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The Companions in Christ Series
Participant's Book
Part 3, week 3
Prayers of Petition and Intercession
Some time ago, my friend Sarah's father suffered a heart attack. Luckily Sarah was visiting him at the time. She administered CPR until the paramedics arrived and took him to a nearby hospital. After his condition improved, Sarah told us of her gratitude for the opportunity to have saved her father's life. She felt that God had guided her and protected her father. Many of her church friends gathered to offer prayers of thanksgiving for what Sarah considered her "little miracle." After a quick recovery, Sarah's father was released from the hospital and returned home to his family.
A few months later, Sarah called me. Her father had just been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. He was experiencing double vision and other symptoms. The tumor, the doctor said, was inoperable. His condition rapidly deteriorated. At the time of his death a few months later, he was unable to see, hear, or speak; he was a deformed body lying on the bed, without hope of recovery. My friend felt deeply anguished. Not only was her father dying a painful and humiliating death, but she considered herself responsible for this catastrophe. "I should have let him die," she would cry. "At least he would have died in peace. Why did God allow this to happen?" I never found the right words to console her. I could only listen and hold her in prayer.
This story disturbs our deepest sensibilities, raising many natural and difficult questions. What happened here? Did God fail Sarah? Did Sarah "fail" her father by saving him in the first crisis? Did family and friends pray for the wrong thing?
Prayers of petition and intercession can be mystifying. Sometimes we feel that our prayers go unanswered, and we question the value of asking for anything at all. Other times, as in Sarah's case, we wonder if we have sought or asked for the wrong thing. If we cannot really know what is best for anyone at any given time, why ask at all? For centuries these questions have been the subject of debate and countless conversations in religious circles. Many books have been written on the topic, and Christians continue to wonder about them. We may not have clarity on all these issues, but we do know that Christ urges us to make our requests known to a God who loves us and cares for us.
This week we will focus on prayers of petition and intercession, prayers for ourselves and prayers for others.
Prayer of Petition
Petition means "to ask or to beseech." Petition is one of the fundamental stances of the human being before the mystery of God. Just as in adoration we recognize the wonder of God, in our prayers of petition we acknowledge our dependency on God. Because we believe in a relational God, we also believe that God desires a personal relationship with us. It is in this context that we offer petitions for ourselves. Petition connects our human need with faith in a God who cares for us and desires our good. The problem arises when we think that we know what is best for ourselves and allow the conviction of our "knowing" to shape our petition. We earnestly pray for what we perceive to be the joy, healing, or goodness we need, forgetting that the prayer of petition is not a tool to manipulate God but a response to God out of our poverty and need. Humans cannot control the mystery of God's will. Frequently when we do not receive the desired answers to our requests, we feel resentful and hopeless.
I would like to suggest two necessary elements in our prayer of petition: 1) a willingness to ask, trusting the deep goodness and love in God's response, whether or not we can see it as such; and 2) a willingness to receive what comes as from the hand of God, surrendering to the divine will in an act of faith.
Asking. We present our needs to God, although God fully knows them already. "Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely" (Ps. 139:4). The psalmist's awareness of God's omniscience does not prevent him from crying out to God: "You are my God; give ear, O Lord, to the voice of my supplications" (Ps. 140:6); "Incline your ear, O Lord, and answer me, for I am poor and needy" (Ps. 86:1). Like the psalmist, we do not pray to inform God of our needs; we pray because we depend on God and trust in God's love for us.
Often our prayers help us perceive more clearly our true needs. We may imagine that our need is for physical healing when the root need is for emotional or relational healing. We may begin by praying earnestly for a particular outcome and find over time that our prayers get "sifted" in God's presence. Self-centered, anxious, and superfluous aspects of our prayer simply fall away as the Spirit purifies our desires. This falling away is part of working to reshape our will so that it conforms more closely to God's perfect will. Jesus encourages us to seek, ask, and knock so that good gifts may be given by God and found by us (see Luke 11:9-10). More than anything, God wants to "give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him" (Luke 11:13). This is the greatest of gifts, the one that orders all else we could hope to seek because the Spirit discerns truly what is the will of God (see Rom. 8:27).
Petition, then, is not aimed at changing God's heart because God already desires the best for us. Instead, it unites our desires to those things that God already wishes to give us but that require our consent to be granted. Every time we ask God to come to our assistance, we open ourselves to the coming of God's kingdom within and among us. When we pray as Jesus taught us to pray, we ask for many things: material sustenance, pardon, strength in our weakness, wisdom in our confusion, and comfort in our suffering. We come in faith to ask God, the giver of life, to sustain our spiritual, physical, and emotional life. We ask for the deep healing that may or may not include the cure of our illnesses. Above all, we ask for the grace of the Holy Spirit and the fulfillment of God's kingdom (Matt. 6:10).
Receiving. When we present our petitions to God, we yield to the one who knit us together in the womb (Ps. 139:13) and who knows us better than we know ourselves: "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you" (Jer. 1:5). My friend Sarah did not know what was best for her father. God is the only one who really knew. She thought it would have been better had he died "peacefully" of a heart attack. Others suggested that her father needed the extra time to prepare better for his final encounter with God. We can only guess what was in God's mind in this situation but more important we can trust what is in God's heart.
