Jesus Goes Up the Mountain Alone

The feeding of the five thousand was the most public thing Jesus had done. Thousands of people had been fed. John's Gospel says they wanted to make him king by force. It was the kind of moment a leader builds on. Jesus did the opposite. He made the disciples leave, sent the crowd away, and went up a mountainside by himself to pray.

Mark gives us that sentence without comment, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. For Jesus it was. Throughout the Gospel he withdraws to pray: early in the morning in Mark 1, after this feeding in Mark 6, in the garden in Mark 14. The pattern is that the bigger the demand, the more deliberately he steps away from it to be with his Father.

What the episode teaches is that prayer, for Jesus, was not a way of recovering from ministry. It was the source of it. He did not go up the mountain because he was drained. He went because that was where he received what he would need for the night ahead, when he would see his friends in trouble and walk out to them across the water.

Consider a few questions. When something succeeds, what is your first instinct, to build on it or to pray about it? Where in your week could you deliberately send the crowd away? And what might change in how you see the people around you if you had spent time alone with the Father first?