Jesus is giving us clear guidance on how to prepare for a special project. He is about to embark on a mission entrusted to him by his heavenly Father.

First on his agenda is to choose, from among his many followers, twelve men who will form his core group. He will send them around Palestine to proclaim the Good News and, after his resurrection, to the farthest ends of the world.

It would be difficult to determine the criteria put forward by Jesus in choosing the Twelve. What we know for certain is how he chooses each one of them—through prayer.

In many episodes in the Gospel, it is common to find him enraptured in prayer. “My food is to do the will of the one who sent me and to finish his work” (Jn 4:34). We can imagine how he deeply prayed to his heavenly Father on the night before he had to choose his apostles. The Gospel says that Jesus spends the night “in prayer to God” as he considers every person he is about to choose. In the light of prayer, Jesus sees the Twelve in their strength and weaknesses, as well as their possible transformation in the future.

Jesus departed to the mountain to pray, and he spent the night in prayer to God. When day came, he called his disciples to himself, and from them he chose Twelve, whom he also named Apostles: Simon, whom he named Peter, and his brother Andrew, James, John, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James the son of Alphaeus, Simon who was called a Zealot, and Judas the son of James, and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor.

And he came down with them and stood on a stretch of level ground. A great crowd of his disciples and a large number of the people from all Judea and Jerusalem and the coastal region of Tyre and Sidon came to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and even those who were tormented by unclean spirits were cured. Everyone in the crowd sought to touch him because power came forth from him and healed them all.