Mark 1:35-39 is a great lesson in quiet time maintenance: get up early, far away from other people and pray. Except it isn’t. It’s much deeper, more significant, than that. Those are things you or I might find helpful but they’re scarcely determinative - and certainly not the point of this passage.
So what is the point? Jesus goes out to a solitary place - a wilderness place. Guess what? He’s been to that kind of place fairly recently in this chapter - flip back to verses 12,13 and you’ll find him in a similar place. What’s going on back there? The testing of Jesus.
Mark doesn’t give us as full an account of that testing as Matthew and Luke do; he simply notes that it took place and that Jesus was in the company of wild animals and angels came and ministered to him there.
Fast forward to verses 35-39. Jesus chooses to rise very early and go out to pray in a wilderness place. Why? Maybe for this reason: the night before, he healed and delivered scores of people - the whole town had gathered at the door. And when the disciples eventually find him on this morning they give him the (hardly surprising) news that everyone is looking for him.
They love him - he’s a great guy to have around! They no doubt want this first-century Superman to stay with them a long time. Who wouldn’t? And Jesus tells his disciples that he’s not going to stay, that he’s instead going on to the other towns and villages, because he has to preach the gospel there too.
The response of the townspeople is a powerful temptation for Jesus, akin to the presence of wild beasts in the wilderness. Everyone likes to be popular; the pull of a crowd is subtle and subversive - and will eat you for breakfast. And so Jesus gets up early (before breakfast) to pray, in order that he might resist the temptation to settle for being popular and being needed and, instead, to maintain his focus on what really matters: taking the gospel to those who have yet to hear it.
In so doing, he shows us that prayer is more than simply making request of God. There is an aspect of prayer that is about aligning ourselves with, and committing ourselves to, the will of God and the gospel of God in which that will is most powerfully expressed. A later scene in the gospels, where the wilderness is replaced by a garden, confirms that: 'not my will but yours be done'.
Jesus knew he needed to pray to resist temptation and to maintain focus on what matters most. He needed to pray in order to see the issues clearly and to enter into the struggle to make the choice that would honour his Father and drive his mission forward.
I guess we do, too.
