Does Devotion to Mary Draw Us Away from Jesus?

You’re listening to Shameless Popery with Joe Heschmeyer, a production of Catholic Answers.

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. So, today I want to explore the first of three objections to praying to the saints. And this first objection is doesn’t praying to the saints, doesn’t devotion to marry and devotion to the saints end up drawing us away from devoting ourselves to Jesus?

And it can do this in one of two ways. Either I start treating Jesus like he’s really far away and so I have to go to Mary and the saints because I’m afraid to go directly to him. Or it just saps up all my time. For every Our Father, I’m doing 10 Hail Marys. What’s going on there?

So, that’s kind of the first question. As I said, this is the first of three big questions I want to tackle. Next week I want to tackle the question is praying to Mary, is praying to the saints something of Christian origin or is this something borrowed from Paganism?

And then in two weeks’ time, I want to cover the really basic question. Well, can the saints even hear us? When you die, are you with God or is your soul asleep? Are you conscious? Are you in heaven? Are you capable of hearing anything when different people pray at the same time in different languages?

How does all of that work? Now some of that is going to be difficult to answer. But those are important questions to kind of consider. And all of those are big. It’s much easier to ask those questions than it is to answer them. So, I’m going to focus on one question at a time.

The first two of these three questions, whether praying to Mary and the Saints draws us away from Christ and whether it’s of Christian or Pagan origin. I’m going to be looking at one Protestant kind of interlocutor in particular, Dr. Gavin Ortlund.

He’s the pastor of First Baptist in Ojai. And he’s someone that I’ve had a lengthy and pleasant kind of back and forth with over the last about three years. So, I don’t know if this is a brag or an apology, but many of you know Gavin now as a very good kind of critic of the Catholic Church.

Meaning he’s smart, he makes good objections, he’s a very good debater and he’s charitable and he’s nuanced. He’s not a flamethrower, he is not some bigoted anti-Catholic. He’s really thoughtful, which makes him a pretty formidable adversary.

And I kind of stumbled upon him years ago as I was writing my book Pope Peter, which came out in 2020, so probably 2019. And I just had this kind of passing reference to him as this Baptist pastor who realized that there was an evangelical tendency to kind of jump in church history from the time of the apostles until the Reformation. And I really liked that Gavin cared about church history.

I liked that he didn’t skip over three quarters of it by jumping from the first century to the 16th century like so many Protestants tend to. That he can name more than just Augustine in between the apostles and Martin Luther. And this I think led to a series of good conversations. Keith Little and Austin Suggs encouraged us to sit down and have a conversation about church history.

And we did. And then we had a conversation about the papacy. And it seems like ever since then, every week or so I see on social media that Gavin has some video exploring some Catholic topic and there’s like eight different Catholics out there who’ve responded to him. I’m grateful to have someone like Gavin posing these questions.

I’m hopeful for the day he becomes a Catholic. But I don’t imagine that’s going to happen just yet. But I’m glad along the way that he’s making really good objections and making us think really critically about why we believe what we believe. Hopefully, it’s one of those situations where iron sharpens iron and all of us come away better more devoted to Jesus Christ because of it.

With that said, Gavin is going to actually concede seemingly a lot of the ground. You remember I said in two weeks’ time, the third of the three, we’ll ask the question, can the saints even hear us? Gavin doesn’t seem to argue that. He seems to grant the saints are in heaven.

They are praying for us. And he’s still going to have the two objections I already mentioned. So, let’s first look at what he kind of grants so we have a common kind of worldview. And then see where we part company and what we can make of that.

And so, let’s be clear, the concern is not we need to be careful not to overreact. We should honor the saints. The concern also is not that the saints in heaven are blind to or indifferent about the events of Earth as though the church triumphant has forgotten all about the church militant or something like that.

I mean, one might differ from one Protestant to another. It’s good to be cautious about this and not be dogmatic about it. But many Protestants have been very open to say that on the contrary, the saints are praying for us.

For example, in the Lutheran tradition, the Augsburg confession says, we also grant that the saints in heaven pray for the church in general. So, the concern is not that direction. The concern is that we should not pray directly to the saints to ask for their intercession and other benefits from God to obtain from them.

So, we actually have a decent amount of the starting framework. I don’t think Gavin’s going to object in two weeks when I say the saints in heaven can hear our prayers. He seems to be granting the saints are conscious. They’re in heaven, they’re certainly experiencing the glory of God in his fullness.

They are not blind to us. They are not indifferent to us. Now he acknowledges that different Protestants take different views on these kind of questions. I’m actually curious, Lutherans who are watching this, if you want to set the record straight, I’m not sure with the Augsburg confession that that is an accurate representation.

First, it’s not from I think the Augsburg confession itself. I think that’s from the defense of the Augsburg confession, which is a different document. But not an important point. I think the more important point is right after the line quoted, it sounds to me, again as a non-Protestant, that the document is saying the saints have some generic idea of what’s going on.

But they aren’t aware of the particulars necessary. They don’t know that Mrs. Smith lost her eyeglasses. But they know things are looking bad out there, that sort of thing. Now I may be wrong, and so I am happy to have the record set straight.

And in any case, I think the more important thing, certainly for Catholics to remember, is Protestants don’t all share the same kind of vision of what the afterlife looks like or what role the saints play. But Gavin is certainly happy to concede seemingly that the saints are playing one of interceding for us. They’re praying for us in heaven.

But nevertheless, as you heard, he’s worried about us going to them for prayers. So, additionally, right before the part that I just quoted, you actually heard one line. He said, “We should honor the saints. We should look to the saints a s examples.”

He doesn’t think we should treat the saints as unimportant. Remember, this is kind of how I discovered Gavin in the first place, is here’s someone who actually thinks we can learn from the past as Christians. Shocking, right? But then additionally, he talks about this underdeveloped idea within Protestantism of taking seriously the concept affirmed in the creed of the communion of the saints.

This is something Catholics and orthodox tend to take more seriously and consider more deeply than Protestants speaking very broadly. And that there’s a need for many Protestants to rediscover like, oh yes, you are part of the body of Christ. And the body of Christ doesn’t just include those on earth.

It also includes those in heaven. We’ll leave aside the whole purgatory question. But certainly we can say, scripture does not treat salvation as a merely individualistic thing. It doesn’t just have the vertical dimension of my relationship with God. There’s also this really rich horizontal dimension intersected in this kind of Christological way in Christ that love of God intersects with love of neighbor.

And so, there’s this part where it really matters that I’m part of the body of Christ and I’m called to be part of the kingdom. And that this means I have certain rights and obligations and duties. And that one of the things that this includes is actually praying for the other members of the body.

Which is why the saints in heaven are praying for us. They’re not just enjoying time in heaven like they’re on a yacht somewhere indifferent to the needs of the world around them. No, they are actively engaged in the very kind of behaviors that made them saints in the first place.

