Luke 11 Footnotes

11:10 Jesus said here that “everyone” who asks receives, yet experience does not seem to bear this out. Why? Jesus was not giving a magic formula for self-gratification. Jesus used absolute terms to emphasize his point: One is to pray while trusting in God’s goodness and willingness to answer. This is particularly true when the object of prayer is spiritual (v. 13). Jesus had just taught the disciples to pray for God’s will to be done. One should assume that the caveats of the prayer earlier in the chapter inform the interpretation of a statement like this just a few verses later. For more on the point of Jesus’s hyperbolic language, see note on Mk 11:22-24.