Intercession while someone is alive may be effective because prayer itself is effective.
Once they are already dead it is not.
But more to the point, by saying “interloper” it tracks back to what the story asserts: that someone who was not a party in a relationship under the terms offered, which comes with a time limit based in our mortality, and therefore requires timeliness for intercession, is in fact an interloper.
I understand the basic reason for the tale, aside from sounding nice (when it really isn’t) it is an expression either of two things: first and foremost in its inception it probably (hopefully) represented a desire that occurs then people consider that folks they greatly admire, who were “good people” but who rejected the Gospel, are somehow not damned (what in our current era I would call the belief that the Ghandis of the world aren’t lost through what we know of their lives says that they rejected the Gospel); secondly it could represent on the part of the teller them asserting a potency on account of an office within an ecclesiastical system in order to encourage devotion to the system rather than the Gospel ... which is something I should hope was not a motive for this for the story teller’s sake.
Whatever the motive this represents a fundamental injustice in its asserted application because, if it were so, as I said, it leaves all the little people without such a recourse, affecting only the great and the beloved as humans judge things for who else should attract much “intercession” long after they were gone? To not represent an injustice would require permitting some other methodology for salvation for anyone besides what Christ has done ... IOW a different gospel. This when pushed to its logical extreme amounts to the idea that only the really bad people are damned.
But if a small case of this guff or a big case of it, either way it tends to ignore that the basic human defect and why we require salvation is NOT because we are inherently immoral since the Fall but because we are not holy. The Fall was one from a state of holiness (yes, just derivative holiness ... I would not claim anything else) to be merely moral beings (the tree was for the knowledge of good and evil, not just evil).
Being moral, while a benefit to men now that we’re in this mess, is no cause for justification before the Lord. It is simply what we ought to be doing anyway no matter who we are. Human morality doesn’t save anyone. Indeed, since men have so grievously come to confuse morality with the whole notion of free will (though recently it seems many have degenerated further to confuse niceness and tolerance with morality and thus with having volition at all) we’ve seen at least one so called moral philosopher opine that being moral beings demands men reject God (the guy in question, his name escapes me for the moment, seemed to somehow think that Christians in obedience to the Lord ceased from having their own wills).
As for the defect of not being holy, which Christ resolves when the gift of the Holy Spirit is bestowed, I would point you to Isaiah. Now, while the Aaronic priesthood still stood as a legitimate way to approach the Lord, in accordance to what He had revealed, I do not question that there was ceremonial holiness available to those that benefitted from the system, and with Isaiah who was a ministering priest he had an official access to far more of that than any ordinary Israelite, or even Levite, might have hoped for. And it should be fairly safe to assert that Isaiah wasn’t sloppy when it came to his morality either ... Isaiah was as much the real deal as mortal men might hope to be ... but when he saw the Lord, when the Holiness of thee Lord was revealed to him, he recognized that he deserved to die.
Yes, “a man of unclean lips among a people of unclean lips” seems to easily represent him realizing that there were things in his life that he didn’t previously recognize as being wrong and which were not recognized as being wrong by his culture; but, even if he had somehow been without any particular sin he would have still fallen short for having “only” had the ceremonial holiness ... recall that we are told that the Lord isn’t terribly impressed with the holiness of the holy angels, do you think men apart from Christ should fare better?
I ask that hypothetically because I consider that you would not when it is placed in such stark terms. But the story invites a different opinion because of the lack of timeliness for the “intercession” claimed and because the person being interceded for, even if said intercession had somehow been timely, still doesn’t seem to have accepted Christ by any witness we have of his life.
I think it reasonable, or rather I would hope for his sake, that the story teller did not intend to craft a different gospel than the one given for all time; but, he wanted to believe someone that he admired was somehow not damned. But whatever his motivation, he was conveying a different gospel. One where the great intercede for the great no matter what the other earlier guy may have chosen in his life.
Hitherto I’ve been ignoring that the story is spurious when considering the principals involved, for the story teller was not involved for the “intercession” anymore than he was involved for the man not accepting the Gospel during his life. Likewise he simply should be out of the know to assert anything about the efficacy of such “intercession”. But I mention this last of all.