They’re loving their neighbor even more. They’re loving their God even more. Then there’s no tension between that. So, all of that, I think we actually agree with each other. But if you’re going to concede all of that, it does seem strange again from a Catholic perspective to say, the saints can pray for me, but I can’t tell them what to pray for.

Or if they want to pray for me, great. But if I ask them to pray for me that’s idolatry or that’s drawing me away from Jesus or any of these things. We would never treat our neighbor this way. If I say, “Hey, I’m going to pray for this person who’s been on my heart lately.” I wouldn’t say, “But they are not allowed to tell me what they want prayers for.”

Because that would be crazy and it would make no sense. Because when you tell your brother Christian, your sister Christian, “Hey, I really need prayers for X, Y, Z.” You’re not saying I’m asking for your prayers because I’ve mistaken you for God. If you thought they were God, you wouldn’t be asking for their prayers.

You would just be praying, just solve this issue for me. You can do everything. You’re omnipotent. But no, instead you’re praying for prayers, praying in the sense of asking. You’re asking for prayers because you realize this is an intercessor, not a God.

So, we have no trouble recognizing this on earth, Catholics and Protestants alike. But for some reason this is an area where we do part company between Catholics and Protestants when it comes to the saints who are in heaven.

Even though they’re part of the same body of Christ and like the other Christians in the body of Christ are praying for the other members of the body. So, then what are the objections Gavin has to this practice of asking the saints for their prayers?

Particularly, two kind of historical context factors that contribute to that concern. The first is going to be about on the ground real life consequences of this practice. Especially as it sort of mushrooms up into the medieval era and the sort of soteriological context in which it functioned. The second is going to be about the origins of this practice and when it comes into the picture.

Great. So, Gavin’s two objections are both historical in nature. But in the video he labels them as pastoral and historical, which is actually pretty helpful. So, the pastoral one is the one I’m going to cover today. Even if we grant that in theory, you could be devoted to Mary and to Jesus.

In practice, didn’t we find in the medieval church that devotion to Mary drew Christians away from devotion to Jesus? Didn’t it make Jesus seem more foreign, more alien, this harsh far off kind of judge? The second objection, which as I said we’ll get into next week, we’re not going to answer it here, is devotion to Mary rooted in scripture?

Or isn’t it rather borrowed from paganism? And like I said, we’ll kind of flesh all that out. Short answer, no, it’s not borrowed from paganism. But I want to get into the meat of the pastoral objection that didn’t we find these medieval Catholics really drawn away from caring about and loving Jesus?

And I want to give maybe a word of warning at the outset here. That Gavin is going to concede as we’ll see, that it’s certainly possible in principle to be devoted to both. And I think it would be very easy to point to a whole litany of saints who obviously were deeply in love with Mary and even more deeply in love with Jesus.

It would not be difficult at all. It would be much more difficult, I think to find a canonized saint in the last say 1,000 years of whom that wasn’t true. And so, given all of that, the pastoral objection seems sketchy. But he’s going to say even though in theory you could do it. And maybe some great saints did it.

In practice, medieval people seem to have treated Christ as very distant. And that’s why they needed Mary and the saints rather than just going boldly to God, going boldly to Jesus. And if you’re familiar, this is a very common kind of Protestant stereotype. And I’ve noticed something about it.

And I’m going to just throw this out and you can agree or disagree with it. I’ve noticed that it always tends to be exotic Catholics. And so, what do I mean by exotic Catholics? I mean, it’s always folks who are kind of far off. Now, if you’re someone living in an all Protestant part of the country or all Protestant part of the world where you don’t know any Catholics directly, maybe you just think, “Well, yeah, all Catholics are Mary worshipers.”

“They don’t have any kind of relationship with Jesus, etc.” But for many of the Protestants watching this, I think you would be able to say that is not really an accurate stereotype of the faithful Catholics that I know in my experience. Maybe the lukewarm Catholics, sure. Maybe the people who aren’t really religious at all but call themselves Catholic, Fine.

But the people who are actually devoutly seriously trying to follow the teachings of the Catholic Church and trying to live in a Catholic way. I think, and without even knowing you, that you would find this is not true of the Catholics you personally know. And I’ve met plenty of people who know me personally and who know I’m not like that stereotype.

Who will say, “Well, nevertheless, these more remote, these Catholics they haven’t met, they’re definitely like that.” And it’ll be either Catholics in some far off part of the world. Oh, in Spain, they do such and such. In the Philippines, they do such and such. Or Catholics who were in some far off century.

Oh, medieval Catholics did such and such. And I would just give a word of warning. And I’ll give the example. For those of you watching the YouTube video, there’s a shot here of this really curious religious procession with a giant Mary statue. And if you have only that without any context, it might look like all of these silly pious, but stupid Catholics are coming to worship Mary.

But no, that’s not what was happening at all. I was in Seville for Holy Week and they have enormous religious processions. And so, they have Mary absolutely. But they also have Pontius Pilates in Jesus. Not to honor Pilate, but to show the events of Holy Week. And so, very obviously someone just watching this would realize this is not a story just about Mary.

This is a story first and foremost, quite centrally about Jesus Christ. But if you are looking at it from 2,000, 4,000, 8,000 miles away or you’re looking at it from 200, 400, 800 years away, it’s easy not to have the full picture to just take the Mary bits and to have a misconstrued kind of conception. This is how stereotypes work.

And so, all I’m saying at the outset here is this is something we should be cautious of because this is something that I’ve seen people fall into. I will let you judge for yourself whether you’ve been guilty of that.

And we’ll analyze maybe the degree to which I think Gavin might be falling into that. But nevertheless, here, I’m going to let him kind of just present his objection about how medieval people allegedly were based on a few snippets from some prayers that he found.

So, starting with the second one first. People often say, “If it’s not wrong to ask your living Christian friend to pray for you, why would it suddenly become idolatrous to do the same thing now just because they’re with the Lord? Aren’t they more alive than ever?” That kind of thing.

That’s a very fair appeal. And another appeal that Catholics and other non-Protestants often make that as Protestants, we need to think about again, historically, how have Protestants thought about that is it’s not a zero-sum game. It’s not as though if you really love your Christian brother, then you’re going to love God less because you only have so much love to give.

It doesn’t work like that. You can love God by loving your Christian brother. And we are told rightly, I think you can worship God by honoring this saint or something like that. And then of course, there’s the distinction between worship and veneration that is made that I’ve dressed more in my video on icons.

So, I’ll say less about that here directly. Now here’s my response to all of that. I think much of that is valid, especially kind of on paper.

I just want to make all of that super clear. I know you just heard it. I’m just going to double down on what he said. There’s no reason, at least in principle, you couldn’t have a tremendously close devotion… And in the same way that you would never look at someone and say, “Could they really love God?”

