NOTES for Luk 11:1-10

The question about prayer addressed by the disciples to Jesus was quite traditional for Gospel times. In that era, learned rabbis and teachers of the Torah in general paid great attention to the question of prayer and prayer rules, their volume, form, and content. Proper prayer was considered the foundation of all a person's relationships with God; the word was given almost an independent meaning in the context of such relationships. It did not come to outright magic, of course, but there was more than enough formalism in the prescriptions concerning prayer rules. Jesus, however, offers His disciples a brief but spiritually extremely saturated prayer. Every word, every petition here is filled with deep meaning, and so much has been written about each over the two millennia of Christian history that, probably, a whole human life would not be enough to study only these commentaries on the Lord's Prayer.

But the point, of course, is not only in the theological saturation of that brief prayer which Jesus offers His disciples. The point, above all, is in its spiritual quality. It is no coincidence that the Savior gives the example of a person asking for help from his friend: after all, God is precisely a friend to man, and a friend, if he understands that the matter is serious, will not refuse to help. But for him to understand this, the request must be persistent and unrelenting.

A person who turns to God and does not himself completely believe that he will receive what is asked for, will most likely indeed receive nothing. And not because God hears such a person worse than a persistent one, but because persistence in this case is nothing other than an expression of the depth and intensity of the relationship binding the petitioner to God, and the depth of his trust in God — that without which there can be no relationship with God, without which turning to Him is useless.