• What a man said he could see
• I see the heavens opened, out loud
• The verse we turned into a licence
• His prayer was his own to make
• A sightline is not an escape

What a man said he could see

Two people describe the same minute and both descriptions survive.

The crowd’s description is in the Lesson and it is all body: teeth, ears, one accord, a loud voice, a run, stones, and coats laid down at a young man’s feet so the throwers would be readier for the task. It is precise, and it is the version any bystander would have given. Nothing in it is untrue.

Stephen’s description is one sentence and it has no stones in it at all. I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God. He is not arguing. He is reporting what is in front of him, in the present tense, while the other version of the minute is happening to his body.

Now count what the Mass does with those two accounts, because that is the whole of this morning. The Introit gives us the grievance: princes sat and spoke against me. Then the Gradual and the Communion both take Stephen’s side, and both of them say I see the heavens opened.

So the rite hears both witnesses and repeats one. The crowd is quoted once, as grievance. The dying man is quoted three times, as the truth of the day. I see the heavens opened is not the losing account here; it is the one the Church decided to keep saying out loud.

The two are not even the same kind of statement. A grievance invites a reply; a description of what is in front of somebody cannot be met on those terms at all. I see the heavens opened makes no claim about who was in the right that morning, and the rite can repeat I see the heavens opened without ever reopening the case.

I want to be careful to distinguish this from something we said on the Fourth Sunday of Advent. That day the question was the timing of a verdict, whether a finding may be handed down before the hearing. Today’s question is not about timing at all. It is about which of two present, simultaneous, equally honest reports gets treated as the account of record, and I see the heavens opened is the answer.

I see the heavens opened, out loud

Where he says it carries as much as what he says. Not afterwards, not in a letter, not to a friend later. He says it in the middle of a council chamber and then in the open ground beyond the city gate, in front of a crowd and the witnesses who had laid their garments down.

That matters more than it seems to. Everything in this Lesson happens in daylight, in front of a full room and a council that convened for the purpose. I see the heavens opened is a public statement, given in public, at the worst possible moment to give it.

He is also a deacon, and that is public work too. The record of his life has him as one of the first deacons, chosen and ordained by the Apostles to distribute alms and to see to the temporal relief of the poorer members of the community. Before he was a martyr he was the man who handed things out. I see the heavens opened comes out of the mouth of somebody whose ordinary work was the relief of the poor.

And the sentence itself is an odd shape for a last word. It contains no defence, no accusation, no summary of his own life. I see the heavens opened is a description of what is ahead of him, offered to a room that is not going to be able to check it.

That is the part I would sit with. He does not tell them he is right. He tells them what he can see from where he is standing, and then he leaves it with them. I see the heavens opened is all he offers by way of an argument, and I see the heavens opened is all he needs to have said.

The verse we turned into a licence

Now the Gospel, and I am not going to walk past what is in it.

Two lines in today’s Gospel are the obvious place for a reading the Church has since had to disown. That upon you may come all the just blood that hath been shed upon the earth. And: behold, your house shall be left to you, desolate. Read as a sentence passed on a people rather than as grief spoken to a city, those two verses become a permission slip.

I want to name who that reading fell on, because the text requires it named. Jewish people did. The reading that Scripture itself convicts and curses a whole people is exactly the one repudiated by the Declaration Nostra Aetate of 28 October 1965, which states that “the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures,” and which “decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.”

Apply the fruit test to that reading the way we test everything here, and point it where it belongs, which is at our own record. A reading that had to be formally disowned is a reading that grew something. It grew the habit of hearing a Gospel as a charge sheet against somebody else, and that is the opposite of what Christ is doing in verse 37, where he grieves over a city he calls by name twice.

That is the test the text sets, and the text passes it while the reading fails it. Set that beside what the Gospel does with the same city an earlier post here called the glory of Jerusalem. Christ addresses her in the second person, as thee. The sentence names what the city has done and then, instead of passing sentence on it, reaches for a hen and her chickens, and for an invitation offered again and again and refused.

And the day itself argues the same way. The Church could have made this feast an occasion for naming an enemy, and she built it on I see the heavens opened instead. I see the heavens opened lays a charge against no group and no person.

So we print the Gospel whole and refuse the reading, and I would rather say that plainly than quietly leave two verses out. The pericope is Christ’s grief, in his own mouth, about a house he wanted full. Nothing in it licenses a single thing that was done in its name, and I see the heavens opened is a better description of what today is for.

