The Prayer Arc: In Luke 18, Jesus Teaches How to Pray and How Far Prayer Goes
Welcome to my Substack newsletter. I have migrated what used to be my blog to this newsletter, where I intend to resume my occasional writing on the Bible, life, work, and observations that seem worth sharing. Readers who subscribed in the past will begin receiving emails again.
For my first piece following this relaunch, I am tackling a big subject. It recently occurred to me that prayer is the unifying topic of one entire chapter in the gospels. What appears to be a disconnected series of parables and scenes is actually Jesus leading a class in the finer points of how to think about prayer. I hope you find this valuable. —PZ
How should we pray?
Jesus’ disciples ask him this question in Luke’s gospel, chapter 11, and we can understand why. Prayer amounts to calling upon the most powerful force there is using the means most easily available to us. It is almost always conducted without sign of success or failure, and even without certainty about what “success” or “failure” ought to consist of. How do we know we are doing it right?
When we turn to God in prayer, how do we know we are not bothering the Creator with our ineptitude and our petty, self-interested appeals?
Jesus’ direct response to the question in Luke 11 is the Lord’s Prayer (Luke’s version of it), about which much could be said—a topic for another time. However, there was more to say. Much later, Luke chapter 18 quotes Jesus covering the topic of prayer in richer detail. How should we pray, what license does God give us, and where does prayer lead? Luke 18 addresses all of this. It is possible to miss this, because it’s not obvious from the presentation that this chapter of Luke is a master class in prayer.
Chapter and verse divisions in the Bible should not be taken too seriously. The numerical divisions were added centuries after the original writing; the original authors of the Bible’s texts would find them strange. Yet the separation of what is now called Luke chapter 18 into a discrete and distinct chapter seems to be a well-chosen commentary on the text. At a distance, this chapter appears to consist of a disconnected series of parables and encounters. Closer scrutiny reveals an arc that runs through the series. The parables and encounters in this chapter are all pieces of what can be seen as a single coherent teaching about our personal approach to God.
What follows is my attempt to follow that arc of Luke 18, and the points it develops about how and why we pray.
But first, the characters.
Dramatis Personae
Seven parties appear in Luke 18, all of them approaching or appealing to the Lord in different ways. Some are characters in Jesus’ parables. Some are real people Jesus addresses. In the order in which they appear in the chapter, they are….
1. The persistent widow. In Jesus’ allegorical parable, she repeatedly asks a judge for justice.
2. The Pharisee, who in a parable thanks God that he is more righteous (in his view) than others.
3. The tax collector, who in the same parable asks for mercy.
4. The children.
5. The rich young ruler, who claims to obey the commandments and asks Jesus about eternal life.
6. The Twelve, Jesus’ own closest disciples, who understand none of what Jesus tells them about his coming capture, execution, and resurrection.
7. The blind man, to whom Jesus gives the ability to see.
The course of teaching that will include these seven parties begins with Jesus telling a story about “the need ... to pray always and not become discouraged” (Luke 18:1). This is the simple message of the story involving the first of these parties, the parable of the persistent widow.
The Widow: Bother God
The parable of the persistent widow (18:2-6) is about a widow who repeatedly comes before a judge to ask, “Give me justice against my adversary.” (Lengthy scripture quotes will slow down this essay, so I will use quotes sparingly and tend to summarize.) The judge in the parable does not care about the widow or justice, but gives her what she seeks simply because she pesters him so much. If repeated appeals can move an unjust judge, says Jesus, then consider the effect appeals will have before One who does care about the widow and justice. The message: Bother God.
When we withhold prayers from God, pride lurks behind our alleged humility and reserve. That pride is not hard to see. If we judge that certain appeals we might make are unworthy before God, then this implies we know our other appeals are worthy. We presume to have God’s number—we know what he wants, and what he really wants to hear.
In fact, all our prayers are petty. And they are all glorious, even the prayers that are self-seeking. We are small, yet made by God. All our wishes (base or noble) are also made by God. The justice we believe we are crying out for might be real justice, or it might be our twisted selfishness masquerading as a need for justice within our skewed view of the world. In either case, God might grant what we cry for, or he might grant something different, according to understanding that belongs to God alone. We know all this. However, and here is the key: He can be moved.
