“5 Then he said to them, “Suppose one of you has a friend, and he goes to him at midnight and says, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread, 6 because a friend of mine on a journey has come to me, and I have nothing to set before him.’ 7 “Then the one inside answers, ‘Don’t bother me. The door is already locked, and my children are with me in bed. I can’t get up and give you anything.’ 8 I tell you, though he will not get up and give him the bread because he is his friend, yet because of the man’s boldness he will get up and give him as much as he needs.
9 “So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. 10 For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened. 11 “Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? 12 Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? 13 If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him!””
Getting a read on someone matters. It’s why we have debates during election years as well as interview after interview. It’s what dating is supposed to be about—getting a read on this other person and giving them an opportunity to get a read on you. You want to know how someone responds to what’s right in you and what’s wrong in you. You want to know how they respond to what’s right in them and what’s wrong in them.
Getting a read on someone matters. That matters more in dating than in an election because a spouse is going to impact your day-to-day life much more than a president, but it matters even more—much, much more—when it comes to God.
Getting a read on God matters. What is He like? Answering that question is a can of worms in anyone. The only person to see the Father comprehensively, consistently, and perfectly was the perfect person—Jesus. The rest of us have all sorts of misguided fears, misapplied loyalties misdirected surrenders, confused affections and so much more when it comes to God, and so Jesus tells us parables about his Father so we might come to see him as Jesus sees him.
Some parables are mirrors that show us ourselves—“I am as much of the sinner as the tax collector as self-righteous as the Pharisee.” Some parables are windows that show us God—“He is overjoyed to bring the lost back home.” Many are both. This parable is a window designed to show us God, and if we miss that, we miss the point of the parable, and we miss who the Father. The Father is not how we fear He might be; He is unimaginably kind, good, and generous. That’s the claim of this sermon: the Father is not how we fear He might be; He is unimaginably kind, good, and generous.
We see this in two points. First: a parable on prayer. Second: a teaching on prayer. In verses 5-8, we see a parable on prayer; in verses 9-13, we see a teaching on prayer.
We begin to see the Father’s character in our first point: a parable on prayer. You might have noticed we are beginning this study mid-chapter. Jesus has just taught the Lord’s Prayer—the model prayer for us disciples. With that prayer he taught us what to pray. In this parable he teaches us the how of prayer—the outlook, attitude, the frame of heart—all of which comes from our read on the Father. Consider your earthly father. Your approach toward him came from your read on him. Was he aloof or caring, quick to bite or quick to build up, cynical or hopeful, seemingly indifferent toward you or undeniably for you? Your read on him colored how you approached him, and that’s what Jesus exploring in this parable.
Jesus continues to train his original disciples in verse 5, ‘Then he said to them, “Suppose one of you has a friend, and he goes to him at midnight and says, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread, because a friend of mine on a journey has come to me, and I have nothing to set before him.’”’ This was a familiar and real problem in that culture. Hospitality and showing honor were—and still are—important to them in ways that we in our culture can barely begin to imagine. “In the east hospitality is a sacred duty, as Barclay explains, “and it was not enough to set before a man a bare sufficiency of food. The guests, however unexpected, must be confronted with abundance.” Notice that language of “must” and “duty.” This man in the parable has as real a responsibility to care for this unexpected guest as I feel to care for my children.
The neighbor to whom he goes had just as real a responsibility. This seems strange to us. We individualistic Americans tend to think that giving a cup of sugar to a neighbor who needs it for a recipe puts us on par with Mother Theresa. That’s a reminder that there are a lot of ways in which cultures have been organized and there are blessings in each of them and pitfalls. This was a culture of honor and interconnection. You see that in the use of the word “friend” three times in one sentence. Jesus is leaning hard into this sense of obligation and relationships with this parable to drive home his point.
The difficulty Jesus creates with his story is that it’s well past bedtime; verse 7, ‘Then the one inside answers, “Don’t bother me. The door is already locked, and my children are with me in bed. I can’t get up and give you anything.”’ In that culture a shut door was the sign that the family was done for the day. The children couldn’t play anymore and any businesses needed to wait until tomorrow. Their houses were also usually comprised of one large room and so waking anyone meant waking everyone. That tells us about the boldness and the felt need he had in knocking on that door. “The host must serve his guest and the guest must eat,” as Kenneth Bailey wrote on this parable after decades living in the Middle East. That is the way of things.
