The Friend at Midnight - Luke 11:1-13

It’s interesting because I used to have a rule when I was going through the Book of Mormon that any down time I had must be devoted to a blog post for that day before I did anything else. It went really well because I was working the night shift and kind of had a routine, but as I transitioned into the day shift and then to a new job, I’ve been slacking quite a bit. Actually, I’ve noticed that my spirituality has been slacking a lot since I moved. I used to give up the chance to sleep in for the chance to go to the temple, granted it was guaranteed that I would sleep through the session, now with temples literally 15 minutes away from me, I don’t give it the priority that it deserves. Now that I have more down time, I spend less time on my scripture study, and now that I am home at night with my kids, I haven’t established the routine and relationship that I thought that I would. I have definitely noticed a lack of spiritual influence in my life, and I’m pretty sure that it’s because I have become lax in what matters most. We still read scriptures most nights, but we don’t discuss them like we used to, we still usually say family prayers morning and night but they are really repetitive and something to get out of the way instead of communing with God. I’ve come to realize that all the chaos in my home is my fault, my children make their own choices but they are growing and learning and they are still children. If my house is a mess, it’s my fault, not because I am the only one capable to cleaning it, but because I don’t provide the guidance and support my children need to learn the task of cleaning and the purpose of keeping things clean. If I feel distant from my children, it’s my fault, not because I control their attitudes but because they are immature and as the adult it’s my responsibility to set an example for them of how to calmly and reasonably deal with difficult interactions. If we are spending way too much money going out to eat and therefore not feeling well because we are not nurturing our bodies correctly, then that’s my fault because I am the one with the money and the car and the responsibility to provide good food for my kids.

When I first started doing daily family prayer and scripture study and family home daytime about 4 years ago, I was prompted by the Holy Ghost to make this a priority in my family, and initially my answer was, “I don’t have time, I work the night shift, I barely see my kids for 45 minutes a day, how can I possibly make these things happen during that time?” My answer was “if you can’t make these things a priority with the time that you have, then you won’t make them a priority when you have more time.” So I made it happen, and we’ve done really well with it. We have morning prayer as I was mostly asleep right before they left for school, and we said evening prayers right before I left to go to work. We did scripture study by listening to the church’s recordings of the Book of Mormon being read while driving home from school, and then talking about it briefly, and did family home daytime on Tuesdays after the kids got out of school early, because that’s the only time we were all together during the week for longer than 10 minutes. I fought so hard for those routines, so why do I let them go now? In the 4 years that we’ve been reading the Book of Mormon everyday, we’ve only missed a handful of times and all of those times have been since we moved to Utah, I find that to be not only ironic, but also very fulfilling of the prompting that I had all those years ago. So basically, what I’m saying is that I need to get my stuff together.

Jesus is teaching in the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazurus but the next that we are told, it seems that he is praying “in a certain place” with his disciples.  His disciples ask him to teach them how to pray, “as John also taught his disciples.” Jesus agrees to teach them and goes over the Lord’s prayer almost verbatim as he did during the Sermon on the Mount. We covered the Lord’s prayer on the Sermon on the Mount pretty extensively over three days of discussion, so I’m not going to go over it again here, but Jesus does go on to teach a parable about how God answers prayers. With the JST inserted, Jesus says, “And he said unto them, Your heavenly Father will not fail to give unto you whatsoever ye ask of him. And he spake a parable saying, which of you shall have a friend, and shall go unto him at midnight, and say unto him, Friend, lend me three loaves; For a friend of mine in his journey is come to me, and I have nothing to set before him?” This calls back to the strict policy of hospitality that was present in ancient Israel, if a friend comes to you for a place to stay during a journey, they are to be permitted to enter and treated as guests in all the finery and food that entails. This man is under obligation to provide food for his unexpected guests and needs help from his neighbor. Jesus suggests that the neighbor’s answer might be “from within… Trouble me not: the door is not shut, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot rise and give thee.”

One of the things that I absolutely love about studying the Bible is that the whole Christian world has spent centuries dissecting and expounding on this text in ways that I would never have imagined. I’ve struggled with this parable because it doesn’t really make sense to me, but with the IM and the input of other Bible scholars, I can get multiple view points and understand it more than I would on my own, or just with the LDS explanations. In fact, one of the points that this parable makes is dissected in a 93 page paper with another very short parable that Jesus gives later, so basically 10 to 15 verses are contemplated over 93 pages, I’m going to have to read that, but it might take awhile.