“I think they love the poor too much. I think they’re serving their neighbor too much. I think they honor their wife too much.” And if you do think that, you have a radical misunderstanding of the gospel. And so, it does seem to follow that the objections Gavin’s raising here wouldn’t be valid any more than those other objections would be.

Why would we treat Mary and saints as inherently more dangerous than sinful people on earth? What principled objection could there be where it’s okay to love the poor, it’s okay to love my wife, but I can’t love Mary and the Saints deeply? And he’s going to say, “Yeah, well that’s fair. Oh, that’s fine.” At least on paper. So, here’s his but.

But I also think it is absolutely imperative to appreciate how things actually played out. What is on the ground consequence of this practice? Is it really functioning like that, the zero-sum game? For example, when we pray to the saints, does this enhance our love for God and our understanding of the gospel or not?

Now I’m going to say a few things. And I want to preface them by saying I’m not arguing that all of the medieval practices are such that in themselves they refute the notion of praying to the saints. All I’m trying to do with this first point is set historical context that will then position us to address that question, the biblical foundation of this practice. But what I’ve done is with the help of Martin…

Sorry, real quick, I want to just make sure we’re getting one thing really clear. He’s looking into the history. And he’s going to use this to tee up the question of is this biblically rooted? And so, that you’ll notice in my response, I’m going to dive into what are the biblical roots for this way of thinking about Mary and the saints?

Chemnitz and John Calvin and others, I’ve canvassed a number of hymns, breviary, prayer books, and other liturgical texts from the late medieval era that did have the approval officially of the Roman Catholic Church and were in common usage among the laity. And I want us to feel a bit how prayers to the saints were actually playing out.

Because if we can get some common ground of like, oh yeah, I can see how that can go wrong, that will help us then go forward from there. And it will maybe make a Protestant concern have a little bit more sense. So, let me give some…

So, two things. First, I want to praise the fact that methodologically, he’s not just saying what’s the craziest prayer I can find? You can probably find some Catholic who wrote down a prayer that was recorded that’s just wild and off the wall and indefensible. He’s not doing it.

He’s not taking the low hanging fruit. And for good reason, that would no more disprove Catholicism than finding the equivalent crazy Protestant would disprove Protestantism. He’s instead saying, “Well, what are the church approved prayers?” So, magnificent.

I really appreciate that. The second thing, the appeal to feelings here, how does this make us feel? I think it’s a double-edged sword. On the one hand, I think it’s totally valid to say, “When I hear these prayers, especially without any context, if they make me feel a little uneasy, then that can make me more empathic towards Protestants who are uneasy with Mary and devotion.”

It doesn’t make it right, but at least I can understand why they might be queasy as foreigners to this culture. And as people who don’t share a Catholic worldview and who aren’t from the Middle Ages. Now, Catholics aren’t from the Middle Ages, but we share a common worldview. So, it’s less foreign to us.

Sometimes can still be foreign, but it’s less foreign. And so, there’s less of the culture shock. But nevertheless, I want to go back to the thing I said before about exotic critiques. When you’re critiquing someone who is really remote from you culturally, you need to be really careful to make sure you’re understanding that.

There’s a popular dispensationalist author by the name of Roy Zuck who had a book called Basic Bible Interpretation that I think sold like three quarters of a million copies, something like that. Tremendously successful by the standard of these things. And I disagree with major chunks of the book.

But there’s one thing he says that I think is really insightful, and I really liked the way he said it. He’s talking about the way we read the Bible, just how we have to be careful in doing it. And he says, “Besides gaps in time, space, and customs, there’s also a chasm between our way of speaking and writing and the way people in Bible time spoke and wrote.”

And he gives the example that we don’t speak and think in parables. And so, we often, when we encounter Jesus using a parable, we kind of don’t know what to do with it. But there’s also going to be a lot lost in translation, at least potentially going from the Hebrew and Greek into English. There can be shades of meaning that are lost.

And so, it can be difficult to understand what’s meant on our culture is really different. Our customs are really different. And our geographies, all of these things make a difference. I think many people who’ve gone to the holy land have the experience of realizing the mental image they had of the life and ministry of Jesus was wrong, at least geographically.

And then they can kind of reset that geographically. But you have to imagine that’s not just true geographically. It’s also true culturally. It’s true in all these other ways. All of the ways we’re envisioning the story, all the ways we’re understanding this is, is mediated through these lenses.

And the more distant we are, the harder it is to make sense of this. If someone tells me a story about something that happened in Chicago, I can more readily understand that than if they tell me a story about something that happened in Shanghai. Because I just don’t have the mental space of envisioning Shanghai.

And so, I would give that kind of as a word of warning. It’s very easy to misunderstand both the Bible and medieval documents and really all old documents for the reasons Zuck cites. Now, this is going to be true in a special way of prayer. And St. John Henry Newman points this out.

He says, “Of all passions, love is the most unmanageable.” And even says he wouldn’t want a love which is never extravagant, which always observes propriety and moves around in perfect good taste. And he suggests nobody would.

What mother, what husband or wife, what youth are made in love, but says a thousand foolish things that they’d be embarrassed to hear recorded or to have overheard by strangers. And so, he says, “This is true as well with devotional feelings that burning thoughts and words are as open to criticism as they are beyond it.”

And so, he suggests that we don’t want to basically misread love letters like a police report. And I think that’s a really helpful kind of image. That when we’re dealing with devotional language, sometimes it’s over the top. And it’s good that it’s over the top. Now, it can be bad in the wrong contexts.

It can be bad if the people praying it don’t realize it’s over the top kind of language. But all of that’s to say, for a lot of reasons the argument that Gavin is making just by the nature of the argument, even if he’d used different examples, the argument itself is one I’m deeply suspicious of.

Because it’s judging our neighbors from a long time ago in a different place based on a little snippet of some of their prayers without any real context of what this meant to them or their broader life. So, you can take that or leave it. But we’ll get more into the specifics. So, with that, let’s turn to the particular examples that Gavin’s going to use

Some examples… And what I want you to be listening for is the way forgiveness and the propitiation of God works. In other words, what’s the soteriological context that’s functioning here in these prayers? “Lord, we ask that thou placated by the intercession of all thy saints may look graciously upon our infirmity and avert all the evils which we justly deserve.”

“We pray thee Lord that the merits of blessed Mary who is both perpetually a virgin and the bearer of God may attend us and always implore thy forgiveness for us.” Note this word forgiveness. It’s going to come up in a lot of these. “O Noble Mary, excellent above all, procure for us forgiveness. O, Mary, full of grace, sweet, mild and beautiful, grant us grace.”

