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| Luke 5:16 “But Jesus Himself would often slip away to the wilderness and pray”Today we often call attention to Jesus’ habit of slipping away into the wilderness to pray alone. (Luke 5:16) This seems to have great appeal to our modern culture of individualism and isolation. Everything we do is about the individual. Marketing targets the individual consumer promising individual pleasures and fulfillment. The individual seeks to find meaning in his life, to find what he can gain, and to probe the depths of his soul. In faith we seek longer quiet times, reading the bible by our selves, and praying in solitude. Yet perhaps comparing this individualist culture to the culture represented in this passage is like comparing apples to oranges. The culture of Jesus’ day was about community. Prayer, reading, study, was done in community. For Jesus to seek alone time with God was a rare and special thing. Today Individualism and isolation is the norm of our society as we grow ever distant from community in our extreme individualism. I believe it is good to seek alone time with God to pray, study and talk to God, yet I believe we are perhaps missing something in our application of this scripture. I believe this passage shows us a balance between communal faith experience and the individual faith experience. We need both and in a faith built around communal experience Jesus sought to spend individual time with God. Yet with so much emphasis on the individual in our culture today, especially when the standard prescription for spiritual growth seems to be to dive deeper into isolation through closet prayer and study, that perhaps this scripture should inspire us to seek to balance our communal and individual experience of faith, rather than using it as a reason to dive deeper into self-focus, isolation and individualism. |
