Deserted Place

There are many cryptic passages in the gospels concerning Jesus’s ministry. We read about the way Jesus transitioned from one village to the next, or the way He would travel by or through the Sea of Galilee, and the way He would just appear and disappear at will; and when He was found, He was always found to be by Himself in some deserted place.

Mysterious passages abound. Jesus was a rather solitary man. He came from Nazareth to Jordan to be baptized alone. He went into the synagogues of Capernaum almost as a stranger to preach, no one being aware of His origins. He walked by the seashore by himself and suddenly call fishermen as His disciples.

Even after He had amassed an immense following, mustered a group of some seventy disciples, and the crowds from all the adjoining countries would press on Him on all sides, Jesus would withdraw in a “solitary place” (Luke 4:42) by himself, no doubt, to pray and to contemplate.

When a man tells him, “I’ll follow you wherever you go,” Jesus retorts, “foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head” (Matthew 8:20). Jesus was the prototype and the paragon to those who would follow Him after Him through faith.

The book of Psalm, I think, sets the precedence for Jesus and His disciples’ withdrawal from the crowd, and hence from the world they had been a part of: “They wandered in the wilderness in a desolate way; they found no city to dwell in. Hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted in them” (Psalm 107:4-5). Jesus’s disciples, both His contemporary and future followers, are “called out,” and “elected” out of this world as God’s special people, the “resident aliens and pilgrims.” Jesus was the prototype.

When the crowd hemmed Jesus in on every side, “He Himself often withdrew into the wilderness and prayed” (Luke 5:16); and not just for the sake of avoiding the crowds would Jesus withdraw, but He even had set times for himself: “Now in the morning, having risen a long while before daylight, He went out and departed to a solitary place; and there He prayed” (Mark 1:35). Devoting Himself to His Father was His regular custom, and it involved a form of “self-isolation.”

When Jesus could no longer walk about through the streets of the cities or of towns, He would often go “outside in deserted places” (Mark 1:45). When the disciples had told Jesus of the death and the secret burial of John the Baptist, “He departed from there by boat to a deserted place by Himself” (Matthew 14:13). Jesus even had to use a sail boat to get to His solitary space beyond the shore somewhere.

The Spirit that was in Jesus in His morning meditations was the same Spirit that had influenced David to sing: “My voice You shall hear in the morning, O Lord; In the morning I will direct it to You, and I will look up” (Psalm 5:3). Such is the devotion and Spirit-filled life of God’s chosen people.

And when things got more hectic, Jesus would urge His close followers to, "”Come aside by yourselves to a deserted place and rest a while"”…So they departed to a deserted place in the boat by themselves” (Mark 6:31-32). Despite the crowds, Jesus withdrew with His disciples “to the Sea” (Mark 3:7). Getting away from all the hustle and bustle, Jesus, sometimes along with His disciples, would seek a place to focus solely on God.

Jesus was also in the habit of going away to a lonely place after the conclusion of His discourse: “These things Jesus spoke, and departed, and was hidden from them” (John 12:36). Sometimes, Jesus would take His disciples for a very private occasion: at the Mount of transfiguration to witness His glorious transfigurement, at the Mount of Olives when asked about the end of the world, at a mountain where He picked out His twelve, and on many more occasions: “Now after six days Jesus took Peter, James, and John his brother, led them up on a high mountain by themselves” (Matthew 17:1).

The mountain was no doubt the main locus of Jesus’s private meditations and of His escape from the frenzied mobs – whether for the sake of being healed by Him or for stoning Him. It was on the mountain where Jesus was tempted by Satan; it was on a mountain where He fed the crowd of five thousand; it was on the mountain where He delivered the great Sermon on the Mount; it was on the mountain where He was also crucified.

The common gospel phrase “deserted place,” “solitary place,” or a “lone place” is the English rendition of the original Greek “heremos topos” which means just that, deserted/solitary/lone. On its own, the first word literally means, “wilderness,” which was also the scene of Jesus’s flight into Egypt and the scene of His wilderness temptation.

To get closer to God, one must approach God within one’s solitary place; to pray to God, one must “shut the door of the room and pray in secret” (Matthew 6:6). That oneness with God is a solitary devotion; and such a devotion is a religious path; and such a path is the way of Jesus; and the Way of Jesus is faith.

This does not, however, mean that we must so completely drop out of the society that we become sort of like monks – though monkish lifestyle is the kind advocated by Jesus (Matthew 16:24). We do not want to go to the extreme of degenerating into anti-social individuals. Between His practices of wilderness withdrawal, Jesus would often interact with His people, eating in their homes.

When the world becomes mad, we know when to just step back and withdraw. When our lives become manic and chaotic, we know when to keep still and meditate alone with God: “commune with your own heart upon your bed and be still” (Psalm 4:4), and “be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10).