“O, glorious Mary, delicate and delights, prepare glory for us. O, holy Virgin Mary and all the saints and elect of God come aid to me wretched one now and in the hour of my death. And make the Lord our God propitious to me by your merits and prayers.”

“Do you therefore O Virgin Mary, approach the more than heavenly shrine of the ever to be venerated Trinity offer for me now and in the hour of my death. Whatever of virtues and graces the king of glory has been pleased to preserve in you as the safest treasury from the day of your conception to the hour of your assumption”

I’ve been reading through a lot of these, combing through them, collecting all of the various titles that Mary has called. And then trying to gather an impression of, again, how does medieval piety actually work? And I don’t think I’m just picking the worst examples.

I don’t think I’m just highlighting the most abusive thing. I think it’s very common in medieval piety for Mary to play a very significant role here. And I think one way I could articulate the concern is that many of these texts give the overall impression that God is a bit more distant, a bit more uncertain.

And Mary is more tender and near and approachable. And the just flat out soteriology I think is contrary to the gospel of Jesus Christ as it’s been revealed in a book like Hebrews, for example, the Epistle to the Hebrews. Because we believe that it’s through Christ’s mediatorial work, his priestly work specifically, that God has already been propitiated.

There needs to be no more propitiation for sins. Christ’s sacrifice is sufficient. And we can approach God directly by the Holy Spirit through the merits of Jesus Christ. There could be a sort of formal agreement upon that in practice. This is not a both end here with Mary.

It’s not like, yeah, we can… Because this is the appeal, it’s Christ is our mediator. But that doesn’t mean there can’t be other intercessors and so forth. But it can come into competition depending on how it plays out. And it’s playing out here in ways that it is competitive.

It is detracting from the sufficiency of Christ. Because the specific tasks that are the property of Christ in the gospel are being assigned to Mary here.

So, that’s Gavin’s argument in a nutshell. Basically, sure, in theory, you could honor Mary and the saints and you could go to them without it drawing you away from Jesus. But in practice, the medieval church was drawn away from Jesus and in two ways.

He didn’t single these out as two distinct strains, but I identify them in what he’s saying. First, just focusing too much on Mary the saints and just treating Jesus as kind of far off. And then second, this notion of propitiation. Now that’s a technical term.

And not only is it technical term, it’s a term that is hotly disputed in its meaning between different forms of Christianity. Does propitiation and expiation mean the same thing? And so, it might be an unhelpful term to use for this concept.

Just because depending on who you are, you might have a pretty significantly different understanding of the term. But basically the idea is satisfying an angry God is, I mean, one sense of the term. Or making some sort of atonement, making some sort of satisfaction.

This is what you can imagine. We’re kind of deep into covenant theology, kind of deep into atonement theology here. But at the very least we can say that one of Gavin’s concerns seems to be that there’s this unique role that Jesus plays. There’s one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus.

He’s the bridge between heaven and earth. And it can sound like we’re putting Mary or the saints there. Or at least it can sound like you’ve got this far off distant angry Jesus and we’ve got the nice sweet Mary, nice sweet saints.

And they’re the ones we can go to. And they’re our advocates to Christ rather than Christ being our advocate to the Father. So, what do we make of that? I want to address the first one. First, that medieval people were not Christocentric.

We’re not focused on Christ because they viewed him as far off. And this is just abundantly false when you look at the totality of the evidence. Now, I realize neither Gavin nor I are medieval historians. And so, I’m not going to rely on my own expertise or his.

I’m going to instead turn to an actual medieval historian who I’ve heard Gavin praise more than once, and that’s Eamon Duffy. Now, Gavin usually cites Eamon Duffy for things like church history in the early church, the first couple centuries where Duffy’s not a particular specialist. But Duffy is a specialist in one area in particular England, between the ‘1400s and the ‘1600s.

So, the end of the medieval period, the beginning of the Reformation period. In 30 years ago, he wrote what remains probably the best book on the subject, the stripping of the altars. The subtitle says it all. He’s looking at traditional religion in England from the year 1400 to the year 1580.

It’s hard to overstate the importance this book had when it came out in 1993. In I think it was 1994, history today named it Book of the Year. I mean, it was just massively influential. And it’s spawned as you might imagine, a lot of response books, but also a lot of books building upon the central thesis and books kind of tweaking the argument.

And to oversimplify a book that you really need to just read for yourself, you can get it on audiobook. It is like 600 pages long, but it’s really interesting. It’s not super technical, although there are some technical bits as we’re going to see. The core thesis is something like this.

The standard Protestant narrative, and so the standard narrative in the English-speaking world, was that prior to the Reformation, the church in England and if you were outside of England, the church and wherever you were in Europe was sick and dying. And people were just going through the motions and were not very devout. And that’s why they were so ripe for reformation.

And what Duffy found out in researching this is that this was just not true. And that there was actually a great deal of evidence that this wasn’t true. So, one of the works in particular that he’s responding to is a book by a guy named A.G. Dickens, who is himself a well-respected English historian, called the English Reformation.

Now, this is a book that you would find in classrooms. And Dickens claimed that medieval men were faced by quite terrifying views of punishment in the life to come. It was no wonder that they felt more comfortable the saints and with God. But they came to regard the blessed virgin as a merciful medriatrix forever seeking to placate the divine wrath of the son as judge.

Now, that is more or less exactly I think what Gavin just claimed. And so, it’s worth reading Duffy’s response. He says, “As these passages suggest, Dickens book begged me questions about the nature of late medieval piety.” It ever seems to have occurred to him that those who flocked and jostled to “see their maker” at the elevation in the mass could hardly be said to be remote from or uncomfortable with their God.

Or that the clergy who led prayers to the saints are commended pilgrimage, [inaudible 00:33:35] also a religion focused on their daily celebration of the Eucharist. And thus, on a resolutely Christocentric action. Remember when I said my experience in Spain that if you just look at the Mary [inaudible 00:33:49] and don’t see the other [inaudible 00:33:50] overwhelmingly just telling the story of Jesus, then you’re completely misunderstanding the picture?

Well, the same thing is happening here. That by just looking at the Mary and prayers and not understanding the context that these are people for whom their daily life is centered around getting to go and see our Lord raised in elevation at the mass. These are people who are deeply in love with Jesus and who are following them as devoutly as they can.

Now, there was that line about them going to see their maker. And this is Duffy quoting Cranmer. Now, Thomas Cranmer, as you may or may not know, was the archbishop of Canterbury under Henry VIII. He was originally a Catholic priest and Catholic archbishop.

But when the reformation happened and the reformation in England happened, he switched his positions on a lot of things and started to deny the Eucharist. And in fact, in some fairly mocking terms. So, here he is in a work called the True and Catholic Doctrine of the Lord’s Supper.

