Intercession and Self-offering

INTERCESSION AND SELF-OFFERING

When we say our prayers of asking, technically known as intercession, what do we expect to happen?

In my experience, we either expect too much or too little, depending upon our image of God.

For some people, God is seen as a kind of celestial Paul Daniels who can produce whatever we want out of his heavenly hat, provided we use the magical formula, "through Jesus Christ Our Lord".

For other people, God is seen as a kind of warm cuddly 'Tom' in 'Waiting for God', an elderly retired person way past his prime, unable to make any significant contribution to life any more.

The result is that we either fall too readily upon our knees expecting him to do whatever we want, or else we just don't bother and try to solve all life's problems by ourselves. As a consequence we either risk disappointment or avoid disappointment.

Both these approaches to prayers of asking seem to miss the whole purpose of intercessory prayer.

When we pray, we do not pray alone but as part of the whole Body of Christ, known as the Church, and it is through that body God chooses to be present in our lives today. If that is so, it therefore follows that the answer to prayer will not lie in the intervention of God from without, but rather from within.

In other words, the answer to our prayers comes from within ourselves who are members of his body here on earth. Just as a boomerang returns to the person who threw it, so our prayers return to the person who prays, inviting some form of action. Our prayers of asking must therefore also involve an act of self-offering whereby we make ourselves available to be the channel of his answer to our request.

In short, it is not so much a question of what we expect God to do for us but rather what we expect to do for him in order that he can answer our prayer.

Let me briefly quote from three writers.

Neville Ward writes: "The Christian idea of intercession is that it is not a means we employ to persuade God to act in a situation he has presumably overlooked, and into which he needs to be summoned, but a means God employs to summon our help through our membership of the Body of Christ".

Studdert Kennedy, the First World War padre, writes: "Prayer is not an easy way of getting what we want: it is the only way of becoming what God wills us to be".

Finally, Kenneth Leech writes, "Intercessory prayer is not a technique for changing God's mind, but it is a releasing of God's power through placing ourselves in relationship of co-operation with God".

Each of these three writers make the same point, namely that prayers of asking must also involve an act of self-offering whereby God can use the person who prays to be the means of his answer.

Now I make no apology for labouring this point because once we have grasped this simple truth, many of our problems in prayer begin to disappear.

For instance, it explains why God often appears to delay answering our prayers. It is not so much God being slow but we being slow in allowing ourselves to become the bearers of his response.

It also explains why God waits for us to pray, rather than just getting on with the job and relieving a lot of suffering and misery. He is waiting for us to accept his invitation to share his continuous work of creation.

Again, it answers the question: If he already knows what he is going to do, and we pray for something else, are we not seeking to change God's mind? The answer is no. Much rather we are opening ourselves up to become channels of his influence. We are not seeking to tell God what to do or reminding him of something he may have overlooked in his busy schedule, but rather making ourselves available to him to be the means of his response.

And finally, and this is something that has always puzzled me, prayer vigils do not seek to persuade God to act by virtue of the number of people praying or by the length of time they pray, but rather that by more people opening themselves up to be channels of his love in a particular situation, the expectancy is heightened since he is greater.

To sum up then. There is a danger that we expect too much or too little of God in our prayers of asking, depending upon our image of him. The real answer is not about what we expect God to do but rather what we are prepared to allow God to do through us, as he seeks to express his will through us who are his body on earth today.

In short, true intercession must always involve self-offering.