The word “intercession” derives from the Latin and in Italian it becomes intercedere, a word which we can break down into cedere (to pass, to go) and inter (through). The meaning which follows is: to come between, to intervene in favor of someone.

In the Greek version of the Bible we have entunkanein, which, from the vulgate into Italian translates as interpellare. The meaning is that of wishing to meet someone in order to beg for a grace, to ask insistently, even at the risk of being importunate... This brings to mind the Gospel parable of the neighbor who keeps knocking at the door during the night, hoping to get the master of the house to open the door and give him something so that he can welcome a friend who has just surprised him with a visit.

Starting from the Scriptures, I would like to examine two classic examples of prayer and intercession; the leading characters of which are Abraham and Moses. The object of this examination is to reach the intercessor par excellence: Jesus Christ. We will then conclude with some references to our Rule of Life.

1. Abraham’s Intercession for Sinners (Gn 18:16-33)

Abraham, with his prayer, obeys the word of God, who had established him as a mediator for the blessing of all men. The basic theme of this extract is typical of biblical revelation: the Lord comes to visit mankind in His capacity of judge and savior. The incarnation will be the central and culminating moment of this series of visits.

The Genesis extract is divided into three parts:

18:1-5 - The Lord’s visit to Abraham.

18:16-33 - Abraham’s dialogue with the Lord and his intercession.

19:1-28 - The Lord’s visit to the sinful cities.

In this extract, biblical scholars point out, the editor (J) does not simply tell the story of a past tradition, he actually theologizes. He makes an effort to elaborate a new concept of God: going from the knowledge of the God of Ur of the Chaldees, to that of the God of salvation. The extract, more than dealing with intercession, could be defined as a prayer of theological penetration into the mystery of the human event as it is judged by God.

The event of Sodom is clearly emblematic. We are facing a cosmic situation in which three characters are interacting: God, the person whom God Himself has chosen to lead his people, and the world with its sin and its injustices.

God will judge the world! What is the function of Abraham, God’s friend, in this judgement?

The Lord, who had previously said to Abraham: “All the communities of the earth shall find blessing in you” (Gen 12:3), here renews His promise, and He will do it for a third time after the decisive proof of the sacrifice of Isaac (cf. Gen 17:21; 22:2). But it is the second proclamation, framed between the other two, which is dominant.

Abraham becomes aware that the new epoch in the relationships between God and man, of which he has been called to be the precursor, is not only to teach the way to God, but also to recover the sinner.

It is precisely now that Abraham’s service to the community reaches its culmination, and that his intercession is the catalyst for that flow of blessing which will spread throughout the world.

When the angels have gone away to reach Sodom, Abraham finds himself alone before Yahweh. With delicacy, the Godly one leads us right into the Heart of God: “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do, now that he is to become a great and populous nation, and all the nations of the earth are to find blessing in him?” (Gen 18:17,18). And here one is present at the interior debate going on in the Heart of God: since He has chosen a friend, as Abraham is, to reverse the direction of human history, would it be possible for Him to make a decision as great as the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, without speaking with him about it?

In the beginning Abraham makes himself the presenter for the need for fairness, pointing out that it is not admissible for the just to be involved in the punishment of the evil.

This is a juridical problem insofar as, according to a principle of the ancient oriental mentality, the entire community shares the guilt of the sin of its members and therefore all must suffer the consequences.

Abraham, for his part, refers to a concept of justice which has a far greater significance than this ancient conception does: if there are just people then they must be saved, because justice demands that each individual should be held responsible only for their own acts.

But his demand goes beyond this. Emphasizing the concept of solidarity, the patriarch demands that Yahweh should apply this in the reverse sense, thus changing a solidarity by which the good shall suffer because of the bad, into a solidarity by which the bad shall be saved because of the good!

Thus a new concept of justice is set up: not one according to which each must be given his own, setting the sinners on one side and the just on the other, but that of a justice which attempts to save everyone and therefore uses the just to achieve its ends.

The courage and the enlightenment which allows Abraham to express such a proposal to God stems from a profound reflection on the Word of God, from a faith and a love which are total availability, and from a vital solicitude for his neighbor. His prayer is not impulsive but is founded on revelation; it is distinguished for its persistence, its humility and its trust.

