2.
Mark 1: the chapter begins with Mark’s version of Jesus’ well-known foray into the quiet.
The Spirit sent him out into the wilderness, and he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan.
Mark’s version of this story is short, staccato: We don’t get the in-depth color we have in Matthew or Luke, but still, Mark wants us to know Jesus’ story begins in the quiet. In fact, Mark’s biography skips right over the virgin birth, the choirs of angels, the Magi, the dreams and prophecies come true; Jesus’ entire childhood is cut out.
Mark goes straight to the forty days of solitude and silence.
From there, Jesus emerges out of the desert and goes “into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God.”
The rest of the chapter is fascinating. It’s essentially one long “day in the life” of Jesus, beginning with Jesus preaching in the synagogue in Capernaum, exorcising an evil spirit, healing Peter’s mother-in-law, then healing the sick and casting out demons late into the night.
He must have been exhausted.
Yet here’s Mark’s next line:
Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed.¹
You would think the story would then have Jesus sleeping in and taking the following morning off. But, no: Jesus is up before the sun. While everyone else is still in bed, he goes off to a solitary place to pray.
That phrase, “solitary place,” is one word in Greek — eremos: It means a quiet, deserted place, out in nature, where you can be alone. It’s the same word translated “wilderness” earlier in the chapter.
Do you see what Mark is saying?
Mark frames the story like this:
Jesus goes into the quiet for forty days.
Then he comes back for a single day.
Then he gets up early, and goes straight back into the quiet.
Translation: the eremos wasn’t a one-time rite of passage for Jesus. “Whew, glad I got that over with.” It wasn’t a box on a life to-do list that he checked off and moved on. It was a practice that was woven into the fabric of his daily life, part of the cadence of his body, his way of being in time and space.
But the story still isn’t over.
Simon and his companions went to look for him, and when they found him, they exclaimed: “Everyone is looking for you!”
Notice: they have to go searching for Jesus. I love that. Like he’s hiding. As the Quaker professor Elton Trueblood once said, the more public a person’s life, the more they “must learn to hide.”² I could not agree more.
Learning to hide is an essential discipline of an apprentice of Jesus.
I imagine the disciples out hiking in the eremos. Splitting into small groups like a search party, peeking their heads into caves, climbing down into wadis, shouting Jesus’ name, growing more annoyed as the day’s heat rises.
When the disciples finally find him, they are exasperated: “Everyone is looking for you!” The town is calling for an encore: Come back! Teach, heal, deliver, dazzle us! — demanding more from Jesus. But, no …
Jesus replied, “Let us go somewhere else — to the nearby villages — so I can preach there also. That is why I have come.” So he traveled throughout Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and driving out demons.
Don’t miss what’s happening here — it’s insightful. The disciples come with a list of pressing demands on Jesus’ time, which, presumably, are all really good opportunities, and Jesus says, “Let us go somewhere else.”
That’s Jesus for no.
“No” is one of the shortest, most powerful words we can ever say, yet it’s also one of the most difficult. It’s profoundly human to find yourself thinking, Why did I say yes to this? How did I get sucked into this? Why do I so easily give in to pressure? How is it I so often long to escape my own life?
It’s incredibly hard to say no, especially to good opportunities, and especially when they come freighted with social pressure or moralized opinions from other people.
Yet somehow, Jesus’ time in the eremos gave him the power that so many of us lack: the power of no.
No, I don’t do that.
Even more …
No, I’m not that.
Did you catch Jesus’ line? “That is why I have come.” He’s not saying no to a good opportunity in the name of work/life balance or a better offer or just because he was a bit stressed out that day, but in light of his identity and calling; his sense of who he was, and what the Father was (and was not) calling him to do.
Jesus’ power of no wasn’t inspired by watching a narcissistic self-help trope on TikTok: “Sorry guys, this Capernaum thing just isn’t ‘serving me’ anymore.” Not at all; it was deeply rooted in his discernment of his Father’s will. This is Jesus, who said, “I always do what pleases the Father.” It wasn’t just others’ desires that Jesus found the power to say no to, but, arguably, his own.
Referring to this story, the Dutch priest and spiritual writer Henri Nouwen pointed out:
“In the lonely place, Jesus finds the courage to follow God’s will and not his own; to speak God’s words and not his own; to do God’s work and not his own …”
And drawing this story to bear on our own apprenticeship to Jesus, he said …
“Without a lonely place our lives are in danger … In solitude we discover that our life is not a possession to be defended, but a gift to be shared.”³
It comes as no surprise that Jesus regularly used two key verbs with his apprentices: “Come,” and “go.”
“Come away to a deserted place [eremos] all by yourselves and rest a while …”⁴
And: “Go and make disciples of all nations.”⁵
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened …”⁶
And: “Go … to the lost sheep of Israel …”⁷
“Come, follow me …”⁸
And: “Go! I am sending you out like lambs among wolves.”⁹
He regularly called his disciples to step away from the world, and he always sent them back out into it, to “learn to hide,” and to courageously venture back into the fray.
Retreat, and return.
This is the way of Jesus.
It is also the life architecture of all those who seriously apprentice under him, who intentionally model their lives on his own.
Of course, it goes without saying: This pattern has to be adapted and augmented for each person individually, based on their particular life — it’s going to look wildly different for an introverted writer like myself than a fun-loving college student living in a dorm or a young parent, just trying to sneak in a psalm during naptime. And it’s a template, not a straitjacket; an example to follow, not a slavish rule.
But whatever expression of this practice works for your personality, in your stage, in your particular life, I simply cannot overemphasize how important it is to follow Jesus’ pattern; to hear his call to “come away” (and also to “go”), because when we don’t come away, we lose our spiritual equilibrium, just as when we don’t go, we lose our spiritual fervor.
We become trapped in our own life; lost in a maze of our own making. Sucked into the tyranny of the urgent, not the important. “Distracted from distraction by distraction,” as T.S. Eliot put it.¹⁰ Drowning under the crippling weight of overcommitment, and feeling the exhaustion accumulate in our bodies, like lactic acid in our blood.
Henri Nouwen went on to playfully call solitude “wasting time on God.”¹¹ When we refuse Nouwen’s call to “waste” time on God, we usually end up wasting time on a thousand other things: TV, entertainment, online shopping, our phones, our inboxes, our jobs. Exhaustion, burnout, and ennui — what Jesus called “the cares of this world” — choke out our soul.
But in Jesus we see a genuine alternative: he emerges from the eremos with a clarion sense of his identity and calling.
With a clear yes to power a long list of nos.
Could this be possible? Could we learn how to do this from Jesus? Could we, too, discover our identity and calling in the quiet?
Leading questions: naturally, the answer is yes. Let’s look at each in
turn …