Lord, teach us to pray
1 One day Jesus was pray ing in a certain place and when he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.”
2 And Jesus said to them, “When you pray, say this:
Father, hallowed be your name,
may your kingdom come,
3 give us each day the kind of bread we need,
4 and forgive us our sins, for we also for give all who do us wrong,
and do not bring us to the test.”
5 Jesus said to them, “Sup pose one of you has a friend and goes to his house in the middle of the night and says: ‘Friend, lend me three loaves,
6 for a friend of mine who is traveling has just arrived and I have nothing to offer him.’
7 Maybe your friend will answer from inside: ‘Don’t bother me now; the door is locked and my children and I are in bed, so I can’t get up and give you anything.’
8 But I tell you, even though he will not get up and attend to you be cause you are a friend, yet he will get up because you are a bother to him, and he will give you all you need.
9 And so I say to you, ‘Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and it will be opened to you.
10 For the one who asks receives, and the one who searches finds, and to him who knocks the door will be opened.
11 If your child asks for a fish, will you give a snake instead?
12 And if your child asks for an egg, will you give a scorpion?
13 Even you evil people know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more then will the Father in heaven give holy spirit to those who ask him!”
Jesus and Beelzebul
14 One day Jesus was driving out a dumb demon. When the de mon had been driven out, the mute person could speak, and the people were amazed.
15 Yet some of them said, “He drives out demons by the power of Beelzebul, the chief of the demons.”
16 So others wanted to put him to the test by asking him for a heavenly sign.
17 But Jesus knew their thoughts and said to them, “Every nation divided by civil war is on the road to ruin, and will fall.
18 If Satan also is divided, his em pire is coming to an end. How can you say that I drive out demons by calling upon Bee lze bul?
19 If I drive them out by Beelzebul, by whom do your fellow mem bers drive out demons? They will be your judges, then.
20 But suppose I drive out demons by the finger of God; would not this mean that the kingdom of God has come upon you?
21 As long as the strong and armed man guards his house, his goods are safe.
22 But when a stronger one attacks and overcomes him, the challenger takes away all the weapons he relied on and disposes of his spoils.
23 Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me, scatters.
24 When the evil spirit goes out of a person, it wanders through dry lands looking for a resting place. And finding none, it says, ‘I will re turn to my house from which I came.’
25 When it comes, it finds the house swept and everything in order.
26 Then it goes to fetch seven other spirits even worse than itself. They move in and settle there, so that the last state of that person is worse than the first.”
27 As Jesus was speaking, a woman spoke from the crowd and said to him, “Blessed is the one who bore you and nursed you!”
28 Jesus replied, “Surely blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it as well.”
29 As the crowd increased, Jesus began to speak in this way, “People of the present time are evil people. They ask for a sign, but no sign will be given to them except the sign of Jonah.
30 As Jonah became a sign for the people of Nineveh, so will the Son of Man be a sign for this generation.
31 The Queen of the South will rise up on Judgment Day with the people of these times and accuse them, for she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of So lomon; and here there is greater than Solomon.
32 The people of Nineveh will rise up on Judgment Day with the people of these times and accuse them, for Jonah’s preaching made them turn from their sins, and here there is greater than Jonah.
33 You do not light a lamp to hide it; rather you put it on a lampstand so that people coming in may see the light.
34 Your eye is the lamp of your body. If your eye sees clearly, your whole person benefits from the light; but if your eyesight is poor, your whole person is without light.
35 So be careful lest the light inside you become darkness.
36 If your whole person receives the light, having no part that is dark, you will become light, as when a lamp shines on you.”
Woe to you, Pharisees!
37 As Jesus was speaking, a Pharisee asked him to have a meal with him. So he went and sat at table.
38 The Pharisee then wondered why Jesus did not first wash his hands before dinner.
39 But the Lord said to him, “So then, you Pharisees, you clean the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside yourselves you are full of greed and evil.