And he claims it and yet have the very antichrist enemies that Christ have by their fine inventions and crafty scholastically divinity deluded many simple souls. And brought them to this horrible idolatry to worship things visible. And made with their own hands, persuading them that creatures were their creator, their God and their maker.

Where else? What made the people to run from their seats to the altar and from altar to altar and from sacrine as they called it, the sacrine, peeping, tooting and gazing at that thing which the priest held up in his hands, if they thought not to honor that thing which they saw.

What moved the priest to lift up the sacrament so high over their heads or the people to cry to the priest, priest hold up, hold up, and one man to say to another stoop down before? Or to say, “This day I have seen my maker. And I cannot be quiet except I see my maker once a day.”

What was the cause of all these? And that as well the priest as the people so devoutly did knock kneel at every side of the sacrament. That they worshiped that visible thing which they saw with their eyes and took it for very God. The point that I think Duffy’s making is it’s incoherent to accuse people both of having that kind of Eucharistic piety and of being afraid to be in contact with Jesus.

These people who are doing everything they can, even to catch a glimpse of him. This is a tremendous and devout, extremely pious kind of faith. You may disagree with their Eucharistic theology, but they’re doing everything they can to try to see Jesus.

This is not people who are non-Christocentric. They’re devoutly Christocentric. Now, that’s just one way of approaching the question. I would say you can take Duffy’s word for it. You can look at Cranmer describing the Eucharistic piety of the people that he has this tremendous contempt for.

You can also do something like look at the reading habits of the people that we’re talking about here. Now, I’m looking more towards the latter part of the Middle Ages. Reading habits are a lot easier to trace once you have things like the printing press. Reading habits are more of a thing once you have a printing press.

So, the 15th century. But nevertheless, in the 15th century, the most popular work after the Bible itself is De Imitatione Christi, the Imitation of Christ by Thomas Kempis. And this was tremendously popular not only during the medieval period, but also after the Reformation.

Popular both with Protestants as well as Catholics. And so, Maximilian Von Hapsburg has a work called Catholic and Protestant translations of De Imitatione Christi. And he’s looking at 1425 to 1650. Tracing and as he describes it, the transition from a late medieval classic to an early modern bestseller.

And that really captures it right there. As Von Hapsburg says, De Imitatione’s spirituality was strongly Christocentric and emphasize the unambiguous relationship between Christ and his saints. And he points out that Protestant versions tended to tweak the language, but pretty slightly.

So, he gives an example that originally Thomas Kempis had said that the teaching of Christ surpasses the teaching of all the saints. Protestant editors added the word [inaudible 00:38:11] thoroughly. The teaching of Christ thoroughly surpasses the teaching of all the saints.

But there’s not a shift in meaning there, only a shift in emphasis. The point there being that when you read what people are actually what reading and praying with the spiritual devotions they have and look at it more broadly than just what did they say to Mary to say what was their whole vision? They’re looking at the imitation. They’re saying, “How can I live more like Jesus?”

They’re trying to imitate Christ. Did they have a deep sense of their own unworthiness? Absolutely they did. And rightly so. They also had a tremendous sense that Christ came to them and gave himself for them as priest, as victim, and as a model to be imitated.

And so, we want to somehow hold together two biblical ideas. St. Peter’s depart from me, Lord, from a sinful man and his Lord to whom shall we go. You have the words of everlasting life. We need to have that awareness of our own unworthiness to be in the presence of God.

And a sense of the fact that God chooses to be in our presence nevertheless. And the medieval people for all appearances seem to have held those two ideas together remarkably well. Of course it’s a perennial struggle for all of us. How do you have the proper reverence and still go boldly before the throne?

Nevertheless, they seem to have… And we see abundant documentary evidence. You don’t have to take my word for it. I just gave you two scholarly works that delve into this. If you want to go even nerdier, Duffy then looks at the wills and trusts that people leave.

So, when somebody dies, they often have this religious language where they make kind of a profession of faith in their will. And so, thanks be to God. He goes through all of this so I don’t have to. He goes and looks at these wills. And what he finds, well, let’s put it in his words, he says, “The late medieval Christian was certainly encouraged to seek the support of the saints at the hour of death as in life.”

But in the words of John Bossy, that’s another historian, a Scottish one, the believer knew who his savior was and was taught to place his trust first and foremost in the passion of Christ. And then he points out, as we see from numerous 15th century examples, there was no contradiction or inconsistency, or orthodox Catholics in number one, trusting solely in the merits of Christ.

And number two, asking the prayers of the living and the dead, including the saints, that the testator might be a partaker of those merits. So, this apparent contradiction is only that it’s apparent. It’s not a real contradiction. And he points out that the reformers thought there was a contradiction between number one and number two of that.

But it’s worth pointing out that Christians for 1,000 years had held both of these things with no sense of contradiction. They’d not seen a contradiction between these ideas. That should be enough to make us think like, okay, here these people saying they’re pleading solely the merits of Christ and also asking the saints for their intercession.

And that the saints will somehow win them a more favorable outcome. So, how do those two things hang together? We’re going to get into that. But all I’m saying right now is the idea that they couldn’t hang together is contradicted by 1,000 unbroken years of practice in which the faithful treated these two things as both true.

If there was such an obvious contradiction that you, a person, looking on 500 years later can say, “‘Aha, well, obviously those two things contradict.” You’d think in a millennium, somebody else would’ve noticed that. Nevertheless, Duffy goes on to say, “Historians have scratched their heads unnecessarily over wills of this sort.”

Seeing them as muddled or mixed or inconsistent, but they’re not. It’s a false choice. And that we’ve seen them being used in the 14th or 15th century all the way up to the 16th century into the 15th, ’40s. So, there you go. Now with that, I want to turn back to some of the prayers that Gavin cites in particular.

Because I think if you have that kind of framework, you can make sense of the prayers that might otherwise be very foreign for Protestant viewers and listeners. The very first one begins, Lord, we ask that thou placated by the intercession of all these saints may look graciously upon our infirmity and avert all the evils which we justly deserve.

Now, this should put to bed the first [inaudible 00:42:37] that people were afraid to go directly to God. Notice the first word is Lord. We’re going directly to God. We’re going directly to God while also saying, “Look at the saints, not just look at me.” Which is tremendously important that we are in this together.

That we’re not just saying, “I’m going to stand or fall on the strength of my own faith, but that I’m part of a body of Christ.” This is a dimension. This is part of why it matters that we’re in the communion of saints. And we’ll get into why. But we’re still going directly to the Lord.

It’s right there. It’s in the first word of the prayer in question here. It goes, “We pray the Lord that the merits of blessed Mary who is both perpetually aversion and the bearer of God may attend us and always implore thy forgiveness for us.” So, we’re going to God and we’re looking at Mary.

And we’re not saying Mary can forgive us by her own merits. We’re rather saying, “Lord, look at Mary one of our own, and be generous, be merciful, be forgiving.” And so, we’re asking for Mary’s merits not to save us of herself, but to implore the forgiveness of God.

