NOTES for Luk 5:15-16
The evangelists quite often note one pattern in the Savior's earthly ministry: the more people came to Him for help or even for a miracle, the more often and intensely He prayed, leaving everyone for this and going away to solitary places. As is clear, His need for prayer increased as the intensity of His ministry grew. Why, it would seem, should the One who is one with His heavenly Father, and one from the very beginning, from His very birth into the world, from His very conception, pray? But, as is clear, the matter is not so simple. Of course, both divine fullness and unity with the Father were inherent in Jesus from the beginning. His human will was always united with God's will to complete inseparability, so that there was no break between them of the kind characteristic of the will of fallen humanity.
The Savior experienced such a break only once, on the cross, and for Him it was a real catastrophe, worse than any physical suffering: He had never before experienced separation of His human will from the will of His Father. Such a break is always an existential catastrophe, but we fallen people are so used to it that we no longer sense the abnormality of such a condition. Jesus, unlike us, experiences it with utmost vividness and clarity. But at all other times He did not experience such a break and, it would seem, should not have needed prayer. More precisely, His whole life should have been continuous prayer; this is what one might think when reflecting on the Savior's spiritual life.
But it turns out that the unity of Jesus' human will with the will of His heavenly Father is not enough. It turns out that He needs prayer no less than each of us. And this is not surprising. Indeed, spiritual life presupposes not only being, but also awareness. The fullness of a person's spiritual life is determined by the measure of his awareness of his own existence.
And of existence on all levels, not only on one or on several. In principle every person can experience a fullness of communion with God close to that which was the norm for the Savior, and in human history there have occasionally been people who at some moment of their life were ready to say, "I and the Father are one."
But for an ordinary person, if he is given such an experience, it will be only moments, while for Jesus such a state was the norm of life even during His earthly ministry. Yet this unity had to be recognized, had to be experienced by the whole fullness of the human will. And for this Jesus needed prayer, like any of us.
And even more than any of us, for He is Man not less but more than any of us, truly Man with a capital letter, unlike us, who by definition do not reach the capital letter. And His awareness of His own existence in perfect unity with the Father was fuller than the awareness of our communion with God by any of us. Therefore His prayer was fuller and deeper than that of any of us. For it was prayer from fullness to fullness.