Certainly Yahweh was expecting this plea from the patriarch! The justice which Abraham demands belongs intimately to the Heart of God: to save men by pardoning them and giving them back their life. Yahweh was not waiting to be able to castigate, He was waiting to be able to pardon! The Hebrew term which indicates this attitude, rahámîm (mercy), comes from the word used for the maternal womb, and this indicates its basis. The Creator does not want to destroy, but to give life again and again.

In the beginning Abraham bases his request on fifty just men, ten for each of the five perverse cities; then, reassured, he goes on increasing his requests, finding the courage to continue along the lines of the divine answer, which each time resounds ready and affirmative.

The bargaining continues until he reduces the number to ten just men. God lets Himself be convinced and accepts this figure, not only out of His great mercy, but also because of Abraham’s profound faith.

But how is it that Abraham, who has discovered a new face of God, stops at ten just men?

Apart from the answer to this question, an essential problem presents itself: Do truly just men exist on the earth? The further one goes into biblical reflection, the more the universality of sin becomes evident. The sequel to the story shows that even in Sodom everyone is a sinner except for Lot. He, considered an outsider by his fellow citizens, is the one who is saved.

God’s saving will, however, is confirmed. Since, in fact, Lot could not flee with the necessary speed he is allowed to take refuge in the smallest of the five cities to be destroyed, which is thus saved.

The grace for which Abraham interceded was therefore in part granted. This is to be considered a sign, and it lays the foundations of a hope which will be fulfilled in Christ. On Yahweh’s part there exists the full willingness to pardon and a great design of salvation so as to put pardon into practice; on the part of humans the necessary conditions are still lacking.

We have here the basis for the theology which was to emerge in all its power in the image of the suffering servant of the prophet Isaiah (Chapters 52,53): because of one just man God will save his people. However there is still man’s incapacity to collaborate in an efficacious and resolute way with the mercy of the Lord. The true Author of salvation, the true just man who will be sufficient on His own to save all sinners, bringing them to conversion and to the fullness of life, will be Jesus Christ, man and God at the same time. Abraham, with his intercession, prepares the way. It is not for nothing that he is the father of a long line of decedents from whom there will bloom the Savior.

Abraham is presented therefore as the friend of God: fervent to his very depths because he wishes to know the mystery of God in full. We could say that his impertinence is forgiven because he has loved much. He wants to love God immensely, he wants to understand Him and to justify Him in his own eyes and in those of the world. That is why he asks such audacious questions.

In him prayer is struggle, a struggle between his sense of the respect due to God and the urgency of the problem which faith presents him with: to better know Yahweh’s justice towards mankind. The question of the prophet Jeremiah is also similar “You would be in the right, O Lord, if I should dispute with you; even so, I must discuss the case with you” (Jer 12:1).

Abraham fights for a new knowledge of God. He tries to understand who the God of salvation is, the true God. He tries to know not the God that he, being a human, would imagine, but the one for whom justice is not ignorant of pardon, the one in whose eyes a meager number of innocent people count for more than a greater number of guilty ones.

In synthesis we could say that Abraham’s prayer expresses the fundamental tension between the two “extents” of the law of God: justice and mercy. Speaking as a human these appear to contradict each other. Only within a personal relationship with the just and the merciful God, in which these demands are not in contrast, can one find a gleam of light.

2. Moses’ Intercession for People (Ex 32-34)

The context is that of the sin committed by the people in their adoring of the golden calf while Moses was praying on the Mountain.

This is a sin characterized by two expressions: the first is “depraved” (Ex 32:7), and the second is “stiff-necked” (Ex 32:9). The construction of the golden calf, considered by the people merely as the pedestal upon which they would set God, is an act of mistrust, of negating of the presence of God, and therefore of perversion and idolatry: of being depraved. Their being stiff-necked, or being hard-hearted, is, on the other hand, a symbol of their self-assertion, of following their own way of thinking, of being people who do not listen to God and do not acknowledge the need to be saved by Him.

The consequence of sin is the annulment of the covenant, symbolized by the breaking of the Tablets of the Law.

The story however ends with Moses going up the mountain again and the preparation of two new tablets, showing the Lord’s solemn renewal of His covenant with His people.