In other words, there’s no propitiation here happening where Christ dying on the cross directly does something to win our forgiveness. This is not like that. And it’d be a mistake to read it like that. Going on, the prayer to Mary that is next cited. Mary is asked to procure for us forgiveness.

Now again, if she could just give us forgiveness, if she was the one who forgives, if she was divine, we wouldn’t be asking her to procure it for us. We’re asking her to play an intercessory role. This is literally what an intercessory is. It’s someone who goes between.

They intercede. You deliver a request on somebody else’s behalf. You’re interceding for them. And so, this is a tremendously biblical concept. We’re encouraged to make intercessory prayer. We’re encouraged to try to procure forgiveness for one another. In fact, we see a very clear biblical model of this.

In Acts chapter 8, Simon the Magi or Simon Magus commits the sin not coincidentally known as simony. He tries to buy spiritual goods. And St. Peter rebukes him, upgrades him and warns him that he is on track to be damned. And he ends this by saying, “For I see that you are in the gall of bitterness and in the bond of iniquity.”

And Simon does not respond by saying, “Well, Christ is all good, and he’s the advocate, so I’m okay.” He instead says, “Pray for me to the Lord that nothing of what you have said may come upon me.” That is he goes to a saint, St. Peter, and asks for Peter’s prayers to bring about his forgiveness and his ultimate salvation.

And the question is, is this appropriate? Because if you understand what Simon is doing, then you understand what the medieval Christians are doing. Because they’re doing the same thing. They might use slightly different language or wording.

But Simon doesn’t think Peter died on the cross for him and medieval Christians didn’t think Mary died on the cross. They’re not going to Mary or to Peter or anybody else as the mediator. There’s one mediator, it’s Jesus Christ. They are going to them as intercessors who can help win our salvation.

And now that language is strong and might make people uncomfortable. So, let’s really press into it and just ask a few hard questions. Number one, can the intercession of the saints help to make us right with God? The example from the Bible from start to finish overwhelmingly points in one direction.

Yes, yes, yes. What am I talking about? The last chapter of the Book of Job, one of the best places to start. In verse 7, Jobs’ three smart-aleck friends are rebuked. God tells him that his wrath is kindled against them. And they haven’t spoken of him rightly as Job has.

And so, they’re told to make an offering, seven bowls and seven rams, and to take that to Job and offer for themselves a burn offering. And he says, “My servant Job shall pray for you.” And God doesn’t say, “I will accept your burn offering.” He instead says, “I will accept his prayer.”

And so, sure enough, Job 42:9, the three friends go. They do what God tells him to do. And then we’re told and the Lord accepted Job’s prayer. So, here are three men who were not in good place with God, who’d been cut off from God. Who were then restored, not by their own actions, not by their own going directly to God.

Remarkably enough, by Job’s intercessory prayer. They did exactly what God had told them to do. And it was still Job’s intercessory prayer that made the difference. If your theology doesn’t make sense of that, that’s the problem in your theology, not in the Bible. The next example, unless you think this is just an Old Testament thing.

Matthew 9, one of the clearest examples, the paralytic man is brought before our Lord. And Jesus looks upon the faith, not of the man, but of the friends. He says, “Jesus saw their faith and he said to the paralytic, take heart, my son, your sins are forgiven.” It couldn’t get any simpler than that.

The intercession of the paralytics’ friends. The paralytic man could do nothing for himself. Though his friends brought him to Jesus, they interceded on his behalf. They couldn’t forgive his sins directly, but they could bring him to the one who could. And their faith was enough to win the salvation, the forgiveness of sins of that man.

That’s remarkable. And it’s right there in Matthew 9:2. And that’s not alone. In 1 Corinthians 7, this is a model given. If you are a believer who has an unbelieving spouse, St. Paul says that the unbelieving husband is consecrated through his wife. And the unbelieving wife is consecrated through her husband.

Otherwise, your children would be unclean. But as it is, they are holy. This is not just for the paralytic friend with some weird one-off, not just a Job, but his friends with some weird one-off. No, this is something that’s in the structure of the Christian model of prayer.

That you need to help bring your friends to salvation. You need to bring your loved ones to salvation. And that’s not just let me try to constantly convert them. It’s also to spiritually pray for them. And to have the faith that God will reward them for your faith.

And if that seems wrong to you, that probably is a sign that your conception of Christianity is too individualistic to me and Jesus without any sense of the communion of saints. Without any sense of the body of Christ, without any sense of the human family being part of the story of the fall, and thus the story of redemption. That’s a much bigger conversation.

But I would just say, the Bible agrees with me, not Western individualism. 1 John chapter 5, we’re given this model again. That if we see our brother committing a venial sin, a sin which is not mortal, we should ask and God will give him life again, for the sin which is not mortal.

So, it’s right there. If you see someone sinning a small sin particularly, you don’t need to go and say, “You technically shouldn’t have done that.” Just make a prayer for their behalf and God will honor that prayer. We’re given that model in 1 John 5. So, let me press down even further.

Second question, can the saints save us? Now that would be stronger than any of the language that we heard that Gavin’s objecting to. But here’s the thing, the language of the saint saving us, the language even of us saving ourselves is also all over scripture.

So, again, we have to understand it properly, but it’s there. And if your model of salvation doesn’t include this, that’s a deficiency. So, can the saint save us? Overwhelmingly the answer in scripture is yes. Let me give you some examples. James chapter 5 tells us, you can give the example of if you’re sick, have the elders come in.

The anointing of the sick is described. And we’re told the prayer of faith will save the sick man. He doesn’t say Christ is the soul mediator. And therefore, you don’t need to worry about anything else saving him. It describes human prayer done by these priests, the elders as saving the man.

The prayer of faith will save the sick man. And the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. Therefore, confess your sins to one another. Pray for one another that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man has great power in his effects.

Now, this really gets at the heart of it. I understand the unease that Gavin and many Protestants have. Because they say, “Look, God is not bad. God is good. So, why do we feel this need to appease him somehow?” And that’s a really good argument against Mary in prayer.

But it’s a really good argument against all prayer. Because you say, “Well, look, God is all good, and he knows everything.” I always go to the example of Matthew 6. Jesus says, your father in heaven knows what you want before you ask him. And you might think He would then say, “Look, he knows everything. He’s all good.”

“You don’t need to tell him anything. Save your time. Go to the store. You don’t need to pray.” But he doesn’t. He then gives us the Our Father. So, these human arguments against Mary and prayer are really arguments against all prayer. That God is so good and so powerful that he doesn’t really need our prayers.

