St. Stephen's Parents

Imagine what you could be. Imagine the freedom to be fully yourself, what you are meant to be, what you think you should be. Imagine answering Jesus’ cry that he is hungry, or in prison, or naked, or a stranger. When Jesus speaks, or one of the saints’ lives speaks to us, we are left needled and uncomfortable because we realise with painful clarity what weren’t not, what we so want to be, truly loving, truly free, truly as competent and committed as we should be. When people met Mother Theresa, (I find it the privilege of having been around at the same time as her hard to comprehend), they said she radiated the powerful peace of Christ (though He would have waited to be invited into her thorny, difficult personality). Somehow, the lives of saints point us towards what we hope for, what we spend our lives struggling towards and may not even achieve by the time we die (we are left then as totally dependent on God’s mercy as we ever were).

We live with saints. They hurt us, infuriate us with the truth about ourselves. They might be family members, an unexpected and unasked for gift. They might greet us every day, their simplicity and quietness hiding the enormous power and strength in their loving lives. They might be trying to heal our bodies, spirits or minds, and probably all three.

Saints usually start out with their own failure, poverty and emptiness, their inability to believe, their selfishness and self-concern, the simple facts of their humanity. When preaching about St. Thomas earlier this year, Fr. Roger said that while Thomas is often caricatured as “doubting Thomas” in a condemnatory way, “he was alright”, a straightforward, committed, confused man. In this light, St. Thomas’ reaction to the news of Jesus’ resurrection is entirely understandable. There was too much pain, anguish and grief in the disciples’ recent experience, in Good Friday, for all this talk of resurrection to appear to him as anything other than the hysterical reaction and hopes of a grieving people. Perhaps he was, as he saw it, trying to inject a note of realism into a situation that appeared to be out of control. He must have felt that his doubts were an act of love. Yet Jesus was moved to rebuke him. St. Wilfrid’s sharp tongue and irritable nature got him thrown into exile, and sent from his beloved north to a place he’d rather not have gone - Sussex. St. James, Jesus’ brother, is alleged not to have believed in Jesus at first, but then gone on to become one of the Church’s great leaders. This church, as with any other church community, is built on vulnerable, foolish saints, its own members and those God insists we keep hearing about, is built on God’s generous affection, is built on His celebration of us, is built on his desire to free us to be ourselves.

Saints accumulate stories round themselves which, while not always true, nonetheless reflect our reaction to them. If we believe that the woman with a bad name in the town, who came into the room where Jesus was saying nothing, only weeping, is Mary Magdalene, then it is because we want to, or must. I have to believe that, earlier in the day while Jesus was on his way to Simon’s house, he passed her in the street and looked her directly in the eyes, only briefly, but unforgettably. That look of utter recognition lead her to seek Him out, and by the time she found Him, she couldn’t speak any more, for Jesus’ wordless knowledge of her had pierced through her hard core of anger, which grew all the time inside her when she was hurt again by one of her so called “clients.” Later, we find her facing Jesus’ pain and loss without running away, and a later legend depicts her as lonely desert penitent, naked and courageously facing up to the reality of who she was and what her life had been, another legend, that this ex-prostitute convinced Provence that a naked and vulnerable God was crucified on the Cross, then rose, and now longed for them.

The young deacon St. Stephen, in his impassioned trial speech to his fellow Jews, faced them with the agonising truth of their people’s history, their rejection of the prophets because what they’d said was too painful, their hard-heartedness and pride. Then, in complete disregard of his own safety and their growing anger and thirst to destroy him, he revealed a vision which showed how close he was to God. This inevitably - and he must have known this was inevitable - leads to his terrible death.

One can’t help feeling the silent presence of his parents through out all of this, feel their reaction to what was, of course, a self inflicted fate. How futile his end must have seemed to them, how unnecessary, how avoidable, how arrogant of him, how callous as to the pain he must have known he was going to inflict on them. How dare Stephen do this to them? How angry they must have felt, and yet how guilty at their feelings; how much they must have longed to feel proud of his heroic witness to the stark truth, but, in their grief and pain, have thought of Stephen with disbelief at his apparent pride. After all, he still had so much he could have given, rather than this, this sordid death he seemed to have wanted to impose on himself.

If we go as far as this, Stephen is not an easy saint to admire. His death must have devastated local Christians at the time. Yet the story of his fate, and the resonance of his powerful words and actions, witness to why we see him as a saint at all. Not because of the ambiguities of what he did, the hurt his course of action must have caused, but because Love does this repeatedly, speaks to us without a sword as much as with it. Those who really, truly love us, in loving us, dare to become vulnerable, dare to risk our rejection because they throw light on what we’d rather keep in silent darkness. We need friends like Stephen, who do not bully us but who rather tell us what we must know, and if we see him like this, he becomes our brother. We are, however, free to reject the crucified Christ to whom he points.

St. Paul spent his whole converted life tormented by a “thorn in the flesh” which made him utterly dependent on the grace and unconditional love of God. Of course we cannot accurately identify this thorn, but how we do so shows us a much about ourselves as about Paul. For some, this is a physical ailment, for others, a personality defect which kept tripping him up, for me, his presence at the death of Stephen. As his letters show, he never lost his pain over his early treatment of the Christians, and I suspect the image of this dying young man haunted him for the rest of his life after Jesus had shown him he wasn’t defending God at all, but persecuting Him. Whatever it was, how grateful we are for this Saint’s thorn! Paul articulated the reality of Jesus’ life and ministry unforgettably, was outstandingly courageous in spreading His word to people would sometimes would murder rather than hear it, yet was tormented. I suspect that his torment is still opening otherwise closed doors in people’s hearts.

St. Peter used to tell a story against himself. It was a story so terrible that it could have turned people away from him. It must, to his early and persecuted listeners, have made him sound little better than Judas. Yet Peter thought it was essential that people should know this story if they were to understand their Lord better, and who it was that Jesus had called “the Rock upon which I will build my church.” This Rock, when faced with a test of his true friendship and courage, had completely denied any knowledge of Jesus. Why? because he was terrified of pain and death. If Peter kept telling this story, it was because he must have felt that people had to know that Jesus went beyond even their most abject failings: Jesus accepted the fact Peter had failed and hurt Him terribly, saw the tough and lovingly spontaneous fisherman behind the scared man who denied Him. Jesus knew that despite what Peter had done, he was struggling to find his way back to God, knew that his sometimes hidden courage would enable him to lead others to God, albeit not in the way he’d hoped for and expected in his pride. At the end of Peter’s life he, too, risked pain and death because he loved enough to make himself vulnerable.

The Bible does then, with some of the stories that legend has added, give us saints who are much closer to our own experiences and failings that we sometimes imagine. The core of their lives, however broken they sometimes were, was to try and open doors for people to Christ, not through unimaginable feats of endurance or sickly virtue, but through a willingness to struggle through the messy journey of their lives and personalities towards Him. Their lives, as difficult and complicate as our own, enable us to imagine what we could be if we are true to the loving selves that God created in us.

Euan Tait, Calne, Wiltshire, 1. 07. 01.



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