Thoughts for the Day

Luke 5:16 But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.

A second clue to the source of Jesus’s confidence in his identity and mission is the importance he placed on prayer.  A keyword search for “pray” on Biblegateway.com gives 26 results in Luke’s gospel compared with 33 for the other three gospels combined.  I can’t help imagining him running over the notes from his interviews with “eye-witnesses and servants of the word”, as he put it, seeing this thread running through all their accounts, and making a conscious choice to highlight it.  He even begins his opening scene of Zechariah in the temple by mentioning the worshippers praying outside.  He includes Jesus’s teaching on how to pray – the Lord’s Prayer and encouragement to be persistent – and his teaching on how not to pray.  He speaks of Jesus praying with his disciples and in private.  He notes Jesus praying at key moments: at his baptism, all night before choosing his 12 disciples, at his transfiguration and immediately before his arrest.  He leaves no doubt that Jesus was serious about prayer, that it was crucially important to him and that he believed in its effectiveness.  And in the passage quoted above, Luke reveals the priority Jesus gave to regular prayer.  The context, the ‘but’ at the beginning, contrasts the crowds clamouring for more of Jesus with his insistence on making space to withdraw to lonely places to pray.  I’m particularly challenged by the two words ‘often’ and ‘lonely’.  I suspect the essence of ‘lonely’ places (elsewhere translated ‘wilderness’) is the total absence of distraction.  As to ‘often’, I suspect that if I feel the need to ask, “How often?” the answer must be “More often than I do!”