NOTES for Luk 5:15-16
The evangelists quite often note one regular pattern in the Savior's earthly ministry: the more people came to Him for help, or even for a miracle, the more often and more intensely He prayed, leaving everyone for this and going away to lonely places. As one can see, 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 pray, and one with Him from the very beginning, from His very birth into the world, from His very conception? But, as one can see, the matter is not so simple. Of course, both the fullness of God and unity with the Father belonged to Jesus from the very beginning; His human will was always one with God's will to the point of complete inseparability, so that there was no rupture between them such as belongs to fallen human will.
The Savior experienced such a rupture only once, on the cross, and for Him it was a real catastrophe, worse than any physical suffering: He had never before experienced the separation of His human will from the will of His Father. Such a rupture is always an existential catastrophe, but we fallen people are so used to it that we no longer feel the abnormality of such a state. Jesus, unlike us, experiences it with extreme vividness and clarity. But at all other times He did not experience such a rupture and, it would seem, should not have needed prayer. More precisely, His whole life should have been continual prayer, or so one might think when reflecting on the Savior's spiritual life.
Yet 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 several. In principle every person can experience a fullness of communion with God close to the one that was normal for the Savior, and in human history there have occasionally been people who, at some moment in their lives, were ready to say, "I and the Father are one."
But for an ordinary person, even if he is granted such an experience, these will be only moments, while for Jesus such a state was the norm of life even during His earthly ministry. Yet that unity had to be made conscious, had to be experienced by the whole fullness of human will. And for this Jesus needed prayer, like any of us.
And even more than any of us, because 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 that capital letter. His awareness of His own existence in perfect unity with the Father was fuller than any of us can have of our communion with God. Therefore His prayer too was fuller and deeper than that of any of us. For it was prayer from fullness to fullness.