Predictable outcome

After Acts 7:54-60

The outcome is predictable.

Tell a group of judges playing

to the gallery that they’re unjust,

corrupt, and no better than those

who came before with corruption

and evil in their hearts, and worse,

prove it to them with the history

they revere and cherish. Perhaps

a slim chance they will listen

and heed. Instead: anger and rage.

When he sees the vision,

the heavens opening,

the throne of glory, 

and says what he sees,

knowing he predicts his death,

the judges become the mob,

exercising mob rule and

mob justice, the mob drags

him away, outside the court,

outside the city, and the stones 

begin to fly and strike his chest,

his head, his face. He ends

his speech, 

his life,

with one spoken thought:

forgiveness.

Photograph by Johan Mouchet via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The rhetorical finish

After Acts 7:1-60

It’s the peroration, the end

of a long speech, a lesson

in how human nature remains

unchanged. He punctuates

his rhetorical finish with words

with words designed to punch

the point home. Stiff-necked.

Uncircumcised. Resist the Spirit. 

Persecute truth. Kill. Betray.

Murder. Violators of the law.

He flipped the charges back

on them, using the history

they knew so well, the history

they believe they overcome

because they’re smarter and

more devout than those 

who came before, because

they know better, their minds

are free, they are liberated.

What he’s saying, of course, 

is that they are no better

than those who came before.

And before the day is done,

they will prove it.

Photograph by K. Mitchell Hodge via Unsplash. Used with permission.

A history lesson

After Acts 7:1-60

The charges are false,

the witnesses paid to lie,

and the judges ask

only one question

a simple question:

Is this so?

A simple if long answer

to a simple if short question,

but a simple if long answer

to turn the falsity and lies

on their heads and reverse

the charges to present

mirrors to the judges.

And the answer moves

backward fifteen hundred

years, back to the man

first called to the land.

And it makes perfect sense:

this is where the story begins,

this is the seminal event,

the backdrop to the corruption

of the law called this trial.

And what he implies,

and what he says in this lesson,

this recitation, of shared history,

is to make a point, the point:

what they are doing in this trial

is what they have always done.

Photograph by Tanner Mardis via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Uproar, familiar

After Acts 23

He speaks to rulers and priests,

saying what he always says,

explaining what he always explains,

a remarkable consistency in view

of the inevitable result: the uproar

so familiar, so expected, that he must

be either baiting them or so completely

single-minded that he can do nothing

else. As he pits false belief against

false belief, opinion against opinion,

ignorance and blindness against

ignorance and blindness, hardened,

he finds himself, once again, taken

by the soldiers to protect him

from a gathering darkness.

Illustration: Paul before the Sanhedrin in Jersusalem.