What’s not the way of things is homeowner’s response. “Don’t bother me. The door is already locked, and my children are with me in bed. I can’t get up and give you anything,” would have been unimaginably rude. Kenneth Bailey interviewed many people in as similar a culture to theirs as there is today and their response to this neighbor’s response was uniformly, “I cannot imagine such a thing!”’ The beginning of the parable sets us up for that, though. New Testament’s use of the “who among you…” formula seen in in, “Suppose one of you has a friend, and he goes to him at midnight,” always elicits the response that no one would behave this way. You see that in verse 8, “I tell you, though he will not get up and give him the bread because he is his friend, yet because of the man’s boldness he will get up and give him as much as he needs.”
The bread will be given. It will be given because the man with the unexpected guest was willing to ask; “yet because of the man’s boldness he will get up and give him as much as he needs.” Asking is what this parable is all about. It’s a parable about prayer—asking the Father. So who is the Father in this parable? Here you see the allegorical approach of the early church break down yet again because making the neighbor who at first blush refuses the request the Father turns this into a quandary. The point of the parable, rather, is one of contrast. The Father is not like the begrudging neighbor. “Answer to prayer is not wrung out of the Father with much effort like water from a towel. He gives willingly,” as Bock puts it.
Some parables are like this. They tell us what the Father is like by giving us a picture of what He is not like. That’s part of getting a read on someone too. You learn what a potential friend is like by watching to see what they are not like, and here Jesus is correcting our misguided fears, misapplied loyalty, misdirected surrender, confused affection, and so much more because we tend to think the Father is like this neighbor. We tend to think He gives begrudgingly. We tend to think He is bothered by our approach. We tend to think the Father hears us pray and sighs to Himself, “here they come again.”
It’s a genius move to show us what we secretly fear in order to teach us that this is not how God actually is. This is needed because life as fallen people in a fallen world gives us reasons to doubt the Father’s kindness, goodness, and generosity—misguided reasons, far less than comprehensive reasons—but we, in our fallenness and finite, take them as reasons to suspect Him. We are quite like Adam and Eve in the Garden suspecting that God is not what He presents Himself to be and cannot be trusted to have our best interests in mind. Do you see that in yourself? I’d be amazed if it wasn’t there, not because there is anything uniquely wrong with you, but because you are more normal than you might think, and normal as a fallen person in a fallen world means an inaccurate of the Father which this parable seeks to correct.
The Father doesn’t give like this resentful neighbor. He is kind, good, and generous. Consider who is telling this parable—the Son this Father gave up for your sake and for mine. “He who did not spare His own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will He not also, along with [that gift of Jesus], graciously give us all things?” If someone gave you their kidney, you’d be a lot less prone to doubt their generosity. If someone made it their business to seek to do you good in as much as they could, you would be a lot less prone to doubt their kindness. If the only thing stopping you from seeing a friend’s goodness was your badness, and you came to recognize that, you’d be a lot less prone to doubt their goodness again. That’s what Jesus is after with this parable regarding you getting an accurate read on his Father and yours.
Jesus takes the way his Father is seen quite seriously. He is continually correcting our misguided read on God because what each of us needs most is to see that the Father is good, kind, and generous. That’s the fuel of the Christian life—remembering that God is for you and not like the stingy neighbor. We have the happy opportunity to see more of what’s He’s like in our second point: a teaching on prayer.
Jesus used a variety of teaching methods to seek to convince. What we are about to study has elements of parable as well as illustration, metaphor, comparison, and contrast. It’s almost as if Jesus throws everything including the kitchen sink at us because he so wants his disciples then and today to trust the Father. Life is all about learning to trust the Father. We we all tend to think life is about something else, which no matter how noble it might seem to us is less than what life is really about: learning to trust the Father. As Jesus put it in John 17:3, “this is eternal life: that they know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom You sent.”
We aren’t prone to trust, though. If you want a 30,000 foot view on what’s wrong with humanity today and always has been since the Fall it would be, “these creatures have real trouble trusting the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” “As we are too prone to distrust,” Calvin explains, “Christ, in order to correct this fault… repeats the promise in a variety of words. He uses the metaphor seek, because we think, that those things which our wants and necessities require are far distant from us—and knock, because our carnal senses imagine, that those things which are not immediately at hand are shut up.”
