• A dimension, not a verdict
• Which clause gets the limit
• A martyr with no record
• The inside edge
• Two tables, one inch apart
• What the width is for
• Where this leaves us

Thy commandment is exceeding broad. Five words at the front of a martyr’s Mass, and they are not about her conduct or yours.

A dimension, not a verdict

Start with what kind of sentence this is, because almost every sentence in a psalm about the law is a different kind. Most of them are reports on the speaker: I have kept, I have not forgotten, I have gone astray. Psalm 118:96 is not that. Thy commandment is exceeding broad is a statement about the object, in the way that the river is deep is a statement about the river.

That single grammatical fact is the whole of this offering, so this is the place to go slowly. The verse hands us a dimension. It does not hand us a score. Thy commandment is exceeding broad tells you the size of the thing being kept and says nothing whatsoever about the quality of the keeping.

We are so used to the other kind of sentence that this one is hard to hear. Ask most people what a serious commandment looks like and they will describe a narrow one: strict, tight, hard to satisfy, easy to fall out of. Thy commandment is exceeding broad describes the opposite shape. It is a wide floor rather than a narrow ledge, and the psalmist offers that as praise. Thy commandment is exceeding broad is a compliment, and the compliment is about size.

For anyone reading without the theology, the ordinary version holds on its own. A good rule is often a spacious one—it rules out cruelty and leaves ten thousand honest ways of living inside it. A rule that admits only one way of doing things is usually not stricter, only smaller. Thy commandment is exceeding broad is that same judgment, said three thousand years earlier.

Which clause gets the limit

Now the verse’s other half, and the pairing is the point. I have seen an end to all persecution: thy commandment is exceeding broad. One clause ends and one does not, and the psalm assigns the ending to the harm. Thy commandment is exceeding broad is what stands on the side that was given no ending.

That is a reversal of how the arithmetic usually runs. The common account gives the harm the long horizon—it goes on, it outlasts you, it defines what is possible now—and gives the law a short one, a narrow thing you either fit or do not. Psalm 118 puts the terminus on the persecution. Thy commandment is exceeding broad stands on the other side of the colon, with no terminus offered for it at all.

The line immediately before it has to be held beside it. The wicked have waited for me to destroy me: but I have understood thy testimonies. People are lying in wait for this man. What he sets against them is not a defence, not an argument, not an alibi. It is that he has understood something, and the something is exceeding broad.

So the psalm’s answer to being under other people’s designs is a dimension. Not innocence, and not a record either. Thy commandment is exceeding broad is offered as the reply to they waited for me, and it works by being larger than they are.

A martyr with no record

Which brings us to the woman this day is kept for, and to the plain fact at the middle of her. What the Catholic Encyclopedia can say about St. Bibiana is very nearly nothing. She was a Roman martyr, dead by 483 at the latest. The Liber Pontificalis records that Pope Simplicius, who held the see from 468 to 483, consecrated a basilica of the holy martyr Bibiana which contained her body, near the palatium Licinianum, and the basilica still stands. That is the whole of the documentary record, and thy commandment is exceeding broad is the sentence the Church sings over it.

Everything else is missing, and the article says so in its own words: we have no further historical particulars concerning the martyr or the circumstances of her death; neither do we know why she was buried in the city itself. A story did grow up around her later, giving her a prefect for a father and a persecution and a manner of death. The encyclopedia’s verdict on it is that it is connected to the Acts of another martyrdom entirely and has no historical claim to belief, and that the ninth-century martyrologies simply copied it out.

Sit with what that leaves. A name. A grave inside the walls, which was unusual. A basilica built over it by a pope whose dates we know.

And fifteen hundred years of a Mass said on the second of December for a woman whose deeds are not on record anywhere. Thy commandment is exceeding broad has room in it for a life that was never written down. Nothing in that width ever asked her for a record.

That is not a gap in the calendar. It is a demonstration of what the calendar thinks it is doing. If honour in the Church required a documented account of what a person achieved, this feast could not exist, and the church built over her grave has stood since the fifth century. The room was drawn wide enough to include somebody about whom the only surviving evidence is a grave inside the walls and a building put up over it. Thy commandment is exceeding broad, and the calendar was built to that measurement.

The inside edge

Here is the teaching this cuts against, and it is rarely stated as a rule because stating it would expose it. The teaching is that a commandment’s seriousness is measured by how narrowly it is drawn—that a community proves it is serious by the size of the class it keeps at arm’s length. Thy commandment is exceeding broad is the sentence that will not let that stand.

This lands with particular force on people who have been to prison, and it lands as a floor that is narrower on the inside than it looked from the door. The welcome is real. It is also renewed weekly rather than settled, and the difference between those two things is the whole of the experience. There are rooms a person may sit in for nine years and never once be asked to hold a key to. Thy commandment is exceeding broad describes a room with no such arrangement in it.

