NOTES for Mar 6:46
The fact that during His earthly ministry Jesus prays like every person causes some people perplexity. Why, it would seem, should the One who from the very moment of conception bears in Himself all divine fullness pray? Of course, He is no less human than any of us, and even much more. But why ask for what one already has? This view of prayer is characteristic of many of us fallen people. This is not surprising: for us prayer most often becomes a request addressed to God, or simply a kind of search for God, when, not sensing His presence, we ask Him to respond, to answer, to enter our life. Jesus, of course, did not have to ask for anything of the kind: during His earthly life He experienced God-forsakenness only once, during His sufferings on the cross.
We are the ones who have to ask, because a certain distance separates us from God, not so much external, since in any case that remains insurmountable for us, as internal. God is close to us, while we are usually far from Him. We cry to Him from afar, and often cannot make ourselves heard, not because He does not hear us, but because we do not know how to hear Him. Yet even some of us humans, whose nature is distorted by sin, can pray differently. They can pray so that prayer becomes a continuous inner standing before God and communion with God.
People who take spiritual life seriously have sought this in every age; that is why the practice of inner prayer is so widespread in different spiritual traditions and ascetic systems. But inner prayer also differs, just as the fullness of communion with God differs. When this fullness becomes ultimate for a person, prayer as word disappears, and only the meeting of two wills, two intentions, God's and the human person's, remains. Ordinary people often learn such prayer their whole life. Jesus, one might say, was born with it.
This meeting and unity of two wills, His own human will and the will of His heavenly Father, is His usual spiritual state. His whole earthly path is fullness of service, fullness of standing before God, and fullness of communion with the Father. But sometimes He, like every human being, needed to speak with His Father alone and in silence. And then He goes away to pray. For He came into the world in order to bring here the fullness of the Kingdom. And He needed to be in this Kingdom and speak with His Father face to face. Not for His own sake, but for the sake of those for whom, by the Father's will, He opened the doors of the Kingdom.