Asking Mary and the Saints to pray for us might seem (at best) inefficient or (at worst) like it undermines the sovereignty of God. But here’s an argument you may not have heard before about how the sovereignty of God is **better** revealed in the intercessory role of the saints and angels.

Transcript:

Welcome back to Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. Today, I want to explore what is, at least to me, a new answer or a new argument that I’ve heard to a question that if you are a Catholic, I’m sure you’ve heard many times, “Why pray to Mary, why pray to the saints when you could go directly to God?” One form says, “It’s heretical to do that.” Another form says, “It just seems inefficient.” It’s the inefficient argument I want to look at today.

Now, the particular way this came about, a Facebook friend of mine by the name of Matthew Nugget Daniels, I don’t know if Nugget’s his middle name or part of his last name or a nickname, but he had some nuggets of wisdom he was sharing. I received them like six weeks ago. I’m very belated in replying to this.

But I received them while we were having dinner with friends of ours, the Suttons, who were converts from Protestantism. I read the question to the group. I didn’t use his name. He’s given me permission to use his name now. He didn’t give me permission to make fun of his name, but hopefully he’s okay with that.

I read them the question and then said, “Here’s how I would answer it.” Then was really intrigued by the different way they were going to answer it. Let me give his question first. He says this, “Thinking about prayers to saints, in my Protestant mind, it seems like the choice for praying to a lesser source. Jesus is sitting at the right hand of the Father interceding for us night and day. Why pray to someone who is saved through Jesus instead of just praying to Jesus Himself? Ask Him to pray for you.”

Then he says, “I understand the rationale of having a saint here on earth pray for you, which can be mystical. A saint can tap into the Holy Spirit and maybe give a word of knowledge that lets another saint know God is thinking and speaking over them. We don’t hear back from these saints in heaven. It just seems like why ask great people to pray for me when I could ask the God of the universe to pray for me?”

In the conversations and debates, I haven’t heard any Protestant bring up this point. To me, it is like having access to fullness but taking only apart. I don’t know if theologically I have an issue, I see the points Catholics make, but Jesus has connected us to the Father. Why add another layer between us when he literally tore the veil and gave us access to the Holy of Holies?

I don’t know if theologically I have an issue, I see the points Catholics make, but Jesus has connected us to the Father. Why add another layer between us when he literally tore the veil and gave us access to the Holy of Holies? Then he says, “I don’t think I have a theological problem with it. I just feel like if I’m raising prayers to heaven, just skip the administrative layer of saints and go straight to the throne.”

We could maybe broadly call this the “Let me speak to your manager” objection. Like “Why are we going to the person at the front desk when we could go above them to the manager, the owner of the company, the owner of the whole universe? Won’t that get stuff done faster?”

On the one hand, yeah, that’s probably got a lot of intuitive sense to it. On the other hand, I think it actually misunderstands something pretty profoundly about prayer. I’m going to give you how I would’ve answered the question and then the answer I really liked that the Suttons offered that I think adds a whole other dimension to this.

Now, I hope this builds on my earlier answers. I’m not disclaiming anything I would’ve said with this. I just think there’s a dimension I wasn’t getting that I’ve been reminded of recently, and I’ll explain why.

But first, here’s how I would start. Anytime someone brings up efficiency in prayer, I always go to the same place, Matthew 6, because when Jesus is contrasting the prayer of his followers to the prayer of Gentiles, he says, “Don’t be like them for your father knows what you need before you ask him.” Now, think about that.

If God didn’t know what you need before you asked Him, He wouldn’t be omniscient, He wouldn’t be omnipotent, and He wouldn’t be the God that is worth praying to. He would have to have his own God who is bigger and more powerful and more knowledgeable than Him. That would be the one we would call God.

But as it is, God is the all-knowing, all-powerful God of the universe, which means you’re never going to tell Him something in prayer that He doesn’t already know. In fact, we can go even bigger than that. He doesn’t just know what you want. He also knows what you need. He knows whether the thing you are praying for is actually in your best interest or not.

What’s more than that, He doesn’t just know what you want, know what you need. He also has the power to bring it about perfectly. Now, that is exactly why we pray to Him. But if you’ve ever thought about it from an efficiency perspective, the whole thing seems horribly inefficient. I’m not seemingly adding anything to the equation from an efficiency standpoint.

You might expect the next words out of Jesus’s mouth to be, “Don’t worry about praying because God’s got it all under control.” But He doesn’t say that. He says, “Pray then like this,” and then gives us the Lord’s prayer, the Our Father. Not only that, but we’re told not just to pray for ourselves, but to pray for other people.