That is the promise contained in this parable, or the possibility. He is there and he listens. Prayer begins with this trust. We stand on that trust by pouring out to him, by making the appeals. “Bother me” is inherently a statement of “I want to hear from you.” I want what you will bring to me. When we hold back or decline to pray out of the fear we know what God wants to hear, we are entirely misunderstanding what he wants to hear. This is the first of the teachings on prayer in this series. The first teaching is, simply, to pray.
The Pharisee and the Tax Collector: Bless This Mess
Next is the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector (parties two and three out of the seven). In this parable, the Pharisee stands in the temple to pray, “God, I thank you that I’m not like other people—greedy, unrighteous, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of everything I get” (18:11-12). God, thank you that I am so awesome.
Undoubtedly his claims are accurate. The Pharisee would not have publicly proclaimed these things before the God he believes in if he thought others might know them to be false, let alone if he knew God knew them to be false. He prayed true statements about himself. And his purpose was not necessarily to brag. In his ability to remain true to God’s law (aspects of it, at least), he experiences freedom markedly better than what comes of the pagan faiths around him. In the extent of his faithfulness to the law and his devotions, he really was awesome—given glimpses of the awe that comes of spiritual peace.
But his self-deception and pride are found in what he fails to offer up in this public prayer. Life is growth, and devotion to God is surrender. The Pharisee could do all the things he mentioned—obey commandments, observe devotions—so he wanted to do only these things. He wanted to be done, boxes checked, and go no farther. Yet there is always farther to go in this brief life, always more than this to see. The Pharisee had some mess or incompleteness he was concealing beneath the tidiness of the checked boxes.
In Jesus’ telling of the story, the one who prayed fittingly is the one the Pharisee mentioned dismissively in his own prayer: the tax collector. We guess he was a thief, because a tax collector in this time and place essentially lived by graft over and above the taxes he collected. Whatever the nature of his offense, he knew he was a sinner and stated this openly. “The tax collector ... would not even raise his eyes to heaven but kept striking his chest and saying, ‘God, turn your wrath from me—a sinner!’” (18:13). God, I am a mess. I know it and you know it!
The tax collector was the one justified in his prayer, said Jesus. The tax collector’s simple, honest prayer of open and even helpless self-disclosure is the one that is moving to the Lord. As the Bible states elsewhere:
You do not want a sacrifice, or I would give it;
You are not pleased with a burnt offering.
The sacrifice pleasing to God is a broken spirit.
God, you will not despise a broken and humbled heart.
—Psalm 51:16-17
Let the Children Come
Now comes what may be the apex of Jesus’ teaching in this chapter. Apex, because it comes at the center. We modern readers are trained by our own culture’s story structures in ways that can leave us overlooking key points in biblical texts. In the way stories were structured in some ancient traditions, including in Hebrew writings, it is the center of the story that often states the point most directly. Our modern essays state their main point at the start and our modern tales build toward their conclusion at the end. But writings out of the places and times from which our scriptures come sometimes make their point in the middle.
The middle of the arc of seven parties in Luke 18 is the children. After Jesus had told his parables of the widow and the Pharisee and tax collector, people wanted to bring their small children to Jesus. But they were prevented from doing so—Jesus’ handlers presumably considered him too busy and serious to give his attention to kids. Seeing this, Jesus says, “Let the little children come to me.... Whoever does not welcome the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it” (18:16-17). That last part, the possibility of never entering the kingdom, would have captured his hearers’ attention. It is hard not to see this moment as delivering the key point Jesus aims to make with this line of teaching.
“Like a little child,” Jesus says—this is the way to regard God and what he rules. This is the way to approach God.
So: How do little children make their approach? How do kids regard God or any grownup?
Little commentary is needed here. We know how children approach. They do so in openness and helplessness before one who knows more. They approach in wonder, without guile or agenda, and in full trust, until and unless that trust has somehow been betrayed. It is the trust of small children that we find the most touching, and so disarming, because this trust is the principal thing that each of us has lost.
But not entirely? The broken shards of wide-eyed, guileless trust that we do still possess, whatever little those pieces amount to: We are to gather them together and look through them as we appeal to the Creator.
