We'll go first to Daniel in South Portland, Maine, listening on the Catholic
Answers app. Daniel, you are on with Jimmy Akin. Hello. I am a Protestant, and I'm
interested in learning about the Catholic faith. Okay.
And I've always grown up around only Protestants, so I've never heard anything
from Catholics. Okay. And I was wondering why you guys pray to Mary,
because in the King James Bible 1 Timothy 2:5, it says, "For there is
one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus." Yeah. Well, let's
deal with that verse first, and then I want to show you something very
interesting about the context to that verse. It's true that Jesus is the only
mediator between God and man, in a couple of very special senses. Number one: He's
the only person who has a divine nature and a human nature. He's the only God-man.
And so He's the unique mediator between God and man in that sense. He's also the
mediator through whom the New Covenant was put into existence. So thus, on the
night of the Last Supper, He says of the cup, "this is the New Covenant in
my blood," and He uses the same language, or at least language based on the
language, that Moses used when He instituted the Old Covenant, and He
sprinkled the people of Israel with blood, saying, "this is the blood of the
Covenant." And so Jesus is depicting Himself, at the Last Supper, as the
mediator of the New Covenant the same way Moses was the mediator of the Old
Covenant. And Moses is even called a mediator by St. Paul in Galatians, where
he talks about how the Old Covenant was put into effect through a mediator,
meaning Moses--he was the mediator of the Old Covenant.
So Jesus is the only mediator between God and man in two senses: one, He's
the only god-man, and two, He's the one through whom the New Covenant was put
into existence. But He's not the only mediator in other senses;
for example, Moses was a mediator for the Old Covenant, and other people can be
mediators in other senses. One of the things--and this kind of gets us to the
thing I wanted to show you about the passage in question, you quoted
1 Timothy 2:5--well, if you back up and read the verse in context, you find something
very interesting. If you go back to 1 Timothy 2:1 and read forward, you find
that St. Paul is actually urging people to pray for others. So they're offering
intercessory prayer. And he wants men to lift up holy hands everywhere in
intercession to God on behalf of other people, and so obviously intercessory
prayer does not interfere with Jesus's role as the unique mediator for
Christians, because if it did, then only Jesus would be able to intercede for us,
and, you know, he would probably be contradicting himself right here in this
passage if he meant for intercessory prayer to be precluded by Jesus's status
as the mediator. So he obviously doesn't think that. He doesn't think that the
fact Jesus is uniquely a mediator means that other people can't intercede for us.
And consequently, we read that not only does Jesus intercede for us in Heaven;
the Holy Spirit intercedes for us in Heaven, Christians here on Earth
intercede for other people--in fact, just in this passage, Paul was exhorting them
to intercede for other people--and we even see saints and angels in Heaven
interceding for other people. If you look in the book of Revelation chapter 5, you
have the twenty-four elders in Heaven that seem to represent the leadership of
the people of God in Heaven, and they're offering to God incense, which we're told
are the prayers of the saints. And normally in the New
Testament, when it talks about the saints, it means the saints on Earth, so we seem
to have the saints in Heaven offering to God the prayers of the saints on Earth,
which would mean interceding for them. If you look in Revelation chapter 8, we have
an angel in Heaven go to the altar, and he has a censer--that's, you know, one of
the things you put incense on and swing it--he has a censer and offers incense to
God, and we're told that incense is mingled with the prayers of the Saints.
So here again, we have an angel in Heaven appearing to offer to God the prayers of
the Saints on Earth and thus interceding for the Saints on Earth. So if Jesus
intercedes for us in Heaven, the Holy Spirit intercedes for us in Heaven, the
Saints intercede for us in Heaven, the angels intercede for us in Heaven, our
fellow Christians here on Earth intercede for us, then there's no reason
not to ask the Virgin Mary to intercede for us as well. And so it's been natural,
since she has a special relationship with her son, and since she's been
specially blessed by God--you know, she herself said, "all generations will call
me blessed," that's in the Gospel of Luke; it's been natural for Christians down
through the ages to ask Mary to pray for them and to be their prayer partner, the
same way they ask other Christians here on Earth or other saints in Heaven to
pray for them. Okay. And I had the follow-up question if that's okay. Sure.
Could you explain briefly what saints are? Yeah. So the term "saint," it--there are
different words for it in Hebrew and Greek and Latin and English, but what
they all have in common is, they all mean a person who is holy. That's what a saint
is, it's a holy one, a holy person. Or actually in Greek and Hebrew it can even
refer--or in Latin--it can even refer to a holy thing; but it normally in English
refers to a holy person. And so there are different types of holy people, based on
the different ways in which they're holy. In the Old Testament, you know, the
Israelites were a people holy to God, so they were a sanctified or "sainted"
people. In the New Testament, Christians are made holy by God, and so Christians
are also saints in another sense. Obviously in this life we're not
perfectly holy, but in Heaven we will be perfectly holy, because Revelation tells
us that nothing unclean will enter the heavenly city, and so by the time we're
in Heaven we'll be perfectly holy, and so we'll be perfect saints in that sense. So
we'll be Saints in an even greater sense than we are here on Earth. Interestingly,
the holy angels, you know, the ones who aren't demons, the holy angels are also
holy, so they can be called Saints. And it's kind of surprising to English
speakers, but God is called a saint in scripture, although when they translate it
into English, they usually translate it as "Holy One," so God is described as the Holy
One of Israel. But you could just equally well translate it "saint," the saint of
Israel it means the same thing. And also surprisingly to a lot of English
speakers, Jesus is called a saint in Scripture. He's the Holy One of God.
But you could translate it "the saint of God," it's just not customary to do it
that way in English. But that's the same word in the Biblical languages. So a saint is
anybody who is in any way holy, and there are different kinds of holiness and
different degrees of holiness, so there are different kinds of saints. Thank you
Daniel, I hope all of that helped.