1 Timothy 2, St. Paul says, “First of all, then I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions and thanksgiving be made for all men.” Part of the Christian calling is to pray for one another and not only to pray for one another but to go to one another seeking their prayers. James 5:16, “Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another that you may be healed.”

Now finally we get here an answer. The prayer of a righteous man has great power in its effects. Now he’s going to give an illustration of that. He says, “Elijah was a man of nature with ourselves and he prayed fervently that it might not rain,” and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. Then he prayed again and the heaven gave rain and the earth brought forth its fruit.

Prayer isn’t just us going through the motions. Prayer really does produce results. It really does have an effect. Now, it’s not a mathematical formula where if you pray this thing, you’re going to get that thing you want. It doesn’t work like that. But it is nevertheless efficacious, it does produce results. Now, maybe that strikes us as kind of strange.

C.S. Lewis makes a point. It’s really no stranger than anything else. In an essay he wrote for the Atlantic, or at least it appeared in Atlantic. I don’t know if it originally was written for that. He points out that our involvement in anything raises this same point. He says God, and then he quotes Pascal, God instituted prayer in order to lend to his creatures the dignity of causality.

Let’s unpack what that means. That means God could have done all of this on His own. But like a loving Father, He helps his children to participate. My son, who is two years old, loves to help anything that involves tools. Now, from an efficiency standpoint, I love him, but rarely does he make the job go more quickly.

But part of treating him as a son and not as a slave or a robot or just a recipient of action is sharing with him the dignity of causality that he gets to help build whatever we’re building. He gets to help work on the outdoor furniture we constructed, and maybe that is passing me screws.

Now I might have to be like, “Actually, I mean the other screw.” But all of that, not from an efficiency perspective, but from a dignity perspective makes sense. God has shared with us the dignity of causality through prayer. He’s allowed us to be part of the plan that He has. His plan isn’t thwarted by our prayers. His plan from all eternity included the fact that He knew our free responses that we would pray.

But then C.S. Lewis says, “But not only prayer, whenever we act at all, God lends us that dignity. It is not really stranger nor less strange that my prayers should affect the course of events then that my other action should do.” That cuts to the heart of things. People worry like, “Well, why pray at all? If I pray, aren’t I interfering with God’s plans?” It’s like, “Well, anytime you act, you could say that.”

Why make myself breakfast? What if God’s plan was that I wasn’t going to have breakfast today? Why go to work? Maybe God didn’t want me to? You could always ask the question, does my acting in the world interfere with God’s plan? It’s like, no, that misunderstands how God’s plan works.

God’s plan involves your action. When you act, you’re not thwarting God’s plan unless you’re sinning or something. When you act, you’re cooperating with God’s plan. You’re helping to bring God’s plan about. That includes the action of prayer. From an efficiency perspective, it’s true any type of prayer is inefficient because prayer isn’t just what’s the quickest way to produce a desired result?

I really want it to rain, so I’m going to pray for rain. God could have made it rain without me praying for it. If I imagine that the end goal of prayer is simply to get the thing I’m wanting, then I’m missing some of why prayer exists. Because what God is instilling in us is not just the ability to get stuff by saying the right words or something like this. That’s much more the Gentile model.

What God has given us is the dignity of causality, but even more than that, the dignity of being His sons and daughters, that we get to approach Him as a father. All of that is connected to holiness. In James 5, remember the prayer of a righteous man is efficacious, has great power in its effects, which means that it actually matters If I’m living as a son of God when I go to Him as Father.

It actually matters if I’m in a healthy relationship with him or if I’m estranged by sin. In John 9:31 we get it very clearly. We know that God does not listen to sinners. But if anyone is a worshiper of God and does His will, God listens to him. Now elsewhere, we know that a sinner who repents, that prayer of repentance, absolutely, God is listening to that.

The point here of God not listening to sinners means you can’t just treat God like a genie or a vending machine where you say the right words and He’s going to give you the result you want apart from your holiness. That holiness actually matters. There’s plenty of examples of this.

In Genesis 19, God saves Lot and his family. Now, Lot and his family are righteous. But when Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed, we’re told that it wasn’t because of their own holiness that they were saved, but that God remembered Abraham and sent Lot out of the midst of the overthrow. That is Abraham had interceded prayerfully for Sodom and Gomorrah. Even though the cities were destroyed, that intercession still was effective in saving Lot and his family.

Or another classic example at the end of the book of Job, in Job 42, God punishes Job’s friends. He says, “My wrath is kindled against you and against your two friends.” This he says to Eliphaz, not to Job. For you have not spoken to me what is right as my servant Job has. But then notice what happens next. He tells him to take seven bulls and seven rams and go to my servant Job.