Weigh the habit by what it grows, and weigh it against our own record, because ours is the record we are obliged to examine. It grows roles that quietly stay closed, with no meeting ever held to close them. It grows the request, always kindly meant, to tell the story again for the newcomers, so that the account stays current and the person stays its subject. It grows a man who helps set out the chairs for a decade and is never asked to count the money. None of it is in the law, because thy commandment is exceeding broad and a law that wide has no probation to serve.

The verse refuses the arrangement at its root, and refuses it without sentiment. The persecution has an end. The commandment does not, because thy commandment is exceeding broad, and a floor that wide has no inside edge to be kept behind. Bibiana is the case in point: no deeds on record, honoured since the fifth century, and her feast has never been struck out for want of evidence.

This is a near neighbour of something said thirteen days ago and it is not the same claim, so the difference should be said out loud. Let her works praise her asked whether you need somebody with standing to speak for you before your good may be mentioned at all. Today asks a question that only starts once you are already inside: how wide is the floor you were admitted to. Endorsement is about the door. Breadth is about the room.

Two tables, one inch apart

There is a story sometimes told of five people who ate together every Wednesday afternoon in the back room of a small social club, and who were not related to any of the others. The youngest was thirty-one and the oldest was seventy-eight. They had arrived at it separately over about four years—one had come for the snooker and stopped playing, one had been brought once by a neighbour who later moved away—and none of them would have used a word like family out loud, though every one of them knew which of the others to ring at eleven at night.

Then the club let the big back room to a dance class and moved them to the small one. The small room had a table that took four. There was a long argument, conducted entirely in terms of furniture, about whether four of them could come at two and the fifth at three, and about whether the table could be got at an angle, and it went on for two weeks with everyone being extremely reasonable and not one of them saying what the argument was about.

What settled it was that the man of seventy-eight brought a second table in the back of a taxi. It was an inch taller than the club’s table and a different wood, and pushed end to end the two of them made a join you could put a coin in. They laid a folded cloth over the gap so the plates would not rock. Five chairs of four different kinds went round it, and that was the arrangement from then on.

It never got fixed. The tables were never levelled, a matching pair was never bought, the club never gave the big room back, and the join is still there under the cloth. Thy commandment is exceeding broad looked, on that particular Wednesday, like two tables of different heights and a folded tea towel, which is a low and unimpressive way for a large sentence to be true. The point is only that not one of the five was asked to come at three. Thy commandment is exceeding broad, and sometimes the width of it has to be carried in by hand.

What the width is for

There is a version of all this that goes badly wrong, and it should be named plainly so that it is not carried off by mistake. Thy commandment is exceeding broad does not mean the commandment is empty. Breadth is not the absence of a shape—the psalm has spent ninety-five verses before this one on a law it obviously takes to be exacting, and the man saying this line is being hunted.

Wide and lax are simply different measurements. A wide law can be demanding along its whole width; that is what makes it worth having. What breadth rules out is not seriousness but the shortcut of proving seriousness by exclusion, which is a way of seeming strict at no cost at all. Thy commandment is exceeding broad forecloses that shortcut and leaves the demand exactly where it was.

And it changes what a person does with their own failures, which is where this lands for most of us. On a narrow ledge, every failure is a fall, because there is nowhere to fail and still be standing. Thy commandment is exceeding broad describes ground you can be badly placed on and still be on. The Collect this morning asks that we be united to Him in charity and saved from all dangers, and it asks God to do both, which is the same claim about who is holding whom.

A different portion of the same chapter was read here seven days ago on the feast of St. Catherine, and it makes the same point from another angle. Two portions of one prayer of thanksgiving, a week apart, both of them said by somebody who got out of something. Thy commandment is exceeding broad is the Introit under which that chapter is read again this morning.

Where this leaves us

So take the verse at its actual size, which is the only honest way to take a sentence about size. It is not asking you to assess how well you have done. Thy commandment is exceeding broad is a measurement of the law, offered as praise, by a man with people waiting to destroy him, and it is the first thing said in the Mass of a martyr with no surviving biography.

Both halves of the verse are needed and the order matters. The persecution has an end—that is said first, and said flatly, without a date attached. Then the commandment, with no end named for it, because thy commandment is exceeding broad.

If you are inside a room that has an edge you keep finding, the verse is not telling you that you imagined the edge. It is telling you the edge is not in the law. Thy commandment is exceeding broad, and no edge you have run into was put there by the commandment. Somebody drew it, at some point, for reasons that were probably sincere, and it can be undrawn by the same means. Thy commandment is exceeding broad, and the floor goes further out than the furniture does.

↑ The order resumes below.