In prayers of petition and intercession, we exclaim with the psalmist, "I delight to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart" (Ps. 40:8). Receptivity to God's response does not mean a resigned passivity to what God has already decided without our involvement. On the contrary, when we willingly yield ourselves to God, we become active collaborators in the divine plan, full-time participants in God's project for creation. By uniting our will to God's will, we join in Jesus' Gethsemane prayer. In fully accepting God's will, Jesus fulfilled his identity as God's Son, the Beloved, with whom God was well pleased (Luke 3:22). As we come to accept and desire God's will fully, we too fulfill the human identity we have been given as sons and daughters of the living God.
Prayer of Intercession
Because we believe ourselves to be children of the one God, we express our solidarity and communion when we pray on behalf of others. In the Hebrew Scriptures we find great intercessors such as Abraham, Moses, and the prophets, who kept calling the people back to fidelity to the covenant and interceded for their sins. The Suffering Servant offers a biblical model of intercessory prayer: "He bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors" (Isa. 53:12). The author of the Letter to the Hebrews assigns this role to Jesus: Jesus as the great intercessor, the high priest, the mediator of the new covenant, offered once to bear the sins of many (Heb. 7:26; 9:15, 28). Paul offers Jesus' intercessory role as our hope in his Letter to the Romans, which presents Christ, not as the one who is to condemn, but as the one "who died, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us" (8:34). As Christians we maintain that God alone can grant us good things and that Christ is our true Mediator or Intercessor before God. When we offer prayers of intercession on behalf of others, we express our common need as children of the one God and join our intentions with the heart of Christ who purifies and presents our needs before God.
God is continually working out a redemptive process in this world, and God uses the faith of believing persons in the mysterious working of this process. Our prayers can and do make a difference. They are, as one writer puts it, "a cosmic fact, that . . . may tip the balance."1 The tremendous dignity and privilege of being able to join God's saving, transforming intentions for this world should give us great courage in our prayers.
What to Pray For
Sarah and her friends questioned the legitimacy of their prayer. Like them, we really do not know what is best for anyone. What then do we pray for in our petitions and intercessions?
We have said that we pray because we trust God's promise to help us in our need. The question then is, "What do we really need?" In some situations, the need is most apparent, and we want to pray for those needs in a concrete fashion. Yet beyond the obvious needs, I would like to suggest three common human needs, necessary elements in our quest for healing, that we often overlook in our prayers of petition and intercession. They are our need for love, for forgiveness, and peace.
When we stand before God, we realize how wounded we are, how sinful and limited our human response to God's love is. Like the tax collectors and sinners of Jesus' time, we come near to listen to him. Some would remind us that we do not deserve to be close to Jesus, that we are not good enough to enjoy his love. To those arguments Jesus responds with the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32). Through this powerful story, Jesus reveals to us the unconditional love of a God who desires to welcome us back into the Father's house, not because of our deep contrition, but because of God's outrageous love. When we pray, we need to ask for openness to this love, to invite God's mercy into our lives. God's greatest desire is to be in communion with each one of us. This was Jesus' promise: "Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them" (John 14:23). Nothing could be more intimate. We need to ask for the grace to accept God's love for ourselves and for others, so that we in turn may love God and offer ourselves as the dwelling place of the eternal Lover!
We also need to ask for forgiveness for ourselves and for others, and for the grace to accept it. Many of us have difficulty letting go of the past. We cling to our guilt and our sin, even though God has already forgotten them. Recently I heard someone suggest that God throws our sins in a lake and then posts a "No Fishing" sign by it. To accept God's forgiveness and to forgive ourselves for being less than perfect are necessary conditions for our openness to forgive others. I suggest that our prayers of petition include asking for forgiveness and for the grace to extend that forgiveness to those who offend us.
Finally, I believe that when we pray we need to ask for peace. We can ask God to transform our lives into a gift of peace for others and ask that those for whom we pray receive it. A beautiful prayer attributed to Francis of Assisi, a thirteenth-century saint, begins with the request: "Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon." When we pray like this, we open ourselves to the transforming power of the peace of the risen Christ. He gave this gift of shalom to a group of frightened disciples after his resurrection. "Peace be with you [shalom]" (John 20:19-21).
Prayer is deeply personal but never private. When we pray we are always in communion with the body of Christ, the church, the community of all believers. In our prayers of petition and intercession, we ask for what we think we and others need but trust that God knows best. We ask openly and honestly out of our poverty, not as an attempt to control God. Moreover, when we ask for anything, we also make a deeper commitment to be faithful followers of Christ. As we present our petitions to God and ask for the coming of God's kingdom, we also commit ourselves to work for its realization to the best of our abilities.
Our prayers of petition and intercession are not a quiet activity but full of energy and action. As we ask, we surrender; as we express our needs and hopes, we trust. There is nothing resigned about this form of prayer. It calls for faith, openness, and a deep commitment to work with God toward the coming of the kingdom for which we so earnestly pray.
Notes
1. Douglas Steere, Dimensions of Prayer (Nashville, Tenn.; Upper Room Books, 1997), 69.
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