Calvin’s explanation shows the correction of verse 9-10, “So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.” This isn’t a blank check for whatever we think will be best for us. It’s a correction of our heart which tends to think that God’s door, like the door in that parable, is shut and locked. It’s a correction of we who tend to think that if we ask, as with the neighbor, it won’t be given.
These words weren’t intended to mean ask for whatever and it will be yours, as it’s sometimes interpreted; we so often torture the meaning of a passage and wind up tortured ourselves as a result. Jesus is correcting misunderstandings we have about asking. He has already made clear that the Father is much more eager to hear our prayers than we ever assume. Now he is explaining that He knows better than we do what we really need. The Father will never give what is useless or what is cruel. He won’t give a scorpion. He won’t give a snake.
Jesus must correct us on this because we fear that the Father will. Much of the misguided nature of our prayers stems from the fact that we tend to assume that unless we dictate to the Father what we want He will do us wrong. There is something in us—formed by this fallen world and also innate in our fallen flesh—which thinks God needs to be corralled like a genie who seems eager to misunderstand in order to do us harm. “Oh, I thought you asked for two thousand doll-hairs to pay off that bill.” “Well, you didn’t say that you didn’t want to get that week off work by way of a death in your family. You need to be more specific.” Human fathers are not so malicious as to give something hurtful when something needful is requested and neither is Jesus’ Father who he wants to be our Father.
That’s the point of the comparison in verse 13, “If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him!” Jesus has again, as we saw last week, upped the ante. Last week he moved from one hundred sheep to ten coins. Now it moves from neighborly relations to the love for a father for his child. Jesus is trying to help us understand that the Father is not only more generous and thoughtful than a begrudging neighbor, He is also more generous and thoughtful than the best father you’ve ever met. “If you then, though you are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give…”
This parent/child illustration corrects our misunderstanding about receiving whatever we request. “Often a parent has to refuse a child’s request not because he does not love him but because he does,” as one commentor put it. “We often find out, when we take the long view, that had our prayers been answered it would have been not to our good but to our harm,” and that’s part of the point of these illustrations about fish and snakes, eggs and scorpions. We who are evil wouldn’t consider doing such a misdeed. We need to believe that the Father won’t either.
Who is it that we are afraid the Father is like? Yes, it certainly is others who have sinned against it, but we are also afraid that He is like us. I’m afraid He is like me who can be thoughtless, evil, and begrudging—the opposite of kind, good, and generous. We are afraid the Father is like us. Here Jesus is gently telling us that his Father isn’t like us—“you who are evil.”
It’s strange—the more like the Father you become, the more evil you realize you are. You see His generosity and so your pettiness, His love for others and so your self-absorption, His kindness and so your thoughtlessness, His goodness and so your evil. “If you then, though you are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give…” The “how much more” argument was rather common among the rabbis. Jesus uses familiar methods and unfamiliar methods, old and new, everything including the kitchen sink to seek to convince us distrustful people to trust his Father, who loves to give.
That is the unescapable message of tonight’s passage if you have eyes to see—the Father loves to give. He’s not like the unimaginably begrudging neighbor. He’s not like the unimaginably malicious dad. He’s different from how you fear He might be. He’s kind. He’s good. He’s generous. He loves to give, and what does He most love to give? Verse 13, “how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him!” This tends to be a let-down for some. I get that. Part of me likes the phrasing in Matthew better, “how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask Him!” because I like good gifts and I imagine that I can imagine gifts better than the Holy Spirit.
I don’t think, though, that Jesus speaks of the gift of the Holy Spirit here to limit the good gifts to the Spirit; after all, the whole point of the parable and teaching is that the Father loves to give, give, give. I think the point is what we saw at the end of the last point. The best gift is Himself and if He gives what’s best—His Son, His Spirit—He will certainly give everything. “He who did not spare His own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will He not also, along with [that gift of Jesus, the gift of the Spirit], graciously give us all things?
God is best. The Father is all goodness, thoughtfully kind, unexpectedly generous, and Him giving the Son and the Spirit to be with us and for us and in us is the chief proof of that and a sign of how much He loves to give. So go to Him. Ask. Knock. The door won’t be locked. He won’t give you something harms when you ask for what helps. He is good, and that’s an accurate read on Him from Jesus himself. Amen.