This week’s second reading is short, only two verses, but it reveals something deep in the heart of God. The Lord is an intercessor, and when God intercedes, it’s an emotional affair.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church cites these verses when discussing prayer of intercession (paragraph 2634) and how our prayer can be efficacious (paragraph 2739). The Church’s point in citing these verses is to say that God himself is an intercessor, one who prays for others. Jesus himself prays for us, both in our place and on our behalf. And the Holy Spirit does the same thing. These are not just pious platitudes. Jesus prayed “with loud cries and tears” (Hebrews 5:7), and the Holy Spirit tells us today through St. Paul that he prays with “inexpressible groanings” (Romans 8:26). When God the Son and God the Holy Spirit pray for us, they pray with intense emotion!
This should be the pattern of our prayer too. Is your prayer life flat and rote and unemotional? I like to challenge people, myself included: if you talk to your friends the way you talk to God, would you have any friends? It is rather revealing. The reverse is equally revealing: what if you talk to God the way you talk to your friends? What if you gushed with joy, sobbed with frustration, or shouted at the heavens to blow off steam? And then what if you waited and listened for the Lord to respond? God is big enough o handle the emotions he created us with. There can be no intimacy without feeling. This week, the Holy Spirit invites us into hat intimacy. Pray with intense emotion, with loud cries and tears, and even with inexpressible groanings.
In my own spiritual life, I find comfort in this way of interceding, because I don’t know how to pray as I ought. I often find when I am praying for someone else or for an issue, I start by articulating my own desires. And then I try to bend my prayer to be more in line with Jesus in the garden: not my will but yours be done. But I want the Lord to act. But I want him to remain the Lord and not become my puppet deity, which as it turns out is a being not worthy of worship. In this back and forth, words fail.
The pandemic is a good example. I ask fervently for the Lord to take it away now. But I know he’s doing something with it. I don’t understand what he’s doing or why he’s doing it this way. But I know he works all things for good. So do I ask him to stop working this for a greater good? Do I ask God for less than what he wants to do in the world? I often find in intercessory prayer that I don’t know what to say, and so I sigh. I groan. And then I trust. I trust that God not only hears me but feels what I’m feeling and accepts the prayer.
At the end of the day, intercessory prayer is less about changing God than it is about changing me and what I prioritize and what I want to happen. Intercessory prayer helps me to become more like the Lord, who is an intercessor, and it helps we want what he wants even more, even when I don’t understand it. And it helps to know that the Holy Spirit is interceding for me with divine groanings.