He doesn’t really need the intercession of the saints. All that’s true. He doesn’t need any of it. That is totally irrelevant though. He’s chosen to make use of prayer. And he’s chosen to make use of prayer precisely to build up both our faithful dependence upon him and our dependence upon one another and our love of one another and our love of him.

And so, if you understand the purpose of prayer is not to give God some information he doesn’t know. But to build up the twofold dimension of my relationship with God, my relationship with neighbor, then it makes sense that I still pray both to God directly and interceding for others and asking others to intercede from me.

Because there’s a tremendous relational value to prayer. That God answers prayers again, not because he needed the information, because he wants to honor the relationship and the trust and the faith. And that’s actually abundantly clear when you read about the number of times God looks at the faithfulness of the person and then rewards them with something he wasn’t going to give them otherwise.

So, that’s why the prayer of a righteous man has great power in his effects. The righteousness matters. Which is also why intercessory prayer is important. Because you don’t know how righteous you are. And if you’re really convinced of your own righteousness, that’s a great sign that you’re not as righteous as you think you are.

So, going back to James 5. My brethren, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone brings him back, let him know that whoever brings back a sinner from the era of his way will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins. Years ago, I was giving kind of my own conversion slash vocation story when I was a seminarian at the time.

And I said something about my RA in college who’s now a Catholic priest, how he’d really saved me in college when I was at risk of really wandering away from Christianity. He answered a lot of questions I had. He answered a lot of questions I had about Christianity generally, about Catholicism specifically.

And as I put it, he saved me. And whoever I was talking to was really put off by the language because they were a Protestant. It was kind of uneasy with this idea of me saying someone besides Jesus had saved me. But this is the language James uses in James 5.

As you bring a sinner back from the error of his way, you will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins. You can save other people. And so, again, if your model of salvation and of prayer doesn’t include that you can save other people, the saints can save you, then it’s not the biblical model.

That’s not a problem with medieval prayer. Jude chapter 1. It’s super weird to say because there’s only one chapter in Jude. This is verse 22 and 23 of the only chapter of Jude. Jude says, “Convince some who doubt. Save some by snatching them out of the fire.”

So, not only can the saints save us, we can save other people, which is maybe more shocking. That doesn’t mean that I’m their God or that Mary’s my God or this priest who saved me, Father Andrew, is my God. He’s not my saver in the sense Jesus is. But he is my saver in the sense scripture speaks about it here, of being an efficacious intercessor.

Of being the paralytics friend to bring me to Jesus to be saved. And there’s 1,000 ways you can do that. In the Old Testament, we’re given this model as well in Ezekiel chapter 3. I’m going to give you just a couple examples here in verse 19. It says, “If you warn the wicked, he doesn’t convert, the wicked man will die in his iniquity, but you will have saved your life.”

And in verse 21, “If you tell him, and he does convert, he’ll live because he took warning and you will have saved your life.” So, notice that. I mean, taken in isolation just as you can get a lot of shock value by taking a Mary and prayer out of context. You can get a lot of shock value by taking those kind lines out of Ezekiel and say, “Look at that.”

“Doesn’t that Palladian. You look like you’re saving yourself. You don’t need Jesus. You can save yourself.” No, understand it in the broader context. When we talk about the saint saving us or us saving ourselves or saving other people, we don’t mean that we’re doing the same thing that Jesus does.

We mean in other words, that we’re bringing people to salvation, bringing people to Christ. Last example. Some people are like, “Well, what about St. Paul? He seems to not use this kind of language.” And the thing is he does use this language.

1 Timothy 4:16, he tells Timothy to take heeded to yourself and to your teaching. Hold to that for by so doing, you will save both yourself and your heroes. So, we can say St. Timothy saved people because St. Paul says that you saved people. And so, again, if that makes you uneasy, I’m sorry.

That’s a problem with kind of your conception of the Bible though. Last kind of theme I want to explore this week. I’m calling it nine saints mean God because I don’t really have a better way of describing it. It’s the thing that Gavin talks about as propitiation, but I want to use it as less technical sense.

The idea that Dickens had, Jesus is either far off or at least angry. And so, we need to go to Mary and the Saints. And I get where people are getting this from in the prayers. And all I would say here is this is actually a model of prayer given to us in scripture itself.

And I know that sounds kind of strange, so I’m prepared to defend that. That God wants us to think of him as someone that needs to be persuaded. Not because of any deficiency in goodness, but because this is part of the dynamic of prayer. There are some things in prayer you won’t get unless you pray for them.

And so, one of the easiest ways to describe that is as if you’re like changing God’s mind. Now, of course, you’re not actually changing God’s mind. There’s rather a dynamism to the will of God. So, classic example, you tell your kids, “If you eat your vegetables, you can have dessert.”

There’s a conditionality there. You want them to eat their vegetables and have dessert. You want good things for them. Nevertheless, if they refuse to eat their vegetables, you’re not going to just give them the dessert anyway. That wouldn’t actually be being a good father or a good mother.

Well, likewise with God, he wants to give us good things. They may not be the good things we want to get, but he wants to give us good things. But he wants us to pray for them. He wants us to put our will in relationship to his. And so, yes, this is often described as if God had some kind of bad idea and a human gave him a better idea.

Or that God was really mean and a human made him nice. And obviously those depictions aren’t literally true. Nevertheless, their attempts to depict or articulate something that is really difficult to describe about the dynamism of prayer. That an all good, all loving God nevertheless demands that we engage in prayer for our sake and not for his.

So, what am I talking about in scripture? We’ve already seen the examples from the medieval prayer. In Genesis 18, you’ve got the teramentive Mamre, the three angels that come to Abraham. And then they go on from there to Sodom and Gomorrah, which I’m not going to go as well.

And God has just made covenant promises to Abraham and he’s about to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. And so, the Lord said, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I’m about to do?” Given the special role that he has, that he’s about to make Abraham a great nation. He says, “No, for I’ve chosen him.”

So, this is significant that he reveals the plan to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah to Abraham. Why? Because Abraham is in this special kind of covenantal relationship with the Lord. And so, he sells him. Because the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is great, I’ll go down to see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry which has come to me.

And if not, I will know. Now, of course, this is again anthropomorphic language. It’s not that God doesn’t actually know. What he’s doing here is very humbly presenting himself to Abraham for a conversation. And so, Abraham hangs back. As the others go off to Sodom, he hangs back.

He stands before the Lord. He draws near and he says, “Will thou indeed destroy the righteous with the wicked?” That is Abraham ask God if he’s going to do something that appears to be immoral. Now, arguably it’s not immoral. But nevertheless, he then negotiates with God going from 50 righteous men down to if there were 10 righteous men, he’ll spare the city.

You know the story. Sodom and Gomorrah are still destroyed. There are not 10 righteous men. Nevertheless, in Genesis 19:29, we’re told that when he destroyed the cities of the valley, God remembered Abraham and sent Lot out of the midst of the overthrow. That is Lot and his family seemingly are righteous.

