Luke 11:1-13

6. Prayer: Luke 11:1-13.

Continuing still to advance leisurely, the Lord remained faithful to His habit of prayer. He was not satisfied with that constant direction of soul toward His Father, to which the meaning of the command, Pray without ceasing, is often reduced. There were in His life special times and positive acts of prayer. This is proved by the following words: When he ceased praying. It was after one of those times, which no doubt had always something solemn in them for those who surrounded Him, that one of His disciples, profiting by the circumstance, asked Him to give a more special directory on the subject of prayer. Holtzmann is just enough to protest against this preface, Luke 11:1, being involved in the wholesale rejection which modern criticism visits on those short introductions of Luke. He finds a proof of its authenticity in the detail so precisely stated: “ Teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples. ” It is, according to him, one of the cases in which the historical situation was expressly stated in the Logia.

The Lord's Prayer, as well as the instructions about prayer which follow, are placed by Matthew in the course of the Sermon on the Mount (chap. 6 and 7). Gess thinks that this model of prayer may have been twice given forth. Why might not a disciple, some months after the Sermon on the Mount, have put to Jesus the request which led Him to repeat it? And as to the context in Matthew, Luke 20:47 proves that much speaking belonged as much to the prayers of the Pharisees as to those of the heathen. That is true; but the prolixity to which the Lord's prayer is opposed in the Sermon on the Mount, and by means of which the worshipper hopes to obtain a hearing, has nothing to do with that ostentation before men which Jesus stigmatizes in Matthew 6 as characterizing the righteousness of the Pharisees. And the repetition of this model of prayer, though not impossible, is far from probable. What we have here, therefore, is one of those numerous elements, historically alien to the context of the Sermon on the Mount, which are found collected in this exposition of the new righteousness. The reflections regarding prayer, Matthew 7, belong to a context so broken, that if the connections alleged by commentators show to a demonstration what association of ideas the compiler has followed in placing them here, they cannot prove that Jesus could ever have taught in such a manner. In Luke, on the contrary, the connection between the different parts of this discourse is as simple as the occasion is natural. Here, again, we find the two evangelists such as we have come to know them: Matthew teaches, Luke relates.