Within this context of betrayal, punishment and pardon lies the outspokenly logical dialogue of Moses and Yahweh, which constitutes one of the highest moments of prayer in the entire Old Testament.

The passing from the justice to the mercy of God, from the punishment to the pardon of Israel, is brought about by Moses’ work of intercession in favor of the sinful people.

Moses’ solitary prayer and the adoration of the golden calf on the part of the Israelites: these two antithetical ways of conceiving prayer and of understanding the relationship with God are in conflict with each other.

On the one hand we have the people who, in a moment of distancing themselves from God no longer recognize the need for salvation, which can only come from an Other. They live an empty cult towards an idol which does not have life!

On the other hand there is Moses, who remains alone and to one side. His prayer is a colloquy with God in secret, it is an interior cult, without images but with spirit and with truth. He is the prototype of the man of prayer who meets God face to face “as one man speaks to another” (Ex 33:11).

The Bible story marks no less than five interventions in favor of Israel. On one hand such frequency emphasizes the persistence of Moses, and on the other hand it expresses a dynamic of development in which not only Moses but also Yahweh is constrained to renounce His own wishes: and “the Lord relented in the punishment he had threatened” (Ex 32:14). The Hebrew word used in the translation of this expression, nhm, manifests, in reality, an even more radical and deeper change; it could also be used to depict the words “He repented” or “He was sorry”. It expresses a physical change in the subject and a change of feeling with regard to an action or to a preceding attitude.

All the same, in what follows, because of the overlapping of various accounts, God’s attitude appears disconcerting.

In Exodus, 32:33,34, He replies to Moses: “Him only who has sinned against me will I strike out of my book. Now go and lead the people whither I have told you. My angel will go before you. When it is time for me to punish, I will punish them for their sin”.

Mercy does not exclude the taking of this kind of a stand. The punitive intervention of God is the extreme manifestation of God’s disassociation from evil and from the sin of His people.

In Ex 32:26 the end result of those who are guilty is also the consequence of a choice to which Moses subjects the Israelites. “Whoever is for the Lord, let him come to me!” It is the decision not to stay with the Lord which leads to death. In the apparent contradiction in this sequence of the text, this extract indicates that God’s pardon does not mean that the wickedness is expunged, it calls man to a decision, to a choice which we very often find when reading of the prophets.

Certainly the mercy and pardon of Yahweh are not conditioned by a choice on the part of man: yet all the same, man, in his freedom, can also reject the dispersion of God’s mercy simply because he does not see himself as a sinner.

Also, for Moses, as for Abraham, intercession takes the appearance of a struggle with God. My means of this literary form we are able to learn of how Moses endured during his combat against those spiritual temptations which remained equally as great as his responsibility. He, in fact, finds himself in the middle: between a stiff-necked people whom he must continually remind of the demands of divine justice, and a God whom he does not cease to remind of those promises, rich with mercy, which He made to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

“This is indeed a stiff-necked people; yet pardon our wickedness and sins, and receive us as your own” (Ex 34:9). One should not miss the brusque grammatical change that occurs when Moses says these words. He does not say “this is a stiff- necked people yet pardon its wickedness”, but “ this is a stiff- necked people yet pardon our wickedness”. Moses sets himself in the middle, choosing to be in solidarity with the sin of the people, a sin which he has not committed.

In his solitary ascent up the mountain, Moses became the friend of God. But in his descent towards his people, he also shows himself to be the friend of his brethren: accepting to align himself with them, with the power of God, even against God.

This delicate position, apart from being humanly stressful, is also marked by profound temptations. God’s mercy cannot change itself into indulgence or into compromise with regard to sin. On the other hand, God’s justice cannot eliminate His fidelity and His mercy. Here too one finds the dialectics between the two “extents” of the law of God.

For Moses the temptation to reject the sinful people is great, considering himself immune from sin. So great that God Himself puts him to the test: “I see how stiff-necked this people is... Let me alone, then, that my wrath may blaze up against them to consume them. Then I will make of you a great nation” (Ex 32:9,10). This request, on the part of God, appears contradictory. Moses is aware that his mission in the story of salvation is different from that of Abraham; the “fathers” in Israel have already been established! What sense would there be in going back to start again as if nothing had happened?

