An audio recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.
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Today’s gospel (Luke 6: 12-19) sees the appointment of the
‘apostles’ who become a select group among Jesus’ many disciples. We also see
how the people from Judea, Jerusalem, Tyre, and Sidon flocked to hear Him
preach and to beg His aid. It must have been quite a sight, not least because,
as this gospel extract attests, power came out of Him that cured them all.
It was not that Jesus was a mere miracle worker; His very presence generated
miracles. Jesus was not just a person but an event!
Yet perhaps the most spectacular part of today’s gospel is
its opening line:
Jesus went out into the hills to pray; and He spent the
whole night in prayer to God.
In the light of these words, for example, we can place the
events of the following day in their true perspective. Jesus appointed
apostles, but first He was wrapped in prayer all night long. Jesus went among
the crowd that had gathered to see, hear, and be cured by Him, but first He was
wrapped in prayer all night long. The prospect of the heroic prayer of Jesus
should put to flight the many excuses we find not to pray; our shortage of
time, our many pressing duties; the priorities of immediacy over the enduring
value of the eternal which, in our human calculations, can be covered by prayer
tomorrow just as well as by prayer today. If we somehow, in some weird place in
our heads, think our need for prayer is not that great today (because, you
know, we are pretty devout anyway), by the same cheap measure we should wonder
why Jesus needed to pray all night long. I mean: who needed to pray less than
Jesus?
But this is, as I say, a cheap measure. If we only pray like
customers at the jumble sale of divine favours, we are like those religious
believers whose prayers seek to forge currency rather than communion; something
to trade with rather than to live in. Our conscious minds need prayer like our
bodies need food, in regular rhythms of activity and rest. But our unconscious minds
need prayer like we need oxygen. Changing Charlotte Mason’s dictum about
education, we might say prayer is an atmosphere, a disciple, and a life. Prayer’s
atmosphere surrounds us and holds us in being; prayer’s discipline encourages
the harmonising of our inner life with the pulse of the Eternal Father – if
that metaphor can be allowed; and prayer’s life fills us up, for to pray as we
ought is to pray like Christ. Jesus prays all night; would that we could too;
would that we could find the path that leads to those heights where He plays
before the Father of us all. At the very least we can try to be open to His
gifts of prayer, whether they lead us to the desert or to the hills.
For that too is important. He surely prayed often enough for
His daily bread, as He taught us to do. But His delight was to pray in the
hills, closer to the eternal mysteries, as it were; from Tabor to Calvary, from
the Sermon on the Mount to the Sermon from the Cross, Jesus often reveals the
sublime to us on elevated ground. In these events, Jesus is always an example,
even though He is always an exception. His possession of the Beatific Vision
meant He had no need to go to the hills; and yet He goes to the hills to pray,
perhaps suggesting to us how we should fly the lowlands of our distractions,
the busyness of our overworked brains with their dizzying engagements, in
search of the rest and recollection we desperately need before God; an unmet
need we are insensible to, like the unfelt hunger of a starving man. From these
heights, we have a chance to see things for what they really are; from these
heights we can beg the grace to see them as God sees them in their eternal
light; not in the garishly blinding dimness of workaday desperation.
And then He spent the whole night in prayer. It would
be wrong to see this only as a quantitative statement: the whole night as
opposed to a half or quarter of it. Unless we are the parents of babies or
small children, the point is that, so often, while our day belongs to others, our nights belong to ourselves, nature’s reward for the labours behind us.
And here is Jesus, giving His whole night – the one thing that does not belong
to His followers - to the Father instead. For to spend the whole night in
prayer for Jesus is to do no more than to rest secure in His belonging entirely
to the Father. The Father and I are one. Of course, many of us
experience unwelcome wakefulness in the night; it is as if our day is robbing
our night in the interests of worry and fretfulness. Yet, as we know, wherever
the Master is, there His disciples are bound to follow. A broken night feels
tangibly like an invitation to follow Him in suffering; but perhaps it would be
more fruitful – perhaps more encouraging – to see the fragments of a broken
night as an invitation to hear the call to give ourselves wholly and entirely
to Him who gave Himself wholly and entirely to us and to the Father in His
nights of prayer.
Then, lastly, comes the unspoken part of the gospel: when
day came, before He summoned His disciples, He must have descended those hills.
Once we are up there, we do not want to come down, like the three apostles who
wanted to build tabernacles for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah on Mount Tabor. It is
good for us to be there. It seems good to us to stay there.
And yet, as we followed Jesus into the hills, we should
follow Him down from the hills, for this too is His command: If a man serves
me, he must follow me, wherever I am, my servant will be there too.
In that, at least, we have Mary’s example to follow, for she went into the hill country of Judea to sing her Magnificat but descended to Nazareth to undertake her work – her work and our work - of bringing forth God’s son.