Jump to Christians ask other Christians to pray God is not the God of the dead Can the saints hear everybody? Why ask them at all? The language of prayer
“Why not go directly to God?”
It is an understandable question. Orthodox Christians ask the Theotokos and the saints to intercede for them, yet Scripture says there is one mediator between God and humanity, Jesus Christ. If Christ hears us, loves us, and has opened the way to the Father, why address anyone else?
The short answer is that Orthodox Christians do go directly to God. Every Divine Liturgy is filled with prayer to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. The Jesus Prayer calls directly upon Christ. The Lord’s Prayer addresses the Father with the words Christ Himself gave.
Asking a saint to pray does not replace any of that. It belongs inside it.
Christians ask other Christians to pray
St Paul repeatedly asks believers to pray for him. St James tells Christians to pray for one another and says that the prayer of a righteous person is powerful. Few Christians regard asking a friend for prayer as a denial of Christ’s unique mediation.
That is because Christ is the one Mediator in a way no creature can be. He alone is the incarnate Son. He alone unites God and humanity in His own Person. He alone conquers death through His death and Resurrection. Every Christian prayer—our own or anyone else’s—has meaning only in Him.
The intercession of the saints does not compete with Christ’s mediation. It is one of its fruits. Because the saints live in Christ, they can pray in Christ.
The real disagreement is therefore not usually about whether Christians may pray for one another. It is about whether Christians who have died are still members of the praying Church.
God is not the God of the dead
Christ says that God “is not the God of the dead, but of the living.” Those who die in Him are not erased, unconscious to the life of God, or expelled from the Body of Christ. Death changes the manner of their life; it does not defeat the communion created by baptism.
The Book of Revelation depicts the worship of heaven and presents the prayers of the saints before God. Hebrews describes the faithful as surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. At the Transfiguration, Moses and Elijah are not treated as unavailable because their earthly lives ended centuries earlier. They appear with Christ and speak with Him.
Orthodox worship takes this communion seriously. When the Church gathers, she does not imagine that heaven is far away and the departed are irrelevant. The Eucharistic assembly joins the worship of angels, apostles, martyrs, hierarchs, monastics, righteous men and women, and above all the most holy Theotokos.
We do not summon the dead. We do not seek secret information from them. Necromancy is forbidden. We ask living members of Christ’s Body to pray to God with us and for us.
Can the saints hear everybody?
Not by possessing divine attributes of their own.
The saints are creatures. They are not omniscient, omnipresent, or independent sources of grace. Whatever they know and whatever they do is by participation in the life and grace of God.
Orthodox Christians need not construct a mechanical explanation of how a saint becomes aware of a petition. Prayer is not a sound wave that must travel through space and locate the correct heavenly address. God knows every prayer eternally. The saints live in Him. The Church trusts that the communion He has created is real, even when its operations are not available for inspection.
Why ask them at all?
For the same reason we ask anyone to pray: because salvation is not solitary.
The modern instinct is to treat a direct relationship with God as a private relationship with God. The New Testament does not. To be united to Christ is to be joined to His Body. We bear one another’s burdens, confess to one another, pray for one another, and rejoice with one another.
The saints show what grace can accomplish in actual human lives. Asking their prayers is not an admission that Christ is reluctant to hear us unless persuaded by someone important. It is an admission that we belong to a family larger than the people we can currently see.
Their intercession also humbles us. Left alone, spiritual life can quietly become a conversation between God and the person we most enjoy thinking about: ourselves. The saints interrupt that privacy. They remind us that others have suffered, repented, endured, and been transformed before us.
The language of prayer
Older Christian language uses pray in the sense of “ask,” as in “I pray you.” When an Orthodox hymn says, “Most holy Theotokos, save us,” it does not proclaim Mary the Saviour apart from Christ. Scripture itself can speak of one person saving another in a secondary and dependent sense. The Church is asking her intercession, help, and protection through the grace of her Son.
Still, phrases should not be torn from the worshipping life that gives them meaning. Orthodox prayer is learned most safely inside the Church, not by assembling isolated sentences from the internet.
Christ remains the centre. The saints do not dim Him. They are luminous because His light has reached them.
And when we ask them to pray, we are asking that the same light reach us.
A note. These articles explain what the Orthodox Church teaches and why. They are not spiritual direction. Anything touching your own rule of prayer, fasting or confession belongs with your priest or spiritual father, who knows you and your circumstances.
- Intercessory Prayer, Orthodox Church in America
- All Saints, Orthodox Church in America
- Hebrews 11:1–12:1; Revelation 5:8 and 8:3–4; James 5:16
One passage. One week with it.
Words for the Narrow Way takes a single saying of Christ and gives it seven days — the passage in full, what the Greek is doing, how the Fathers read it, and one practice small enough to actually do.