Why a Saint? 

If you have been to Mexico and keep your eyes open, it won´t be long before you see a saint. Of course, I mean the kind of saint made of plaster and housed in a glass box or set on a wooden table. You will see these saints in houses, shops, cars, and on the side of the road.  I’ve written on this subject previously, so with this blogpost I want to ask the question: 

Why would someone light a candle and say a prayer to a saint shaped out of plaster and placed on a shelf? Why would a young guy walk around town with a bracelet bearing the image of a saint? Why would an elderly woman walk for miles and miles in a pilgrimage dedicated to the Virgin? 

The easy answer is: tradition. We do what we see others around us do. Certain habits and practices have been inculcated in us by parents and teachers and we adopt them because we trust those who taught us. This can be a good thing, but it can also result in believing and doing things out of tradition and not conviction. 

So, if you ask someone why they have a picture of a saint hanging from their rearview mirror, they might shrug their shoulders and say: tradition.

But on occasion you´ll get a different answer that helps to further explain the popularity of the saints in Mexico. Sometimes, people will tell you a story about how they asked a particular saint for a miracle and how their prayer was answered. They will tell you how a family member lit a candle and said the rosario at a particular shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe and how the Virgin answered their petition for healing from a grave illness. 

For the people who tell such stories the answer as to why they pray to a saint is fairly straightforward: the saints have real power to meet real needs! The saints are blessed by God and in turn can bless others.

Whatever we make of these stories of miracles and healings, we must filter them through the lens of Scripture. Nowhere in God´s Word are we encouraged to bring our prayers to God in the name of a fellow saint. Nowhere are we directed to ask for healing from anyone else beside God. On the contrary, we are told that the spiritual power that we need for life is found in Christ and His Spirit that dwells inside of us. This is the Apostle Paul´s point in the following verses from Ephesians 3: 

I pray that he may grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with power in your inner being through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. I pray that you, being rooted and firmly established in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the length and width, height and depth of God’s love, and to know Christ’s love that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

We honour God to the degree that we seek strength and power in Christ, which comes to us not through some magical, mystical process, but rather through a deep comprhension of the depths of His love for us. In other words, spiritual power comes through knowing a person.

Paul’s words here are the message that we seek to bring to people who have taken their eyes off Christ and his all-sufficiency, and have placed their trust in saints and dumb images.