"Good King Wenceslas looked out on the Feast of Stephen." In other words, the good king looked out of his castle window today, the day after Christmas. Strange, yesterday celebrated a birth; today remembers the awful death of a young man. Stephen, whose feast is older than Christmas, is called the Protomartyr — the first. To love and learn from Christ is going to cost me something.
This painting by the 17th century artist, Bernardo Cavallino is filled with emotional energy. Stephen wears a deacon's dalmatic. Red is the liturgical color of a martyr. In front and behind there's an agitated, angry mob. No women. In the upper right corner notice even the sky is troubled. We see the city wall. Like Jesus, Stephen was taken outside the city to die. The biblical account of the saint's work and death is found in Acts of the Apostles 6,7.
But one verse gets my attention, "he looked up." Very busy, preoccupied people never look up. They only look straight ahead to where they're hurrying or they look down determinably, making no eye contact. But "look up" can also have symbolic meaning. "Look up" as if out of the bubble world we can find ourselves in — encased in the world of someone else's ideas we've picked up along the way without thinking. This is played out dramatically these days in our post election world of denial — I believe it because someone said it — especially someone I've invested with authority. Some people never look up in this sense.
And what did the deacon-martyr see when he looked up? Bernardo Cavallino understands. Stephen didn't see Jerusalem's glorious temple; that's behind him. Rather this:
But he, (Stephen), full of the Holy Spirit, looked up into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God; and he said, "Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing at the right hand of God."
It's at that point that the listeners can't stand it anymore and they "cried out with a loud voice and stopped their ears and rushed together upon him." And they stoned him to death.
Stephen saw "the heavens opened and Jesus standing with God." Standing is the posture of readiness and action. What does it mean? The point of contact with God is no longer a splendid building, but the person of Jesus Christ. The heavens are opened over all of us — not a prefered or exclusive some of us. That line has tremendous personal implications — political implications, religious implications, racial implications.
But when we delve deeply into those implications/possibilities, that's when people still cover their ears and rush about screaming (if even inwardly) to put someone or something (maybe the ideas themselves) to death.
This first martyr's feast day, in the Christmas Octave, might be an invitation for me to look up and out of the little sphere of my world in some new way, to allow for the new vision, the new universal vision of the one who lived his life most authentically. It's a life changer.