It is God’s fidelity to His own work which is the subject invoked here in this moment of truth. “Let your blazing wrath die down; relent in punishing your people. Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac and Israel, and how you swore to them by your own self, saying, ‘I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky; and all this land that I promised, I will give your descendants as their perpetual heritage.’“ (Ex 32:12,13). The awareness of his own limits and of his own subordination to a work which is not his own, is the surest footing for Moses’ prayer.

But above all what Moses cannot accept is the concept of his individual salvation. He intends to share the fate of his people. He prefers to be eliminated from the book in which God is writing the story of salvation, providing that Israel can be saved (Cf. Ex 32:32). It is a kind of blackmail in which Moses gambles the whole of his life, knowing that he will win according to the rules imposed by God, rules which God Himself cannot fail to obey.

Moses, in his struggle, becomes the victor the very moment in which he becomes capable of forgetting his personal interests in order to live an oblative love with the dignity and the greatness of soul of a man who has always assumed his own responsibilities. At that point his intercession is so pure, so efficacious that it can bring about the renewal of the covenant between God and Israel.

Definitively Moses’ prayer is an experience which reveals the mercy of God. This is the God who, while he was telling Moses to “Let me alone, then, that my wrath may blaze up against them to consume them”, secretly wanted Moses to block Him. It is, therefore, as if he was saying, “Do not leave me... I hope you will not leave me.... I leave the decision in your hands!” This is a God who operates in history according to the mystery of the incarnation, a God who could not reveal his magnanimity without the work of just men, such as Moses.

In the admirable course of the story of salvation it will be God Himself who will so seriously regard the all-encompassing meditation of the man who prays, that He will go as far as “compromising Himself” definitively with man: becoming flesh, taking sin upon Himself, for the salvation of all.

3. Jesus Christ Intercedes for Us with the Father

Addressing a community which is probably in crisis with regard to the trials of life, the author of the Letter to the Hebrews starts with a profession of faith in Christ, Son “who is the refulgence of God’s glory”, enthroned at the Father’s right hand. But then he immediately picks up the theme of the incarnation, which established that the Son of God is in solidarity with mankind, with all its historical contradictions, in order to open to all people the new path which leads to meeting God. Psalm 40 should be re-read in this perspective: “For this reason, when he came into the world, he said: ‘Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me; holocausts and sin offerings you took no delight in. Then I said: As is written of me in the scroll, Behold, I come to do your will, O God‘“ (Heb 10:5,7). The protagonist, unnamed in the words of the Psalm, is identified with Jesus, who interprets His mission under the sign of the faithful fulfillment of the will of the Father. A Father for whom the will to save is stronger than the will to punish (Cf. Lk 15), who through the power of the only just man, Jesus Christ, true man but also true God, saves each and all of His creatures.

One might say that, with His sacrifice, Christ contributes to establish Yahweh definitively on the throne of mercy. On the cross, the place of synthesis between justice and mercy, God says all of Himself: He is Love. This, Jesus knew very well! He knew that there was no need for any previous intercession for the Father in the parable to welcome the prodigal son even before his explicit repentance, or for the shepherd to go in search of the one lost sheep. God is overflowing love. The offering of His Son on the cross shows how true reparation starts from Him, and only in Him can it become fully efficacious.

In this way Jesus became the architect of salvation for humanity; He is at the beginning and at the end of the journey of faith for those who set themselves on His road; He is the mediator and guarantor of the new and definitive covenant.

To express all this in a single word, evocative of all the long biblical tradition, the author of the Letter to the Hebrews affirms that Jesus was proclaimed “high priest”. This, however, is a question of an existential priesthood, the definitive supersession of all the forms of antique cults; a priesthood made real by means of the giving of Himself in death on the cross.

As the Jewish high priest penetrated beyond the veil of the Holy of Holies, in the same way Jesus, once and for all, entered the new temple beyond the veil of the Holy of Holies.

This veil was His flesh, observes the author of the Letter to the Hebrews (Cf. Heb 10:20), He passed through it by dying and then being resurrected. His body, resurrected from the dead, became “the new and living way”, thanks to which everyone may now have access to the sanctuary.