His prayer was his own to make

Here is the guardrail, and on this day it is the most important paragraph in the file.

Stephen, on his knees, says: Lord, lay not this sin to their charge. That is one of the most extraordinary sentences in Scripture and it has been used very badly. It has been read to people who were hurt as an instruction, as though a Christian who has been harmed owes their harmer a prayer like that, on a timetable, as proof of something.

It is not an instruction. It is his. Stephen prays it for his own killers, in his own last minute, out of his own mouth, and Scripture never turns it into a rule for anybody else. I see the heavens opened and lay not this sin to their charge are both a man’s own words about his own death.

If you have been assaulted, if somebody you trusted did something to you that is still doing damage, this text asks nothing of you this morning. It is not a bill and it is not a test. Neither sentence is a duty laid on the injured, and I see the heavens opened is not a standard of composure you are failing at.

The same holds for the Commemoration’s language, which asks that we be delivered from the bondage of old and the yoke of sin. That is a prayer about a condition everyone in the room shares, made in the plural, on behalf of all of us together. It is not a description of anybody’s particular life, and it is not a hint that something wrong with you is holding you where you are.

We said something adjacent to this on the feast of a martyred bishop ten days ago, and I want to be exact about the difference. That day the point was that comfort is not a debt to be repaid. Today’s point is narrower and harder: a martyr’s death is not a template. His courage is not an example anybody is being graded against, and I see the heavens opened is not a standard of vision you are failing to meet.

And a martyr’s Mass is not a recruitment poster, which is what we said in a different key on the feast of St. Lucy. What the Church keeps on a day like this is not the dying. It is the sentence the dying man got out, and the fact that somebody wrote it down.

Let me close one more door before it opens. None of this says that what you do makes no difference, and none of it says the outcome was already arranged. Stephen disputed, and answered, and said what he could see, and every one of those was a thing he did.

A sightline is not an escape

There is a story sometimes told of a man eleven days out of a detox ward who went to a Friday meeting in a hired village hall, strip lights on, about thirty stacking chairs pulled into a rough circle, an urn on a folding table by a shuttered serving hatch.

When it came round to him he said he could not tell the room he felt better, because he did not, and he was not going to stand there and say a thing that was not so. What he could tell them was what was in front of him. He said he could see a Saturday in April when he would be able to sit through his brother’s wedding, all the way through, and not have to leave the room.

That was the whole of his contribution and it was received exactly as offered. Not a single voice in the hall argued with him about whether April was realistic. Somebody went over to the paper rota taped up beside the hatch and put that weekend on it, so there would be a meeting on the Friday before it and the urn would be on, and that was the end of the discussion.

He has said since that he had nothing else to give the room that night. He could not report a feeling and he would not invent one. He could describe a sightline, and describing it out loud in front of thirty people is I see the heavens opened as it happens in a village hall in an ordinary year.

Now here is the part I do not want to overstate, because it is where this sort of story usually gets ruined. The sightline is not an escape. It did not shorten anything, it did not make the following February easier, and it was not a promise that April would go the way he described. I see the heavens opened does not remove a single stone from the ground around Stephen either, and the Lesson is careful about that: he says it, and then he is stoned, in that order.

So the claim is smaller than it sounds and more useful. A person in the worst stretch of their life can sometimes still describe what is ahead of them while having no account at all of how they feel, and that description is admissible. It is real information about a real direction. I see the heavens opened is that same act at its furthest edge, said by somebody with nothing left to gain by saying it.

And if none of the theology here belongs to you, the sentence still works with the God taken out of it. When you cannot honestly report that you are all right, you can sometimes still name one specific ordinary thing you can see ahead of you, and naming it in front of other people is not self-deception. It is the only part of the future you have any actual evidence about, and I see the heavens opened is what it sounds like when somebody says it without hedging.

Which changes what the rest of us should do with it. When a person tells you what they can see, the useful response is not to test the forecast. It is to write the date down somewhere and keep the room open, because I see the heavens opened was met by a crowd with stones and by a hall with a rota, and only one of those is available to us.

Ask somebody what they can see rather than how they are doing, and keep whatever they name in the diary. I see the heavens opened started as one sentence in an open field, and I see the heavens opened is what a booked hall makes of it.

↑ The order resumes below.