That is He tells them, if you want to come back into right relationship with me, you need the intercession of Job. Would it have been more efficient if he said, “Come directly to me?” Yes. But He doesn’t say that. We would do well to ask why He doesn’t say that, that He wants him to go to Job and have Job offer a burnt offering.

He says, “My servant Job shall pray for you, for I will accept his prayer not to deal with you according to your folly. For you have not spoken of me what is right as my servant Job has?” Then sure enough, two things happen. They go to Job. They do what God told them to do and we’re told and the Lord accepted Job’s prayer.

But then we’re told the second thing. In Job 42:10, the Lord restored the fortunes of Job when he had prayed for his friends, that God blesses both Job’s friends who he prayed for. He also blesses Job for what? For praying for his friends. We take of this quite seriously that we ought to be praying for one another and that there may be some things in our lives that we don’t get from our own prayers, even though we can go directly to God.

But that we might get those things if someone else is praying for us, someone else who is maybe holier than we are, someone else who’s in right relationship with God, isn’t marred by sin. For instance, the saints who are beholding God in glory, who are completely without sin right now. The saints in heaven completely without sin. Now, it’s reasonable to ask here why would God do it this way? Why not just say, “Eliphaz, you go directly to me. Don’t worry about Job. You’re already talking to me. I’m God, and therefore, we can sort this out right now.”

But He doesn’t do that. Well, why not? I want to suggest one reason is because of how we’re made. Man is a social animal as Aristotle says, or as God says in Genesis 2:18, it is not good that the man should be alone. We are not meant to be in radical isolation one from another. It’s a mistake to have a really individualistic view of Christianity because Christianity is simply not an individualistic religion.

When Jesus is asked what the great commandment is, what does the great commandment in the law? In Matthew 22, what does he say? Well, he gives two answers. He first says, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. This is the great and First Commandment.

If he stopped there, that would’ve been great, me and Jesus, me and God, just a direct vertical relationship. But he never leaves it just the direct vertical relationship. There’s also the crossbar. There’s a horizontal relationship. In the very next verse he says, and the second is like it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

On these two commandments, depend all the law and the prophets that every single part of the Old Testament comes down to one of two things or both of those two things, loving God, loving neighbor. The rest is just telling you how to do it.

But notice loving neighbor flows from loving God that you can’t rightly be in relationship with God if you’re not in right relation to your neighbors. You can’t say you love the God you haven’t seen if you don’t love the neighbor you have seen.

All of this is closely related to the idea of the church. St. Paul says in Colossians 1:18, he is the head, me being Jesus here, of course, he’s the head of the body, the church. The body of Christ exists to build up the other parts of the body. Jesus could have saved you as an individual cell, a little monad, but He doesn’t. He brings you into a body and you are saved through the body of Christ.

That is why the parts of the body of Christ look out one for another and that includes the parts of the body here on earth, but also the parts of the body in heaven. It’s a mistake to imagine that the saints in heaven are less a part of the body. It’s also a mistake to imagine it’s either or. I pray directly to God. When Jesus gives us the Our Father, Catholics pray that all the time. We prayed at every mass. You pray it in the Rosary. You pray it, for most of us, in personal devotional prayers. The dedicate talks about praying it at least three times a day back in the first century.

Going directly to God, absolutely. But you might have even considered this question. Even in the way the question was originally asked, he said, “Well, we can go directly to the Father. We can go to Jesus who can pray for us to the Father.” It’s like, “Well, hold on a second. Have you ever considered the fact that those two things are both true? You can go directly to the Father. You can also go to Jesus who is at the right hand of the Father, who is both God and who intercedes for you to God. You can go to the Holy Spirit who helps to form the [inaudible 00:17:26] expressions of your heart, the things you can’t put into words before the Father.”

Even within the Trinity you have this work of intercession, which means that trying to simplify and say, “What’s the fewest steps I can go to get to God or what’s the fewest steps I can go to get to the Father?” Something is fundamentally unchristian about that. I don’t mean that as an insult. I mean that the Trinitarian workings that you see there are not themselves efficient from a modern industrial way of thinking.

We’re constantly getting rid of inefficiencies and simplifying and shaving off anything that takes longer. You’ve got a GPS right now that can save you a minute by redirecting you on a different route. Great. That’s not how prayer works. Prayer doesn’t work by what’s the fewest possible steps. Because as I said before, the fewest possible steps would be zero. God can do it himself. Or one, I’m not even going to pray to Jesus. I’m going to go only to the Father. I’m not going to go to the Holy Spirit. I’m going to go only to the Father. Any number of those things.