The sanctuary and the curtain of the covenant are also now different from their previous appearance in the liturgy of the Old Testament. They are truly “greater and more perfect” and “not made by hands” of man (Heb 9:11). The sanctuary is heaven itself, where, on the right of the throne of the Father, our high priest takes His place in order to be our intercessor throughout eternity. (Cf. Heb 9:11-24).

“But he, because he remains forever, has a priesthood that does not pass away. Therefore, he is always able to save those who approach God through him, since he lives forever to make intercession for them” (Heb 7:24,25).

It is in the new sanctuary of heaven that Jesus prays now, in that timeless now of eternity which our created time cannot fix nor reach, if not with prayer. Thus He is and remains “yesterday, today and forever” (Heb 13:8).

Up there, in the resurrected Jesus, there is also the source of our prayer of down here. Thanks to prayer we are close to Him; the limits of time are broken and overcome and we breathe the eternal. He is the one who presents our prayer to the Father, maximizing its value with His merits, sustaining us in our weakness and interceding for our sins.

All this was well and truly present in St. Paul when he wrote “For however many are the promises of God, their Yes is in him; therefore, the Amen from us also goes through him to God for glory” (2 Cor 1:20). St. Paul’s prayer is, in fact, directed to God through Christ: “First, I give thanks to my God through Jesus Christ for all of you...” (Rom 1:8).

St. John also makes the intercession of the glorified Christ the heart of Christian prayer. It is essential that believers remain united to Him as do the tendrils of the vine. In this way they can ask everything they want and every request will be granted to them. This organic union presupposes that the union of one’s will and tension with Christ, is the foundation of prayer.

Our prayer must insert itself in the personal prayer of Christ. It is through His passion that we can begin it, it is with His mouth that we raise our supplications, it is because of His blood that we regain courage, it is because of His justice that we hope to be heard.

In the Gospel of St. John, in Jesus’ long discourse to His disciples, the following expression appears several times, -”If you ask anything of me in my name, I will do it” (Jn 14:14). And since, in the Jewish culture, the name is the equivalent of the person, asking something in the name of Christ means praying in Christ, conforming our prayer to His, asking for what He asks for.

Our intercession will therefore be increasingly pure the more our heart and our mind let themselves act from the heart and the mind of God.

A prayer similar to His, which inserts itself in the unceasing prayer of Christ, would certainly be heard because it is in Him that God has fulfilled all promises. “And we have this confidence in him, that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us” (1 Jn 5:14).

This certainty of Christian prayer is by far stronger than that in the Old Testament. In the Old Testament the sins of the people of Israel could break the covenant and God could move away and listen no longer to prayers. The Christians, on the other hand, no longer feared this kind of rupture: the new alliance, sealed in the blood of Christ, is an eternal alliance. This certainty is founded on the faithfulness of God, who cannot fail to keep His own promises (Cf. 1 Cor 1:9).

4. Elements of Dehonian Spirituality

I would like to help us focus the emphasis on prayers of intercession, lived according to our charism, by making reference both to some “Dehonian” passages from the Gospels, and to the Constitutions.

The Priests of the Sacred Heart underline the unconditional love of God for every man, a love which became visible definitively in Jesus Christ: “But when the kindness and generous love of God our savior appeared, not because of any righteous deeds we had done but because of his mercy, he saved us through the bath of rebirth and renewal by the holy Spirit, whom he richly poured out on us through Jesus Christ our savior” (Ti 3:4-6). For Fr. Dehon this, like other New Testament extracts which reflect the mystery of the incarnation, was a privileged position in which he willingly found himself. Jesus, who transforms our human reality by taking it on from the inside, generates in us a profound solidarity with all mankind, especially with those who are most marginalized.

Because of the centrality of the mystery of the incarnation, the Dehonian, in his prayer, lives a strong sense of responsibility towards the world, towards every human. He feels himself involved with his whole life in the contradictions of humanity. With emotion and wonder his very being resounds with the words from the overture of the Gaudium et Spes: “The joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the men of our time, especially of those who are poor or afflicted in any way, are the joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the followers of Christ as well. Nothing that is genuinely human fails to find an echo in their hearts”.