40 Fools! He who made the outside, also made the inside.
41 But according to you, by the mere giving of alms everything is made clean.
42 A curse is on you, Pharisees; for the Temple you give a tenth of all, including mint and rue and the other herbs, but you neglect justice and the love of God. This ought to be practiced, without neglecting the other.
43 A curse is on you, Pha risees, for you love the best seats in the synagogues and to be greeted in the marketplace.
44 A curse is on you for you are like tombstones of the dead which can hardly be seen; people don’t notice them and make themselves unclean by stepping on them.”
45 Then a teacher of the Law spoke up and said, “Master, when you speak like this, you insult us, too.”
46 And Jesus answered, “A curse is on you also, teachers of the Law. For you prepare unbearable burdens and load them on the people, while you yourselves don’t move a finger to help them.
47 A curse is on you, for you build memorials to the prophets your ancestors killed.
48 So you approve and agree with what your ancestors did. Is it not so? They got rid of the prophets, and now you can build!”
49 (The Wisdom of God also said,) “I will send prophets and apostles and this people will kill and persecute some of them.
50 But the pre sent generation will have to answer for the blood of all the prophets that has been shed since the foundation of the world,
51 from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who was murdered between the altar and the sanctuary. Yes, I tell you, the people of this time will have to answer for them all.
52 A curse is on you, teachers of the Law, for you have taken the key of knowledge. You yourselves have not entered, and you prevented others from entering.”
53 As Jesus left that place, the teachers of the Law and the Phari sees began to harass him,
54 asking him endless questions, setting traps to catch him in something he might say.
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Comments Luke, Chapter 11
• 11.1 The apostles already knew how to pray and they prayed in common, as all the Jews did, in the synagogue and at key times during the day. Yet, in living close to Jesus they discovered a new way to live in close fellowship and they felt a need to address the Father differently. Jesus waited for them to ask him to teach them how to pray. See Mt 6:9.
• 5. Jesus urges us to ask with perseverance without ever getting tired of asking but, rather, “tiring” God. God will not always give us what we ask for, nor in the way we ask, since we do not know what is good for us. He will give us a holy spirit, or a clearer vision of his will and, at the same time, the courage to follow it.
Knock and it will be opened to you (v. 9). A page from Father Molinie is a commentary on this verse. “If God does not open up at once, it is not because he enjoys making us wait. If we must persevere in prayer, it is not because we need a set number of invocations, but rather because a certain quality, a certain way of prayer is required. If we were able to have that at the beginning, our prayer would be heard immediately.
“Prayer is the groaning of the Holy Spirit in us as Saint Paul says. Yet, we need repetition for this groaning to open a path in our stony heart, just as the drop of water wastes away the hardest rocks. When we have repeated the Our Father and the Hail Mary with perseverance, one day we can pray them in a way that is in perfect harmony with God’s will. He himself was waiting for this groaning, the only one which can move him since, in fact, it comes from his own heart.
“As long as we have not played this note, or rather, drawn it from within, God cannot be conquered. It is not that God defends himself since he is pure tenderness and fluidity, but as long as there is nothing similar in us, the current cannot pass between him and us. Man gets tired of praying, yet if he perseveres instead of losing heart, he will gradually let go of his pride until being exhausted and overcome, he obtains much more than he could have wished for.”
PETITIONS – THE SAINTS
Jesus invites us to ask with perseverance: persevering petitions cease being self-centered and become prayer, that is, they lift us up and bring us closer to God.
What about asking the saints? We must admit that, very often, the person who begs from the saints takes a road opposed to real prayer. Such a person is not interested in discovering God’s mercy, but in obtaining some favor. She does not care whom she addresses as long as she finds an efficient and automatic dispenser of benefits. So begins the search for saints, shrines and devotions.
The Church is a family. Just as we ask our friends to pray for us, so too and much more should we ask our brothers and sisters, the saints. No one will criticize us if, at times, we show our confidence in their intercession, especially the intercession of those whom we admire more because we know their lives and their deeds. This “petition” to the saints should not, however, be confused with perseverance in asking, which introduces us into God’s mystery. Only Mary, the mother of God can accompany us in that prayer because God made her our mother; because he deposited in her all the compassion he has for us; and because he united her to himself in such a way that when we look at her, we always find the living presence of God.