But that’s not at all how it works. We have a paraclete that’s not more efficient. We have an advocate with the Father that’s not more efficient, but it is more efficacious. It is better than me trying to do it all by myself. Move away from thinking of efficiency and think instead of efficaciousness and God gives some results in this seemingly less efficient way that He doesn’t give in the seemingly more direct way.

That’s how I would’ve responded to the question if I had not forgotten for six weeks to reply to his question. But here’s what I missed because when I posed that, shortened form of that, to the Suttons, Anna, the wife said, “I go to a different passage.” I was really intrigued. She said, “Matthew 8.” I’m heavily paraphrasing. I don’t know if she quoted the chapter and verse.

But she mentioned the scene from Matthew 8 where Jesus goes into Capernaum and his centurion comes and he says, “Lord, my servant is lying paralyzed at home in terrible distress.” Jesus says, “I will come and heal him.” But this centurion says, “Lord, I’m not worthy to have you come under my roof, but only say the word and my servant will be healed.”

Now if you’re a Catholic, chances are that sounds extremely familiar because we quote that only we say, “My soul will be healed” at every mass right before receiving communion. We acknowledge we’re unworthy, but that God can make us worthy. What you may not know unless you’re familiar with the passage this comes from is what the centurion says to Jesus next.

He says, “For I’m a man under authority with soldiers under me. I say to one, go and he goes, and to another come and he comes, and to my slave” or the word doula can also be servant, “do this, and he does it.” Notice the centurion is saying to Jesus, “I’m not even worthy to have you in my house.” That’s one reason. But then he gives a second reason. I’m a man under authority, meaning he knows how authority works and he knows that someone in authority gives a command.

He can say, “Go, come, do this,” and he can trust that the servants are going to go, come, do that. The soldiers are going to go, come, do that. He realizes Jesus has authority. He has royal authority. He can act through intermediaries. Jesus doesn’t say, “Hey, that’s too inefficient. That’s too indirect.” Jesus praises this as a faithful response. Matthew 8:10, when Jesus heard him, he marveled and said to those who followed him, truly, I say to you, not even in Israel, have I found such faith.

Given the fact that the man is not himself Jewish. He’s a Roman centurion. Given that this is coming from a certain time and place to make sense of what’s going on here in Matthew 8, you have to step back and think about ancient royal authority. Ancient royal authority is really big. I’m going to say it just a couple words at the outset that kings surrounded themselves with people who were extensions of royal authority.

You see this all over the place. As we’re going to see, you see this even in the Kingdom of God. When you see that, a lot of that is foreign to our way of thinking about things. But this is not foreign to the way of thinking of people in the day of Jesus. We have to step back from our own, again, this post-industrial efficiency-obsessed mentality and enter into more of an ancient royal view of authority.

Here’s what I mean by that. I’ll give just a handful of examples. In Judges 4, the Israelites are under the hand of Jabin, the king of the Canaanites, but while he’s ruling in Hazor, their direct opponent, their direct foe, the one who’s actually doing the oppressing isn’t the king, it’s the commander of his army, Sisera.

Judges 4 and 5 tells about the defeat, not of Jabin directly, but of Sisera, because he’s the representative, if you were, of Jabin’s royal authority. He’s the one whose boot is actually on the neck of Israelites. Likewise, in Judith 2 is not Nebuchadnezzar, the king, that they have to worry about. It’s Holofernes, the chief general of the army. The story is about the defeat of Holofernes, not of King Nebuchadnezzar.

In Jeremiah 39, when Jerusalem is taken, we’re told about the Babylonians and the officers of the King of Babylon are all mentioned who are the embodiments of royal authority, who are these representatives. Now, I mentioned all of this happened like six weeks ago, and I was reminded of this recently, because in a couple of weeks I’m going to have a video looking at 2 Kings 18 with what happens with the Assyrian attempt to take over Jerusalem.

There’s an important fact there that the king of the Assyrians sent three people, one called the Tartan, one called the Rabsaris, and one called the Rabshakeh with a great army from Lachish to King Hezekiah, Jerusalem. Notice the king pretty explicitly does not come himself. This is an intentional move the Assyrians to show their authority, don’t send the king, they send representatives of the king. That’s going to matter.

There’s a lot of reasons why that matters. Because the Assyrian one is the one I’ve been really obsessed about, I’m going to explain this one a little more then I explain the other ones. Believe me, I’m explaining this less than I want to because I imagine you’re not obsessed with the Assyrians right now, and I respect that.

First, Betina Faist says in the Neo-Assyrian empire, there were five other dignitaries of paramount status beside the grand vizier and the steward of the royal palace. You have two right there. You also have the Tartanu or the Tartan. The commander in chief, he was the supreme commander of the Assyrian army after the king. That first of the three that you heard about, that’s him.... Read more on Catholic.com