DAILY MEDITATION: “Jesus departed to the mountain to pray, and he spent the night in prayer to God”

Liturgical day: Tuesday of the Twenty-third Week in Ordinary Time

Gospel text (Lk 6,12-19): Jesus departed to the mountain to pray, and he spent the night in prayer to God. When day came, he called his disciples to himself, and from them he chose Twelve, whom he also named Apostles: Simon, whom he named Peter, and his brother Andrew, James, John, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James the son of Alphaeus, Simon who was called a Zealot, and Judas the son of James, and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor.

And he came down with them and stood on a stretch of level ground. A great crowd of his disciples and a large number of the people from all Judea and Jerusalem and the coastal region of Tyre and Sidon came to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and even those who were tormented by unclean spirits were cured. Everyone in the crowd sought to touch him because power came forth from him and healed them all.

“Jesus departed to the mountain to pray, and he spent the night in prayer to God”

Fr. Lluc TORCAL Monk of Santa Maria de Poblet
(Santa Maria de Poblet, Tarragona, Spain)

Today, I would like to center our thoughts on the first words of this Gospel: “Jesus departed to the mountain to pray, and he spent the night in prayer to God” (Lk 6, 12). Introductions as this one may go unnoticed in our daily reading of the Gospel, while —in fact— they are of the maximum importance. Today, Jesus, specifically and clearly tells us that the election of the twelve disciples —central decision for our Church's future life— was preceded by a full night in prayer alone, before God, his Father.

How was the Lord's prayer? What we can deduce from his life, it must have been a prayer full of confidence in the Father, of complete surrendering to His will —“because I do not seek my own will but the will of the one who sent me” (Jn 5, 30)—, of clear union with God's work of salvation. Only through this profound, long and constant prayer —supported always by the action of the Holy Spirit that, at the moment of Jesus' Incarnation, had already fallen over Him in His Baptism— could the Lord receive the necessary strength and light to go on with His mission of abiding by the Father to accomplish His work of salvation for mankind. The subsequent election of the Apostles —that as St. Cyril of Alexandria says, “the same Christ affirms having given them the same mission He received from the Father”—, shows us how the rising Church was the fruit of Jesus' prayer to the Father in the Holy Spirit and, therefore, the work of the Holy Trinity. “When day came, he called his disciples to himself, and from them he chose Twelve, whom he also named Apostles” (Lk 6, 13).

If only all our life as Christians —of disciples of God— could always be immersed in prayer and led by it.

Source: evangeli.net