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Jesus' statement in 23:24 appears to be an act of forgiving those who have beaten, humiliated, and crucified him.29 What Jesus actually does, however, is petition God to forgive them. Adopting the mode he instructs his followers to adopt in 11:2-4, he addresses God as Father and petitions God to forgive those who have wronged him. In other words, Jesus does not personally forgive them and then petition God to forgive him because he has forgiven them. The presupposition is that those who have abused and crucified Jesus need God's forgiveness, not simply Jesus' forgiveness.30 Indeed, the formulators of this discourse may presuppose that Jesus does not need forgiveness, either because he never committed a sin or because, if he did, he petitioned God for forgiveness and God granted it. Jesus' petition to God to forgive those who have wronged him moves beyond the principle he articulates in the Lord's Prayer to the principle of "praying for those who abuse you" (6:28), which in turn is an enactment of "loving your enemies" (6:35). Both praying for those who abuse you and loving your enemies occur in an enthymemic context that grounds the actions in belief that God "is kind to the ungrateful and to the selfish" (6:35). The enthymeme about forgiveness in the Lord's Prayer, then, is part of an enthymemic network of reasoning in Luke about forgiving others and about petitioning God to forgive oneself and others. These topics are important enough in the social, cultural, and ideological environment of the Gospel of Luke to be expressed in enthymemic form. Assertions about these topics rarely stand unsupported. Rather, rationales accompany the assertions. The rationales create enthymemic reasoning, and this reasoning both interconnects statements in different locations in the work and introduces new topics that branch out to other related topics of importance. II. Ideological Subversion of a Social Enthymeme in Luke 11:5-8 After Jesus recites the Lord's Prayer to his disciples, he asks the disciples a lengthy and complex rhetorical question beginning with "which one of you...?" and anticipating the answer "no one" (Luke 11:5-7).31 A 29Robbins, "The Crucifixion and the Speech of Jesus," 40. Back 30When Jesus forgives sins in Luke, either there is criticism that God alone forgives sin (5:21) or there is an expression of consternation (7:49). Back 31Bernard Brandon Scott, Hear Then the Parable: A Commentary on the Parables of Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989) 87; Robert C. Tannehill, Luke (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996) 189. Back |