The Neighbors You Don't Have

Luke 11:5-8

January 14, 2015

When we think of the word "parable" our minds may jump immediately to the story of the Prodigal Son or that of the Good Samaritan.  These are certainly the most famous of Jesus' stories, and they deserve to be the first ones we think of.  And because we associate parables with these wonderful stories about a father's love and a stranger's kindness, the word "parable" itself may well make us think of warm and fuzzy things--little kittens or stories that have happy endings and make us feel good.  Jesus told a lot of stories to make his message understandable and memorable.  Depending on what we include as a parable there are at least thirty different ones in Matthew, Mark, and Luke--John doesn't record a single one!  Many of these really do make us feel good because they end on a happy note.  But there are a few parables that don't follow the "happy ending" pattern exactly and, instead of leaving us with warm and fuzzy feelings, may make us put on our thinking caps and scratch our heads.  That's probably why Jesus told some these stories.
Let's get the story itself in front of us.  It appears in Luke 11:5-8 (and not in any other Gospel).  I've  chosen to use the New International Version because of the way it translates one word in the parable.  See if you can guess the word that the NIV treats differently than other translations.
Then Jesus said to them, “Suppose you have a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread;  a friend of mine on a journey has come to me, and I have no food to offer him.’  And suppose the one inside answers, ‘Don’t bother me. The door is already locked, and my children and I are in bed. I can’t get up and give you anything.’ I tell you, even though he will not get up and give you the bread because of friendship, yet because of your shameless audacity he will surely get up and give you as much as you need.
       Did you guess that the NIV's use of "shameless audacity" to translate one Greek word^[1] in the story  is what makes it different?  The old King James Version as well as the Revised Standard Version and the Catholic Douay-Rheims Version all translate this word "importunity."  The New King James Version and the New Revised Standard Version and The Living Bible translate the word in question as "persistence."  Eugene Peterson's The Message manages to combine more than one of these meanings by translating the word:  "if you stand your ground, knocking and waking up all the neighbors."  We'll come back to the word "audacity" later.

So What's The Point of the Parable?
Luke makes it clear that the parable has something to do with prayer.  He placed the parable immediately after The Lord's Prayer (Luke 11: 1-4) and immediately before Jesus' saying about Asking, Seeking and Knocking (Luke 11:9-10).  But just what is the point of the parable?  Jesus sometimes told his listeners explicitly what his message was in a parable.  In the parable in which a shepherd leaves the ninety and nine to search for one lost sheep Jesus  emphasized that "there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentence" (Luke 15:7).  His point is very clear.  In the parable of the midnight borrower, however, there is no such summation and we must figure out for ourselves what the point is.   Luke has put this parable beside other teachings of Jesus on prayer so he has helped us narrow down our choices.  So even though the parable is all about hospitality and we know that in the ancient world the requirement to offer hospitality was very important, Luke thought this was not the point of the story.   Does the parable intend to tell us how to pray by describing a neighbor who bangs on the door late at night to borrow some bread?  Did Jesus intend to compare God to the friend who was asleep with his children?  Or, is the parable intended to give us assurance that we will be heard when we pray just as the sleeping neighbor ultimately heard and answered his friends plea?
We'll need to look at several things before we decide what the point of the parable is.  For example, Luke did something that Freshmen in college sometimes do when they write an essay;  he used pronouns without being crystal clear to whom he was referring when he said "he."   We must ask who the "he" is.  We need to use our concordances and see what the opening phrase, "Which of you,"  expects as an answer.   If Jesus asks, "Which of you have a friend who would refuse to get up and help you if you called on him?" would we anticipate the answer, "Nobody has a neighbor like that" or "Everybody has a neighbor like that."  We will need to explore the meaning of that Greek word that is translated so differently in the various translations.  Why isn't its meaning clear?  We may need to know something about normal behavior in Jesus' time;  did people arrive hungry at midnight routinely?  Was it normal to bang on a friend's door late at night when it was clear that the family was asleep?  These are not all the questions scholars ask as they try to get to the point of this parable, but these are some of the major issues that we can explore.

