You open up this door right this minute, you hear me
Persistence or Shamelessness?
This is our third post working through material from David Crump’s Knocking on Heaven’s Door on Prayer and the New Testament. Posts 1, and 2.
And he said to them, “Which of you shall have a mate, and go to him at midnight and would say to him, “Mate, give me a lend of three loaves, ’coz I got a mate here who’s come from a trip to me and I don’t have anything to give him.” And that guy inside’ll answer and say, “Don’t bother me! The door’s already locked and I’ve got me kids with me in bed; I can’t get up and give you something.”
Let me tell you, even if he won’t get up and give him something because he’s a mate, yet because of his shamelessness he’ll get up and give him as much as he needs.
Have you heard this passage, perhaps in a more familiar translation, and been encouraged to keep on praying, taught that if you only persevere in repeatedly bringing your request to God, earnestly and with great effort, he will eventually relent and answer that prayer? There are many encouragements in the Scriptures to persevere in prayer, but they are not by way of assuring us that repeated asking is a means to guarantee success.
The whole notion that if you pray repeatedly for the same thing, and with emotional urgency and intensity, sooner or later God will relent and answer that prayer, along with the language of “prayer warriors”, or “wrestling with God” in prayer, and so on, correlates, in some of the literature on prayer, with a 19th century idea of the world as basically mechanistic, and governed by “spiritual laws” which are counterparts to the “natural laws” we were discovering at the time. Therefore, if you pray like this, then this result will follow. A large amount of writing on prayer follows the same logic: here are the principles for praying, and if you follow them you’ll get what you want. The corollary then, is that if you don't pray according to the rules (and here the rules are “repetition and sufficiently emotionally intense prayer”), then you are responsible for not getting what you prayer for. Luke 11, however, does not teach us that.
The parable in Luke is immediately followed by Jesus’ famous ask/seek/knock statement of Jesus, which is important context for later. There are some elements of the parable that are straightforward: the householder represents God, the friend coming in the night represents someone praying. But there are two particular sticking points for interpreting this parable. Firstly, what is the meaning of ἀναίδεια (anaideia) in v8, which I have translated as shamelessness? Is it persistence, shamelessness, audacity, or what? Secondly, whose anaideia is in view? The use of pronouns (he, his, his, etc..) becomes unclear at that point in the narrative, so that it’s not immediately apparent if it’s the anaideia of the householder or the friend.
Though some translations render anaideia are “persistence”, that translation only exists because of reading this very parable. The word generally has a negative sense in Greek literature, referring "to people who have no proper sense of shame and willingly engage in improper conduct"[1] This in turn causes us problems. Is God a shameless fellow unwilling to hear prayers? Or is it shameless behaviour for believers to pray to God? Either way, is shamelessness a positive quality. On the other hand, the parable itself does not present any instance of repetitious or persistent request.
There are two interpretive helps that indeed help us over the speed-bump here. Firstly, recognising that the frame of the story is a rhetorical question that sets this us as an outrageous story, with the question in 11:5 "Which of you?"[2]
Secondly, that it's not a comparison but a contrast. The householder fails to respond out of friendship and is only moved by the outrageous willingness of the midnight visitor to cause a ruckus in the night. But God is not like this. So often in our reading of parables we assume that the point is “this is like that”, but we need to be alert that sometimes they work by saying, “this is not like that”.
Read in these terms, we can understand the shamelessness as the midnight friend's willingness to violate social norms in order to force/push/manipulate their sleeping friend into accommodating their need. What lesson are we meant to draw here? Not persistence at all, but "how much more may we depend on God not only to hear our prayers promptly and to respond freely, but to never consider our coming shameless!"[3]
God is graciously disposed to hear prayers, and we can approach at any time without a sense of shame. If this is the main point of the parable in v5-8, then when we read on to Jesus’ comments about asking, seeking, knocking, we are not already primed to see this as also about persistence. There isn’t any direct indication that you need to keep on knocking in order to get God to finally open the door. In fact, the idea that persistence leads to success in prayer and you will absolutely iron-clad guarantee eventually get what you ask for, is undermined by Luke 11:11-13 which makes clear that God knows, like a good father, what to give you, which is good things not harmful things. That element points us to God's good sovereignty in relation to prayer. He will persistently not give us what is not good for us, however long we ask. He will, however, give the best gift - the Holy Spirit.
Don’t mistake me, there are very good reasons for persevering in prayer, and the Scriptures certainly model and encourage believers to continue to present their requests to God, especially those that we have been commanded to pray. Luke 11:5-8 isn’t the only passage on prayer! At the same time, let’s not miss what is being taught here. A great deal of Jesus’ teachings on prayer are designed to teach us what God’s character is like, and so what to expect as we approach him in prayer. Here we are wonderfully encouraged by two great truths. That God, a good Father, knows what good things to give us, and will certainly not give us bad things (including those bad things we repeatedly and relentless ask him for). And that we ought never feel abashed or ashamed to come to him in prayer – it is never a flagrant violation of every social norm for a forgiven sinner to approach the King of Heaven with their smallest request, because we have been granted access through the Son. So let’s go to him in prayer.
[1] Klyne Snodgrass, “Anaideia and the Friend,” JBL (1997) 116(3): 506. Quoted in David Crump, Knocking on Heaven’s Door, Baker (2006), 67.
[2] It’s not clear in many translations that this is a question at all, partly because the syntax doesn’t flow smoothly in English.
[3] Crump, Knocking, 71.