If we seek and advance with trust, then the Creator’s own kingdom is what we will be able to find.
The Ruler: I See What You Want
From this point on in Jesus’ teaching in Luke 18, he is done with parables. He has further points to make about approaching God, but he makes them now through encounters with people—real people more complicated than the characters in stories.
The first of these is the rich young “ruler,” as he is called in the text, though what he rules is never specified. This wealthy and impressive man came before Jesus with a question. He made clear that he obeys the commandments and has long done so. Unlike the allegorical Pharisee, however, the ruler understands there is farther to go. The rich young ruler asks: How can I have eternal life? (18:18).
It is a good question. It is the right question. Life is the gift of God; life is what God wants us to have. In a different context, Jesus explains this as his purpose: “I have come that they may have life and have it in abundance” (John 10:10). This very thing that God wants us to have, how can we have it the way God wants?
Jesus listens to the ruler. He listens to the claim about obeying commandments. He lists commandments and accepts, does not refute, that the man had indeed obeyed them. That left just one more thing to do.
Jesus says, “You still lack one thing: Sell all that you have and distribute it to the poor.... Then come, follow me” (18:22).
Hearing this, the rich man left the conversation “extremely sad” (18:23).
Are we still talking about prayer? Indeed we are! We are talking about coming before God, the essence of what we do in prayer. The account of the rich young ruler’s encounter with Jesus is all about this. Again, all that we lay before God in prayer is petty, in a sense, but in another sense all of it also has a point. We are God’s handiwork; he made us as we are; he made us for his love and his purposes. We come to him in prayer with all that concerns us and all that is uncertain or incomplete because solving all of this in ways that align with God’s plans for our lives will serve to release more of the freedom and fullness of who we might be, who he made us to be. All this praying to God points in one direction and has one ultimate aim, and that aim is God.
The ruler almost but not quite sees this. He wants eternal life, but what is it he imagines when he asks for this? On offer is the life of fullness and joy, the life against which our current experience of life is a shadow, the life of problems solved because God is ever near, the life in which we see him and love him with unveiled eyes and a heart healed and made whole. Is this what the young ruler wants, is this what he knows would satisfy him, or does he instead want inclusion in the larger kingdom while still somehow holding onto the status and riches he enjoys in the current kingdom? His sadness makes the answer plain.
And I would be sad, too. Any of us might be sad in his position. Money brings protection, and comfort, and the respect and attention of others. The system should not work this way, but it does, and money is the thing whose power is most starkly apparent to us in this broken world.
God can be moved. But now: Can we? That is the question the encounter with the ruler raises. Can we be moved from the system that transfixes us today?
Through the lens of that question, we can see the sense of Jesus’ response to the ruler. “Sell all that you have….” If you have nothing left to ask of me but eternal life, then live that eternal life now! Live according to the values of the better system, the perfect system, on which the eternal kingdom is built.
The ruler was offered the chance to stop being a ruler and become like a child. Let the children come, Jesus had said. The ruler turned and left.
But let us not be too hard on the rich young ruler. There is more than this to say.
The Twelve: Possible With God
Again, had I been the rich young ruler, I believe I would have walked away sad as well. I imagine I, too, would have held to my riches even as I knew I would not need them in the kingdom near to God. And the disciples surrounding Jesus seemingly perceived the same thing. Immediately after the ruler went away, a discussion broke out among them. If the ability to surrender the protection of wealth is a requirement for the kingdom of God, they ask, “Then who can be saved?” (18:26).
Who indeed?
Jesus replies, “What is impossible with man is possible with God” (18:27).
This is a famous line from the Bible. Many of us are familiar with it. We hear it this way, quoted alone and out of context. But importantly, within context of the complete text, it is no vague or mystical statement. Jesus has more to say immediately after this; he goes to provide explanation. That is, Jesus goes on in the text as we have it to describe explicitly how God makes the impossible possible. Jesus takes the Twelve aside, his closest disciples, and he tells them in literal, non-allegorical detail what is to come. It’s just that they could not understand it in the moment.
He says to them: “Listen! We are going up to Jerusalem. Everything that is written through the prophets about the Son of Man will be accomplished. For he will be handed over to the Gentiles, and he will be mocked, insulted, spit on; and after they flog him, they will kill him, and he will rise on the third day” (18:31-33).
