July 28, Ordinary 17C (Luke 11:1–13)

What if the surface of the Gospels were smooth as glass, their themes unified, outlines evident, and imagery integrated? What if they didn’t jump around like a ride on a rough road and show light through the cracks? What if a single tone of serious religiosity pervaded the whole and expected from its readers a uniform response of equanimous acceptance? What would be the fun of that? Where would be the challenge? Instead we are provoked by the questions in the text and others unexpressed.

This week’s passage from Luke slides from piety to pratfall, from rhythmic reassurance to absurd exaggeration, and lands with a not totally convincing summary about the Holy Spirit. The raggedness of the Gospel surface invites readers to discover the logic between the parts and to try to make sense of the whole.

Critical Gospel studies would explain that this highly valued tradition about the prayer that Jesus taught was preserved in a written source shared by Matthew and Luke. One version, likely earlier than the one found in Matthew, was placed by the writer of Luke into what François Bovon calls an “artificial but plausible” narrative context. The evangelist follows it with a humorous parable linked to the prayer by the themes of asking, giving, and bread. A series of sapiential sayings follows, using the keywords knock and ask. Then a rhetorical question makes an implied comparison between human parents and God. Luke draws the sequence together with a saying about the Holy Spirit, a central motif in the Gospel of Luke. Another way to account for the sequence is that it reflects Jesus’ own logic and rhetorical strategy as he moves from one topic to another.