God’s economy of grace.  The graciousness of God, who provides enough for all God’s children, is embodied by a community that is founded on a gracious provision of enough for everybody.  (Recall that a motif through much of the covenantal teachings spread throughout Torah are the powerful phrases “I am holy” and “Be holy” Leviticus 11:45, 19:2)

Did not Jesus also say, in the Lord’s Prayer, that God’s forgiveness of us is intimately tied to our forgiveness of others?  So, too, God’s meeting our needs is bound up with our meeting each other’s needs.

The parable of the widow and the judge likewise invites a multi-layered reading of the text.  Like the previous story of bread, it is not a random tale with a primarily metaphoric purpose.  The concrete details of the story are similarly steeped in the broad arc of the biblical tradition and narrative – as Jesus’ audience would have immediately recognized.

For Israelites, any story about or reference to widows was rife with significance.  Widows were given special protection in the communal and economic practices defined by the covenant.  Not only were provisions for care for widows carefully spelled out in Torah (Deuteronomy 24:19-21, 26:12-13, 27:20), the prophets frequently reminded the wayward people of the centrality of this obligation:  “Learn to do right! Seek justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow” (Isaiah 1:17).  “This is what the LORD Almighty says: ‘Administer true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another.  Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the alien or the poor’” (Zechariah 7:8-10a).

Likewise, the prophets decried the neglect of widows as a flagrant manifestation of Israel’s faithlessness and sin:   “So I will come near to you for judgment. I will be quick to testify against sorcerers, adulterers and perjurers, against those who defraud laborers of their wages, who oppress the widows and the fatherless, and deprive aliens of justice, but do not fear me, says the LORD Almighty” (Malachi 3:5).  “Your rulers are rebels, companions of thieves; they all love bribes and chase after gifts.  They do not defend the cause of the fatherless; the widow’s case does not come before them” (Isaiah 1:23).  In some of the more dramatic texts, the failure to bring justice to widows is so heinous that it warrants destruction of the nation:  “Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless.  What will you do on the day of reckoning, when disaster comes from afar?  To whom will you run for help?  Where will you leave your riches?  Nothing will remain but to cringe among the captives or fall among the slain.  Yet for all this, his anger is not turned away, his hand is still upraised” (Isaiah 10:1-4).  Jesus himself stands firmly in this prophetic tradition when he too condemns the exploitation of widows – suggesting no less than the destruction of Temple as the consequence of religious hypocrisy that leads to the impoverishment of widows (Mark 12:38—13:2).

This tradition was clearly recalled and honored in the earliest days of the church:  Acts 6 recounts efforts by the apostles to resolve a problem around economic protection of widows (Acts 6:1-6).  In his work with the nascent house churches, Paul gives meticulous instructions for care of widows (1 Timothy 5:1-16).

Jesus is doing with this story exactly what he did with the previous one:  describing a social and religious crisis.  A widow is being denied justice.  The scenario reverberates with echoes of Torah and the prophets.

The typical misstep in reading this story is to assume that the judge represents God (as we typically assume any authority figure in a story – a king, a landlord, a manager of an estate – must be God; this often gets us into hermeneutic trouble).  The widow’s persistent pleading is simply a metaphor for how we must persist in bringing our needs before God – the nature of the widow’s plea is irrelevant, and the content of our supplication is secondary.

If the point were simply to stress spiritual persistence, Jesus could have spun a tale like Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill – only with more positive results. But in fact, this is a story about widows and justice, and it is meant to remind the hearers of an ancient and sacred obligation.  Jesus is saying, as did Torah and the prophets before him, that ensuring justice for widows – and other vulnerable members of the community – is utterly central to what it means to know God and to be God’s holy people.  Jesus’ own gloss on the story is not simply that God answers any random prayer, but “will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” (vv. 7-8).

Just as the first story of prayer is Jesus’ reminder to the people of the tradition of economic justice, this one is a reminder of legal justice for the marginalized and oppressed.

Matthew’s version of Jesus’ teaching on “persistent prayer” makes the same point unambiguously. In the same Sermon on the Mount, where he presents the Lord’s Prayer and the “seek and you will find” dictum, the linchpin text is 6:33:  “Seek first the reign of God and God’s justice.”

A deeper engagement with these teachings of Jesus – including seeing how he is drawing on the ancient traditions of scripture – make it clear that it’s far more than a matter of “Pray hard enough and long enough and the prayer will be answered.”  Contrary to the insinuations of the prosperity theologians, it is irrelevant how “persistently” we pray to get that spanking new Jaguar.  The prayer of Jesus’ disciples is not a blank check, but has a very specific content and character:  bread, justice, holiness embodied in covenantal community.

If we were to risk a bottom-line “definition” of prayer, we might suggest it is the spiritual practice through which we seek to know God. Jesus responds to the disciples’ query about prayer with two profound and powerful assertions:  To know God through prayer is to know the justice of God – the justice that forgives, shares bread, and protects the vulnerable.  And prayer is intimately related to our active practice of discipleship. While we seek to know God in prayer, that knowing is deepened through the doing of justice, through our concrete, lived work of forgiving, sharing bread, and protecting the vulnerable.  (Jeremiah makes the same point in 22:5-16.)  Yes, there are discrete times of the specific discipline of what is traditionally called prayer, but Jesus is suggesting that a prayerful life is one that knows God by participating in the reign of God.  Which might also be what Paul means in urging us to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17).

Tragically, good church folks have often been so busy praying that they have ignored the crises of bread in the world or the numerous cries of vulnerable persons being denied basic justice.  We are frequently so piously fixated on heaven that we forget a core principle of Jesus’ prayer: “on earth as it is in heaven.” Jesus’ teaching on prayer is more holistic, richer, deeper – and more challenging.  But like Jesus, we might anxiously ask, when the Son of Man comes, will he find this kind of prayerful faith on the earth?