They don’t amount to 10 people. So, that’s unfortunate for Sodom and Gomorrah. But they are righteous living in an unrighteous kind of city. But Abraham is more righteous. Leon Kass in the book the Hungry Soul, has a great examination of the comparative approach in terms of hospitality that Lot and Abraham exhibit towards the angels.

Lot does what’s appropriate. Abraham is excessive. He’s over abundant. He rushes out to them. He gives them a feast. He doesn’t just give them food. I mean, it’s a study in contrast where Lot is doing fine, Abraham is saintly.

And this is I think context we can lose without kind of the ancient Jewish hospitality culture. Nevertheless, Lot is not saved because of his own righteousness. Lot is saved, we’re told explicitly in 1929, because God remembered Abraham. That is why he’s saved.

Now notice it looks like God had to be appeased by Abraham. And this is a special role that he has as the head of the people of God. Abraham does. Moses then has that role later on in Exodus 32 after the incident where they build the golden calf, God threatens to destroy the people.

He says to Moses, “Now therefore, let me alone that my wrath may burn upon against him and I may consume them. But if you all make a great nation.” Now, does God really want Moses to leave him alone? No, if he really wanted him to leave him alone, he wouldn’t have to say that.

God’s perfectly capable of withdrawing his presence. He doesn’t need Moses to be like, “All right, the door’s over here.” No, well for one, they’re on a mountain. But for two, God’s all powerful. So, he’s not actually wanting Moses to leave him alone.

He’s inviting him again to intercede for and advocate for the people that he’s been entrusted. And that’s what Moses does. He says, “Oh Lord, why does I wrath burn hot thy people?” Now there’s a great bit there. There’s a little shift where God had said, this people, it is a stiff neck people.

Moses cleverly shifts it to your people. And so, it’s like when your kids are acting up. It’s like your kids are acting up. Let’s create this relationality even in the language. It’s a subtle thing, but it’s really important. And you actually see this multiple times in Exodus when God looks like he’s going to give up on the people Israel and Moses reminds them, these are your people.

You brought them out of Egypt. You don’t want the Egyptians to say that you brought them out with evil intent. And so, he says, “Turn from my fierce wrath and repent of this evil against thy people.” Those are remarkable words to say in prayer to God, telling God to repent. Moses is not struck dead on the spot.

Instead, Moses appeals to the covenant, Abraham, Isaac in Israel. And sure enough, Exodus 32:14, the Lord repented of the evil which he thought to do to his people. Now, was God literally planning some kind of evil to the people? No, he was instead pointing out to Moses that the natural consequence of their actions are they’ve abandoned me.

Why don’t I abandon them? And Moses intercedes and appeals to the best in Israel. This is a powerful moment. And this shows us what intercessory prayer is like. But notice that Moses to do this has to take responsibility. That they can’t just be God’s people. They also have to be Moses’s people.

And if you follow this in Exodus, there’s a great interplay where God and Moses keep calling them the other person’s people. It’s delightful. Flash forward to the New Testament, unless you think this is an Old Testament thing. 1 Timothy 2, we are told to make supplications prayers, intercessions and thanksgivings for all men.

In other words, we as baptized Christians sharing in the priestly, prophetic and kingly ministries of Jesus Christ are called to do this thing that Abraham once did, that Moses once did, that Jesus does par excellence. We are called to be imitators of Christ. And that includes making supplication.

Now, 1 Timothy 2 very famously says in verse 5 that there’s one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus. But just a few verses before that, we’re told to make intercession. So, Paul does not see any contradiction between saying there’s only one mediator, there’s only one who died on the cross for your sins.

And you nevertheless, or not just nevertheless, but because of this have both the right and the privilege and the duty to intercede for other people the way that those Old Testament figures did. One last example of this in Luke chapter 18. This is not actually intercession, but it’s a great example of God presenting himself in kind of a weirdly bad light in prayer.

And I think he gives us a little hint as to why he does it. Jesus told them a parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart. And he gives the example of the persistent widow. This is Luke 18:1-5. It’s really worth taking to prayer. Then in a certain city, there is a judge who neither feared God nor regarded man.

There’s a widow who keeps coming to him saying, “Vindicate me against my adversary.” And at first, the unjust judge refuses. But afterwards he said to himself, “Though, I neither fear in God nor regard man. Yet because this widow bothers me. I will vindicate her or she will wear me out by her continual coming.”

Now, the thing that’s really striking about this passage is here’s this story of a guy who’s so wicked that he does the right thing only for the wrong reason. Because he doesn’t want to be harassed by this woman who’s absolutely in the right. And Jesus gives this as a model for what prayer should look like, which is frankly bizarre.

Because you’re just like, well, God’s not an unjust judge. And no, he’s not. And you know that and I know that and everyone knows that. But there are times where we can feel like the persistent widow where we’re just knocking and not getting the answer.

And we just keep knocking and keep knocking. That is not a defect, that’s not a bug. We’re told in Luke 18, keep doing that. If you feel like you’re getting on God’s nerves because you keep coming in with the same thing, by all means, keep doing it.

In the same way that kind of persistence would pay off here on earth, even with the wicked. So, much more will it pay off in heaven with God who isn’t wicked, who is all good. Jesus makes all that clear beginning in verse 6. He says, “‘Here is what the unrighteous judge says.”

And will God not vindicate his elect who cried to him day and night? Will he delay long over them? I tell you, he will vindicate them speedily. So, God will answer those prayers, but we have to be persistent with it. See, in other words, all that’s to say, I get how someone reading this without the kind of Catholic framework or vision could say, it sounds like you’re treating God as this basically this unjust judge.

Or this far off figure who’s just angry and has to be appeased. And I would say to summarize everything I’ve said so far, that is a misunderstanding. And something that we know is not an accurate depiction of what the medieval people thought because of all their Eucharistic piety, because of all the other things that show they were happy to imitate Christ.

They wanted to learn more about him. They had passion plays. They were all sorts of stuff. But it instead reflects these may be under-recognized dimensions of biblical spirituality. That there’s this real sense in which God allows himself to be presented almost in a bad light to encourage our persistence and to encourage our intercession.

And this is something where medieval prayer seems faithful to me to these biblical models of prayer. Now, we’ll get into this more deeply next week when we look at the question whether this prayer to Mary and to the saints is something that is of Christian origin or something of Pagan origin.

But I just wanted to tee that up that if your understanding of the Middle Ages is people were super distant from God and so that’s why they went to Mary and the saints, you’re wrong. And qualified historians will tell you you’re wrong. And a mountain of evidence will tell you that you’re wrong.

And that’s really good news because it would be a shame if that were the case. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. I’m hopeful to read your comments and see what you have to say. God bless you.

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