We have established that God can be moved.
Then came the next question: Can we be moved?
Now we are dealing with the answer.
The answer is no. We cannot be moved. Not in this state. Not with the world this way, not with people’s hearts and spirits this way. Every one of us is a rich young ruler over his or her own life.
So Jesus said to his disciples: I am going to be executed, I am going to die, I am going to rise from the dead—because all this is what it will take to change the world so that some human beings can be changed into people who can be saved.
Our aim in prayer is God. God, and the kingdom with him, is what we really want, and ultimately why we pray every prayer we do. But we cannot have this, we cannot have the true object of our prayer; we are too consumed with this world, too overcome. We cannot have him—except for what God did to allow us to have God.
The text says the Twelve “understood none of these things ... they did not grasp what he said” (18:34). Fortunately, they did not have to. Their understanding was not a precondition.
They set out, going to Jerusalem just as Jesus said. They did not understand what was coming even though Jesus had explained it. Along the way, they drew near to Jericho. And as they did, they passed a blind beggar, the seventh and final party in this arc of Jesus’ teaching.
The Beggar: A Simple Question
Who are the ones among us living nearest to the way of God’s kingdom, whose example we should see and appreciate?
A blind beggar might be easy to look past. In the extent of our fear, shame, and helplessness upon seeing a blind beggar, we might find no response we can cope with except to look away. The text of Luke’s gospel says nothing about the identity of the beggar whom Jesus and the Twelve met; history will never know his name. Yet his story fills the last nine verses of the chapter, and it recaps the entire arc of the teaching about prayer. In the encounter with the beggar, all of this occurs:
The beggar cries out to Jesus, is told to keep quiet, and cries out to Jesus again (18:38-39). In other words, like the widow of the parable, he persists.
His repeated cry: “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” That is, his appeal is that of the tax collector, not the Pharisee.
Jesus stops. He commands that the beggar be brought to him (18:40). As with the children: Let him come.
And we see the beggar following as the rich young ruler was instructed to follow. The beggar asks one thing of Jesus, the obvious thing, and for him it is the end of his asking. He asks for sight and Jesus heals him, giving him his sight (18:42). From that point the beggar follows Jesus, glorifying God. And his joy becomes others’ joy. And his witness (literally) to the real and loving power of God brings clarity and freedom to others.
“All the people, when they saw it, gave praise to God” (18:43).
That verse is the end of Luke 18, the chapter we have been considering. Yet there is more to say. Even in this recap, even in the blind beggar’s story, even in the nine-verse-long segment of scripture conveying this part of the arc about prayer, the main point is in the middle. The heart of the story of the blind beggar is in this story’s center.
In the middle of the passage about the beggar, when Jesus has the man brought to him as the children were allowed to come, Jesus faces the man and asks a simple question.
It is a question as plain and frank then as it still is now.
Jesus says to the beggar, “What do you want me to do for you?” (18:41).
Jesus Christ, the incarnate deity who came to serve. Jesus, who as a man embodied the will and desires of the Creator toward his creatures.
What do you want me to do for you?
We wonder whether God responds to prayer. We wonder whether he will grant our appeal. Here is our answer: He does respond; he responds to every prayer. He responds before the appeal is even made.
We appeal to God, we open this window in our soul toward his attention, and he is there. He is already there.
Imagine it. We choose to open that window. He is there leaning through it when we do.
What do you want me to do for you?
When he says “me” in this question, he means the Creator of all the cosmos.
When he says “you” in this question, he means the one so tiny, with concerns so self-regarding.
The arc of Jesus’ teaching about prayer comes ultimately to this: not a final statement of instruction, but a question to a figure crying out to him. “What do you want me to do for you?” says the Lord Jesus Christ. We pray, and this is the response we meet. A question—a simple question. In the way this response ratifies the desire of the Lord to hear from us, to meet us in our need, it overcomes the premise by which our prayers are withheld. A simple question, yet one that refutes our reserve, and upends the false theology, founded on our pride, that says God might tire of our praying.
Photo: “Ethiopia: Innocent Prayers of a Young Child” by Steve Evans