As Moses refused to separate his own destiny from that of his people, so the spiritual children of Fr. Dehon will never find themselves in agreement with certain Manichees and various fundamentalists of this century.

They are called, instead, to put themselves in the middle, putting up with the tensions and the lacerations which the situation involves. They do all this in order to make a synthesis between the desire for justice and the demands of mercy, between the need for truth and the supremacy of charity; and this starting from contemplation of the pierced side, apex and synthesis of divine justice and mercy, of truth and charity.

In the S.C.J. Constitutions we find: “Though entangled in sin, we participate in redemptive grace. We want to be in union with Christ, present in the life of the world, through the service of our various tasks. And in solidarity with Him, and with all of humanity and creation, we want to offer ourselves to the Father, as a living, holy offering that might be pleasing to Him (cf. Rom. 12:1)” (S.C.J. Constitutions, n.22).

In this way the Dehonian expresses his priestly vocation as mediator. Starting from the Eucharist, celebrated and adored, he lives his mission following the example of Jesus, who does not seek His own will but that of the Father, and who finds His greatest joy in giving Himself for others.

In his daily adoration of the Eucharist the Dehonian wishes to deepen his own “union with the sacrifice of Christ for the reconciliation of people with God” (S.C.J. Constitutions, n. 83), because he feels a need to be “sharing in His thanksgiving and intercession” (S.C.J. Constitutions, n. 84). With his heart open to hope, and rich with imaginings of the love of God, he introduces a “who knows...?” or a “perhaps...?” (Cf. Gn 1:6; 3:9; Jer 21:2; 26:3; 36:3-7). He does this when faced with the irrevocability of sentences and condemnations, in the certainty that the future will remain open to grace and unimaginable surprises of the love of God, who is rich with mercy and capable of writing straight even on crooked lines. It is a kind of challenge which borders on boldness, but is based on the knowledge that he can count on the secret wish of God, who is expecting that prayer from him.

With intercessory prayer it is not we who refresh God’s memory or urge Him in a certain direction, rather it is He who reminds us of our responsibility with regard to the whole of humanity. It is He who urges us to intervene, with greater precision and courage, in the same direction in which His Heart tends irresistibly.

For the Dehonians, being responsible for the world means taking on the commitment to transform it with love, which is stronger than all offenses. It is thus that in our Constitutions reparation is understood “as a welcome to the Spirit (cf. 1 Thess 4:8), as a response to Christ’s love for us, a communion in His love for the Father and a cooperation in His work of redemption in the midst of the world” (S.C.J. Constitutions, n. 23).

In Dehonian spirituality we speak of “contemplation in action”. There is the conviction, in fact, that one’s own work for the Kingdom of God is always and only a tiny drop in the immense ocean of the needs of the world. We feel ourselves to be like the useless servants of the Gospel parable (Cf. Lk 17:7-10). They did what was asked of them, but they were well aware that there was so much more to be done and that it could only be accomplished with the intervention of God.

That is why intercessory prayer, lived in eucharistic adoration, takes on the dimension of a universal love which can reach anyone, and which spreads throughout the world in proportion to its need.

In this they entrust the Father with their daily labors for the coming of the Kingdom, together with the labors of every man, certain that, if the Lord does not build the house, in vain do its builders toil (Cf. Ps 127). They keep ever-present in their mind the fact that the important things are not our personal interests but the good of the entire world. It is in this context that the maxim is meaningful: “Act wherever you are, aiming at the entire world”.

In conclusion, I wish to emphasize that, in interceding for the world, the Dehonian is not only a “Cyrenian carrying the cross”, as a long ascetic doctrine had emphasized for many years, but he is also and above all a “Cyrenian of joy”. Vatican II reminds us of this at the beginning of Gaudium et spes.

The genuinely human joys which make the human heart beat, however limited and perhaps even banal they may be, are not looked down upon by God, nor are they part of a worthless collection which has little in common with the Easter joy of the Kingdom, but rather they make up a part of those joys which we will feel in eternity.

That is why, in prayer, it is the whole man, with his joys and his sorrows, who is offered to the Father, in Jesus Christ, in the Spirit, so that he may be recreated in the magnitude of trinitarian love.