This week’s Gospel Lectionary is Mark 1:29-39.

“Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims.” Over the past year, these words have become a parody of the Christian response to tragedy—and particularly to the epidemic of gun violence that sickens our national soul. In a year that saw more than 400 mass shootings, Christian leaders in Congress and in the White House and in churches across the country offered their “thoughts and prayers” while failing to take any meaningful action.

This week’s lectionary passage from Mark 1:29-39 gives us a chance to reflect on the role of prayer in Jesus’s life and to ask in what ways his prayer life might serve as a model for us in the public arena. In this passage, Jesus famously withdraws from the town to a deserted place, removing himself from the sick and the needy so that he can pray (1:35-37). A simplistic reading might suggest that Jesus is modeling precisely a “thoughts and prayers” approach rather than engaging in direct action to heal the world. Such a reading would be terribly mistaken.

To understand the role of prayer in Jesus’s ministry, we need to place his prayer in its proper context within the narrative of Mark. In fact, his prayer comes in the wee hours of the morning following a long day of teaching, healing, and casting out demons. The day begins in Mark 1:21 with the story of Jesus teaching in the synagogue and casting out an unclean spirit from a man in the congregation (1:21-28), a story that was the lectionary passage last week.

While the lectionary divides the narrative, today’s text begins immediately after the exorcism in the synagogue. Mark tells us that “As soon as they left the synagogue, they entered into the house of Simon and Andrew” (1:29). Arriving there, Jesus immediately heals Simon’s mother-in-law of a fever (1:30-31).

Then Mark tells us that “that evening, at sundown, they brought him all who were sick or possessed with demons” (1:32). We aren’t told how late into the night Jesus continues his healings. We do know that he didn’t begin his healings until “evening, at sundown” (1:32). We also know that “the whole city was gathered around the door” (1:33). We might imagine that Jesus, having spent the day teaching and healing in the synagogue and in the household now spends his entire night healing people and casting out demons in the streets of the city.

Only then, in the predawn hours of the following day, does Jesus finally sneak out to a deserted place to pray. We don’t know what Jesus prays, only that his disciples hunt him down because the crowds are still clamoring for him. The story closes by telling us that “[Jesus] went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons” (1:39).

It’s clear that Jesus does not pray as a substitute for action. Rather, Jesus begins and ends the story out in the world tending to the needs of people, pausing only briefly to pray before returning once again into the fray. Prayer is not Jesus’s response to human suffering. It is the way he renews himself for the struggle yet to come.

Only two other times does Mark’s Gospel depict Jesus praying. The first follows immediately after Jesus’s feeding of the 5,000, a miracle in which Jesus provides food for the hungry crowds along the shores of the sea (6:30-44). As the meal concludes, Jesus sends his disciples ahead of him across the sea (6:45) and heads up the mountain to pray (6:46). Immediately after praying, Jesus walks across the sea and begins to heal the sick in Gennesaret (6:47-56).

Jesus’s other prayer takes place in the Garden of Gethsemane (14:32-42). This prayer occurs just after Jesus’s final supper with his disciples and immediately before he is arrested and put on trial. Jesus prays for God to steel his nerves for the last great act that he must do for the healing of humankind—the crucifixion and resurrection through which he defeats the powers of death and darkness once and for all.

In all of these cases, prayer is a moment of respite and preparation. It is a breath that allows Jesus to return once again into the breach, casting out unclean spirits, healing the sick, and feeding the hungry. For Jesus, “thoughts and prayers” are never the solution. They are calls to action. His prayers propel him into the world where he tends to the needs of the people.

So it should be with us. In the face of violence, in the aftermath of disaster, in the struggle for justice, “thoughts and prayers” ought never be enough. From first light to dusk’s dark fall, we should be in the streets casting out the demons that turn us against one another. Casting out the fear and mistrust that lead us to wield arms against our neighbors. Casting out our addiction to violence and our enthrallment with the weapons of war. Casting out the demonic propaganda of those who would profit from death.

And only then, like Jesus, should we pray. Pray for the strength to get up tomorrow and do it all again.