The neighbor who answers basically, “leave me alone, we’re sleeping” says, “my children are with me in bed,” which is an ancient Palestinian custom. Most rural and poorer people in that area at the time of Christ had a single room home, where towards the back there was a raised pallet. At night, this raised platform served as the family’s bed, with the mother and father sleeping on either end with the children tucked in the middle. I read this; it wasn’t something that I already knew. He didn’t want to get out of bed, possibly wake up his wife and children, in order to spend time doing what this other guy wants. It also makes me wonder if the man would have had to perhaps bake the bread or something like that, because it seems straightforward enough to simply get the bread and shove it out the door, but it seems like it might have been more involved then that. Apparently, the man asking for the bread isn’t going to take no for an answer and keeps banging on the door and asking, it doesn’t say that explicitly in the parable but Jesus uses the word “importunity” indicating that this guy was persistent. Finally the man in the house decides, “either I can get up and give this guy what he wants or he’s going to bang on the door all night, waking up my kids and neighbors and no one will get any sleep.”

Relenting to the persistent friend, Jesus says, “Though he will not rise and give him, because he is his friend, yet because of his importunity he will rise and give him as many as he needeth.” Wikipedia says that in this parable “a friend eventually agrees to help his neighbor due to his persistent demands rather than because they are friends, despite the late hour and the inconvenience of it.” We are quick to judge people in the scriptures or parables for their attitudes and behavior, and that’s probably human nature, but if I get woken up in the middle of the night for something, it better be good. Jesus expounds his parable saying, “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you. For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened. If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will for a fish give him a serpent? Or is he shall ask an egg, will he offer him a scorpion?”

How does this relate to the parable? Let’s think about it. The man literally asked for bread, and eventually was given bread, not a stone, which would have been useless, like the answer of “no” was. If we think about this in terms of prayer, if we ask Heavenly Father for something, does he give us something useless? No, nothing he ever gives us is useless. If we ask for something, does he send us a serpent? I always thought that it was interesting that Jesus used the serpent here, why not use something else, why was it a serpent? The only reason that I thought there might be something more too it is because the serpent is a representation of Satan, so maybe it means, if we ask for something life sustaining, like food, does God give us evil or temptation instead? That’s an interesting way to think about it.

What about a scorpion for an egg? I can’t think of any type of scorpion that wouldn’t cause severe illness of death with a sting, and as far as I know, they can sting multiple times. There is nothing good that can come from a child playing with a scorpion. Therefore, we can understand that God will never give us anything that will kill us, spiritually, even if it appears deadly physically. In fact, coming to work today I was listening to the most recent general conference address entitled, “Has the day of miracles ceased?” in which Elder Donald L. Hallstrom of the Seventy asked, “do we have the faith ‘not (to) be healed’ from our earthly afflictions so we might be healed eternally? A critical question to ponder is ‘where do we place our faith?’ Is our faith focused on simply wanting to be relived of pain and suffering, or is it firmly centered on God the Father and His holy place and in Jesus the Christ and His Atonement? Faith in the Father and the Son allows us to understand and accept Their will as we prepare for eternity.” Even is it appears that something will kill us, like cancer for instance, we can trust that whatever the outcome is, whether it’s a miracle healing or not, will be what we need for our eternal progression.

Jesus continues, “If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give good gifts, through the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?” This is saying that, we as humans, with all of our flaws, if we can love our children enough to give them what they need, then surely the great God of the Universe, our loving Father, knows and will give us what we need. The IM says, “The parable teaches that persistent, righteous, and faithful prayers to our Father open the doors of heaven because of His overwhelming goodness and His love and concern for His children…. Elder James E. Talmage of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles noted the differences between the friend in this parable and our Heavenly Father: ‘The Lord’s lesson was, that if man, with all his selfishness and disinclination to give, will nevertheless grant what his neighbor with proper purpose asks and continues to ask in spite of objection and temporary refusal, with assured certainty will God grant what is persistently asked in faith and with righteous intent. No parallelism lies between man’s selfish refusal and God’s wise and beneficent waiting. There must be a consciousness of real need for prayer, and real trust in God, to make prayer effective; and in mercy the Father sometimes delays the granting that the asking may be more fervent.’”