Who Is the He?
Before we tackle the biblical text, let's take a few moments to try an exercise in sentence punctuation.  If you were given the following sentence, how would you punctuate it so it makes sense:    "time flies you can't they fly too fast."   Don't add anything but punctuation marks!  To give you a little help, I can tell you that part of the solution is to pay attention to the pronouns….. Well, doubtless this was not very challenging to students like you.  I've put the answer in a footnote ^[2] in case you need to see the sentence properly punctuated.   Now let's look at Luke's use of pronouns in the parable he recorded as the RSV has it:

5 And he said to them, “Which of you who has a friend will go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves;6 for a friend of mine has arrived on a journey, and I have nothing to set before him’; 7 and he will answer from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything’? 8 I tell you, though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his importunity he will rise and give him whatever he needs.

I'll replace the pronouns with the names of people you know--Doug, Lindy and Alvin--and you can decide whether I've done it correctly:

5 And Jesus said to them, “Which of you (Doug) who has a friend (Lindy) will go to Lindy at midnight and say to Lindy, ‘Lindy, lend me three loaves;6 for  Alvin has arrived on a journey, and I have nothing to set before Alvin’; 7 and Lindy will answer from within, ‘Do not bother me (Doug); the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot give you anything.' 8 I tell you (Doug), though Lindy will not get up and give you anything [just] because Lindy is your (Doug's) friend, yet because of Doug's importunity Lindy will rise and give Doug whatever Doug needs (for Alvin).
The parable says that while friendship alone would not move a person to get out of bed and disturb his whole family to help a neighbor, something would cause him to do that.  What is that something?

The Crucial Word "anaideia."
The key word in the parable is the Greek word "anaideia" which without question means "shamelessness" or something like that in every setting where it occurs outside this parable.^[3]   This is the only place in our Bible where the word occurs.  According to one major scholar "shamelessness" (Greek:  anaideia) means "one either has no understanding of what is shameful or no hesitation in committing shameful acts."^[4]   Snodgrass writes that "the word expresses an ignorance about  or disregard of what is shameful and the absence of any sense of proper behavior."^[5]    Perhaps we can get close to understanding this concept if we call to mind the two guys in the Sonic commercial who are, as always, in the front seat of a car and the straight man comments that perhaps eating chicken nuggets
will give you that certain 'Je ne sais quoi'!  (Peter Grosz)
"Jenna said what?"          (T. J. Jagodowski)
                        "Jenna?"
                        "Did she mention me by name or..."
                        "I said 'Je ne sais quoi!'"
                        "I know, but what did Jenna say!?!?"
Mr. Jagodowski is not embarrassed by his failure to understand the French his partner used because he is shameless; in his ignorance he is so sure of himself that he cannot be shamed.
As has been alluded to already, very few translations of our New Testament have actually used the true meaning of the word anaideia in their rendering of this parable.  Most have substituted the word "importunity" which implies that the man who asks has made repeated or annoying requests.  The word "importunity" paints a picture of a man who kept on and kept on knocking and calling.  There is only one thing wrong with translating the parable that way.   The parable does not say that the man asked repeatedly, and it does not say that he knocked!" There is no hint in the text we have that the man is rude or insensitive.  He is just a man in need who asks his neighbor for help.
Apparently the parable has been modified by the translators to stress the man's persistence "because interpreters have wanted a more direct application to a theology of prayer than the parable seems to offer… .  We want to know in what way God is like the sleeper and how people who pray are like the petitioner."^[6]

Shamelessness We Can Be Proud Of
Dr. Snodgrass has concluded " 'Shamelessness' cannot have a positive meaning in this  passage.  It is a negative term describing the rudeness of the man outside asking for bread."^[7]    He may well be right, and for a non-scholar in this area to suggest that he is wrong may well be a true case of anaideia  and hubris .^[8]  You should certainly be very skeptical of the interpretation that I am about to offer.  Feel free to reject it out of hand if you feel so led.
The parable is clearly of the "how much more" kind;  it tells us that if a neighbor will get up at midnight to answer a request for food, how much more will God respond to our requests.  I fully agree with Dr. Snodgrass that "The parable does not invite rudeness in praying any more than it suggests that God is asleep…..  The parable addresses the implied question 'Will God respond to prayer."^[9]   But where does the "shamelessness" come in?  Let me paraphrase the parable for us this way:  If we had an emergency and called on a neighbor for help in the middle of the night, none of our neighbors would refuse us.^[10]   [In the words of the parable, none would say, " Do not bother me."]  They might not be our closest friends, but they would help us because it is the right thing to do.  [In the words of the parable, "he will not get up and give you the bread because of friendship"]  And we wouldn't feel any sense of shame in calling for help at midnight; it is what our neighbors would expect us to do in an emergency.  The neighbor will get up and help us and feel good about doing so because without any hesitancy --any embarrassment,  any shame--we asked for his help.   [In the words of the parable, "because of his 'shamelessness' he will rise and give him whatever he needs."^[12]]
And so it is with prayer.  There is absolutely no reason to feel embarrassed to pray for help.^[11]  If our neighbors would come to our aid because we depended on them in a time of need, how much more is this true of him who is closer than a brother?  There would only be shame if we didn't call on him.