• 14. See commentary on Mark 3:22 and Matthew 12:23.
By the finger of God (v. 20). In Exodus 8:15 the same expression is used to designate the power of God working miracles.
• 23. Whoever is not with me… This phrase seems to contradict Luke 9:50: Who ever is not against you is with you. In fact, in Luke 9:50 Jesus admits that his spiritual family goes much beyond the visible group of his disciples: those who, without belonging to the church, work for the same goals, must be considered as friends.
In Luke 11:23, on the other hand, Jesus speaks of people who refuse to stand with him and his message and who want to remain uncommitted: they do not join him, and later they will criticize him.
• 24. The Jews believed that evil spirits preferred to live in the desert or, rather, that God had banished them there (Tb 8:3). Here Jesus is speaking of people who only believe for a while because they do not repent enough of their past sins. They enjoyed listening to the word, but they did not take the costly measures that would have allowed them to heal the root of evil. See commentary on Mt 12:43.
• 27. Blessed is the one who bore you! This woman envies the mother of Jesus and is full of admiration for his way of speaking. She is mistaken if she thinks that Jesus’ relatives can be proud on his account, and she is wasting her time if she admires his words instead of making them her own. So Jesus turns her towards the Father, whose word he gives, and to herself, whom God invites to the family of his sons and daugh ters.
As for Mary, the mother of Jesus, the one who believed (1:45), she kept all the words and deeds of the Lord in her heart (Lk 2:51).
• 29. The Ninevites, being sinners, re ceived no other divine sign than the coming of Jonah, who invited them to repent. Jesus’ contemporaries believe they are “good” because they belong to the people of God, and they do not realize that the hour has come for them to repent as well.
The people of Nineveh will rise up with these people and accuse them (v. 32). Jesus again uses the traditional image of collective judgment where each one excuses himself by pointing out that others have done worse. This image retains a deep truth: all that God has given to each one of us should produce fruits for all humanity.
• 37. See commentary on Matthew 23.
The Bible does not demand these ritual purifications that Mark also mentions in 7:3, but the teachers of Jesus’ time insisted that they were necessary. Jesus rebels against these new religious obligations. Why do they not pay more attention to inner purification?
Then we read about the reproaches Jesus addressed to the Pharisees on various occasions. If Luke like Matthew has kept these very hard words of Jesus, it was perhaps a reminder that the Gospel goes much further than the vision of the Pharisees, so concerned, as they claimed, for the service of God. Some of them were part of the first Chris tian community, and were influential (Acts 15:5). Doubtless, the hostile attitude adopted by the par ty of the Pharisees in the fol low ing years accounts for the remembrance of these reproach es. There are surely others and deeper reasons for the many warnings we read in Scripture about Pharisees.
Entering the new covenant is a free gift from God. It is also a gift from God to possess a good knowledge of Christian doctrine, or exercise a special ministry in the Church, or belong to a Christian group committed for their faith. Nevertheless there is always the danger to behave as an elite group, thus losing the true humility that should lead us to occupy the last places, where we really should be.
• 49. Those who, before Luke, wrote down this saying of Jesus: I will send prophets… (which we also read in Mt 23:34), introduced it with the formula: “Wisdom says,” which was a way of designating Jesus. When Luke placed these lines with in Jesus’ discourse, he forgot to take out these words. Removing them would have made the text a lot clearer.
See commentary on Matthew 23:34. Jesus states that the Pharisees and the teachers of the Law will be mainly responsible for the persecution against the first Christians (against those apostles and prophets he is going to send).
The warning of Jesus is equally relevant for Christian institutions and all those who in one way or another guide the com munity. We too, per haps, build a church for the “elite” who un -conscious ly despise the poor and the lowly. So very quick ly were the prophets paralyzed or eliminated.
You yourselves have not entered, and you prevented others from entering (v. 52). Is not this one of the reasons why so many simple people go to other churches?