The Mediation of Christ in Prayer

Our world is a mediated world. It is mediated because it is created. It has its origin. It is the effect of a cause. Some call its origin to be God, while some others (scientists) call its origin to be some vital principle. The fact is that, what was immediate has been mediated in the making of the world. In this was everything we see around us is mediated due to the dynamics of cause and effect. This is the basic understanding of mediation with which we will attempt to understand the mediation of Christ in our prayer. This article is concerned about the mediation of Christ in prayer. However, Christ’s mediation is something more profound than the way, let us say the saints mediated our prayer through their intercession.

According to Bernard Lonergan, there are two ways in which mediation of Christ is applied. One, an objective application, and the other, subjective application. Objective application would be the spontaneous way Christ is presented in the Scripture, in terms of Galatians 4:4 ‘But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying Abba! Father!’; Christ as love ‘No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends’ (John 15:13); in terms of the precept of Christ ‘I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another’ (John 13:34). Objective application is done also through the religious teachings on Christ’s life of suffering and death, his work of redemption in his sacrifice. It is also evident from the scripture that Christ mediates between us and the Father: ‘There is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus’ (1Timothy 2:5); and the Holy Spirit mediates between us and Christ:‘Therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says “Let Jesus be cursed!” and no one can say “Jesus is Lord” except by the Holy Spirit” (1Corinthians 12:3). This is all an account of Christ as mediator in the objective field.

We now move on to the subjective application of Christ’s mediation. Each of us to himself is immediate: oneself as one is, oneself as Existenz, as capable of decision etc. There are some things in us which are to be known; things that are prior given to oneself, all the data of one’s spontaneity, one’s deliberate decisions, one’s living, one’s loving. These are all in our immediacy as ourselves. In all that immediacy there are supernatural realities that are actually not part of our nature but result from the communication to us of Christ’s life. We find the evidence to it in the prologue of St. John’s Gospel: ‘what has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people’ (John 1:3-4). We are a mixture of earth and heaven (body and spirit). We are also temples of the Holy Spirit – proclaims St Paul to the Corinthians: ‘Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Should I therefore take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute?... Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own?’ (1Corinthians 6:15-19).

Being the temple of the Holy Spirit, a member of Christ, and adoptive child of God the Father is the higher part of our reality. Though not part of us by nature they are essentially the gift of God. Present in us as immediate they have to be mediated by the life of prayer. What is thus given to us as a gift has to be made part of our habitual conscious living. Otherwise, we remain in a vegetative state of grace. Grace can be made dynamic and active by the life of prayer, by living, developing and growing, in which one element is gradually added to another and anew whole emerges.

Just as we came to consciousness and grow into full knowledge of ourselves by self-appropriation, in the same way what we are by the grace of God can be mediated by our acts. This is actually self-mediation – for we are mediating what is immediate in us, namely: the temple of the Holy Spirit, a member of Christ and an adoptive child of God the Father. In doing so Christ becomes as one who is apprehended by us. We put on Christ in our own way, in accord with out own capacity and individuality in response to our own needs and failings. Although our appropriation of Christ through our acts appears to be a self-mediation, it is much more than that. Since the object of our living and loving has been Christ in one way or the other it is a self-mediation through another. Besides experiences, insights, judgments, choices, decisions, conversion there is a sense of being carried along. This, Lonergan terms it as mutual self-mediation. We have to see how it is a mutual self-mediation.Christ’s incarnation is the real evidence to this mutual self-mediation as it can be very beautifully explicated in the words of the Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 4:7-8:

Yada yada hi dharmasya

Glanir bhavati bharata

Abhyutthanam adharmasya

Tad’ atmanam srjamy aham

Paritranaya sadhunam

Vinsaya ca duskrtam

Dharma-samsthapan’ arthaya

Sambhavami yuge yuge

(Whenever there is decline of Dharma and ascendance of Adharma, then, O scion of the Bharata race! I manifest (incarnate) Myself in a body. For the protection of the good, for the destruction of the wicked, and for the establishment of Dharma, I am born from age to age).

Christ as incarnated man developed and acquired human perfection. Christ chose and decided to perfect himself in the way of the cross, because he was redeeming a fallen humanity. In becoming a perfect man he was thinking of us and thinking of what we needed to be able to attain our own self-mediation. Just as we attain our self mediation with reference to him in the life of prayer, so also the life of Christ was a self-mediation with reference to us. Prayer is then a reciprocal response of mutual self-mediation that we choose because of him. The mediation of Christ in the life of prayer is then a mutual self mediation, because we choose the cross of Christ because Christ chose it because of us.

Finally we can say that Christ is the mediator in the life of prayer insofar as the life of prayer itself is a transition from the immediacy of spontaneity through the objectification of ourselves in acts. The mutual self-mediation of God’s love in the life of interior prayer can be exteriorly expressed in the charity towards one’s neighbour. We become perfect by our acts of living and acts of praying which are done of course with reference to Christ. Christ came that all people might be saved, and that kingdom of God may be established here on earth. But only a small contingent of people appropriated him through their self-mediation. Therefore the ideal of the Cosmopolis which Lonergan speaks of remains an ideal to be achieved. Nevertheless as he himself says, the movement towards the Cosmopolis begins with mutual self-mediation.