BACK TO TEXT1. The Greek word involved is the word anaideia. The key article about this parable and its use of the word anaideia is: Klyne Snodgrass, "Anaideia and the Friend at Midnight (Luke 11:8)," Journal of Biblical Literature, 116 (1997), 505-513
BACK TO TEXT 2. The sentence reads "Time flies? You can't! They fly too fast." The word "time" refers to trying to determine how fast a fly flies; it is a verb here. The word "flies" is a noun here and not a verb. The pronoun "they" refers back to the "flies." If one doesn't get the connection between the pronoun "they" and the noun "flies" it is hard to make sense of the sentence.
BACK TO TEXT3. See footnote one for Klein Snodgrass' article. See also his Stories With Intent (Grand Rapids:Eerdmans, 2008), 442-445.
BACK TO TEXT4. Snodgrass, Stories With Intent. 442-443.
BACK TO TEXT 5. Op. cit., 443.
BACK TO TEXT 6. Snodgrass, Stories With Intent, 447.
BACK TO TEXT 7. Op. cit., 445.
BACK TO TEXT 8. Hubris has been humorously defined as the attitude of a man who throws himself on the mercy of the court as an orphan after having killed his father and mother! That takes gall.
BACK TO TEXT 9. Op. cit., 448.
BACK TO TEXT 10. Snodgrass points out that the NIV is wrong to translate the opening words as "Suppose..." The expression is "Who from you" making this an interrogative parable; "it consists of a long question and Jesus answer to his own question . ... The whole point is that no one would say such a thing and refuse to get up and give his friend what he needs. Such a refusal is unthinkable. The question 'Who from you (Tis ex hymōn)' appears eleven times in the Gospels. In all of them the question asks if anyone would do some hypothetical action, and in each case the implied answer is 'No one.'" Snodgrass, Op. cit., 442.
BACK TO TEXT 11. Dr. Snodgrass has made a strong case for the fact that there is no "good" meaning attached to the word anaideia as I have understood it here. I have understood the word to mean "without shame." Dr. Snodgrass argues that it means without "a proper sense of shame" on the part of someone who engages "in improper conduct." He notes that the term is always used for "outrageous and offensive behavior such as rashness, insolence, disorder, coarse behavior and recklessness." If he is right then it seems to me that Luke used the wrong word in this case. There is nothing outrageous or coarse about calling for help from a neighbor in an emergency. I think in this case the word means "without feeling shame."
BACK TO TEXT 12. After finishing the narrative for this presentation, I sent my last paragraphs to Dr. Snodgrass and got this reply which, as you will see, tells me that my interpretation is not true to the technical sense of the word anaideia: " As for anaideia, I do not think it ever means "without shame" in the good sense. It is a word repeatedly that points to the fact that someone has no sense of what shame is and does not know what is legitimate culturally accepted behavior. However, your point about people needing to feel no shame in praying is something that comes out of the "how much more" logic of the parable. The parable is intended to encourage prayer and expectation that God will act. You might compare the logic of the parallel "how much more" parable of the Unjust Judge. If an unjust judge will respond, how much more your Father who cares for you and will vindicate his people. There is no focus on the "unjust" imagery. To put it another way, the assumption of the Friend of Midnight is that God is eager to respond to prayer, and it seeks to encourage prayer. If that is the case, certainly there should be no fear, anxiety, or shame in approaching God. That conclusion is not tied to the word anaideia though. At least that is how I see the parable working." Personal email from Klyne Snodgrass, Northpark Seminary, Chicago, 1/05/15.