Today, I would like to focus our reflection on the opening words of this Gospel: “Jesus departed to the mountain to pray, and he spent the night in prayer to God” (Lk 6:12). Introductions like this can easily go unnoticed in our daily reading of the Gospel, yet they are of the utmost importance. Here we are told very clearly that the choice of the twelve apostles—a decision central to the future life of the Church—was preceded by an entire night of Jesus’ prayer, alone, before God His Father.

What was the Lord’s prayer like? From what we glimpse in His life, it must have been a prayer filled with absolute trust in the Father, with total abandonment to His will—"I do not seek my own will but the will of the one who sent me” (Jn 5:30)—and with complete union to His saving work. Only from this profound, prolonged, and constant prayer—always sustained by the action of the Holy Spirit, present from the moment of the Incarnation and descending upon Him at His Baptism—only then, we might say, could the Lord draw the strength and the light necessary to carry forward His mission of obedience to the Father and accomplish His saving work for humanity.

The subsequent choice of the Apostles—who, as Saint Cyril of Alexandria reminds us, “Christ Himself declares that He has given them the same mission He received from the Father”—reveals to us that the very birth of the Church was the fruit of this prayer of Jesus to the Father in the Spirit. It is, therefore, the work of the Most Holy Trinity. “When day came, he called his disciples to himself, and from them he chose Twelve, whom he also named Apostles” (Lk 6:13).

May our own Christian lives—our discipleship of Christ—always be rooted in prayer and continually nourished by it.