Sermon for the Feast of Saint Stephen

admin | 26 December 2010

“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and
stonest them which are sent unto thee.”

Jerusalem!? I thought Christmas was in Bethlehem! It is, but to understand the mystery of Christmas, we cannot lose sight of Jerusalem.

Bethlehem and Jerusalem are the two centers around which Christian contemplation revolves like an ellipse. We cannot appreciate and celebrate the meaning of Christ’s holy birth in little Bethlehem without regard for the events of betrayal and death in Jerusalem. “Jesus Christ was born for this,” as the carol, In dulci Jubilo, reminds us. “This,” of course, is death and sacrifice, and only so can we celebrate the birth of a Saviour who comes that he may go “through the valley of the shadow of death” for us; only so “hath he ope’d the heavenly door and man is blessed for evermore;” only so we “need not fear the grave.”

Christmas is not a happy-clappy story, all fuzzy and warm with sentiment and good cheer. No. The joys of Christmas are deeper and greater than the sentimental trappings of this overly commercialised and rather caramelized season. Christ’s holy birth addresses the deep disorders of the human heart and the human community. Bethlehem is oriented towards Jerusalem from the get-go.

Remember Advent Sunday? We began the holy season of Advent with the triumphal entry of Christ into Jerusalem and his cleansing of the Temple. In other words, we make our journey to Bethlehem with the realization of the deeper meaning of God’s coming to us in the humanity of Jesus Christ. “He borrowed a body that he might borrow a death,” as St. Athanasius puts it. Death and sacrifice are inescapably part of the Christmas picture.

Christ is Emmanuel, God with us. His being with us challenges us about the meaning of our being with him. That challenge is about discipleship and our witness to God’s being with us. The Feast of Stephen alerts us immediately to the deeper realities of the Christmas mystery; they are the realities of suffering and sorrow.

In T.S. Eliot’s drama “Murder in the Cathedral,” there is an interlude between the two parts of the play. The interlude takes the form of a sermon that Eliot imagines Thomas à Becket, the 12^th century Archbishop of Canterbury entangled in the power dynamics of the investiture controversy which was about the respective relations between church and state, giving on Christmas morning in the year 1170. It is wonderful to think of a sermon as an interlude, literally something in-between the play of life that sheds light upon the meaning of the play of life, perhaps. In that sermonic interlude, and in anticipation of his own impending martyrdom, Thomas speaks about the mystery of Jerusalem in Bethlehem by way of reference to the feast of Stephen, the first martyr of the Church, the proto-martyr whose death reveals so much of the meaning of our Christian discipleship. And perhaps, just perhaps, it will serve as an interlude to our Christmas playtimes, now and always.

“Consider also one thing of which you have probably never thought,” the Archbishop says. “Not only do we at the feast of Christmas celebrate at once Our Lord’s Birth and His Death,” by which he means Mass or Holy Communion, “but on the next day,” this day, “we celebrate the martyrdom of His first martyr, the blessed Stephen. Is it an accident, do you think, that the day of the first martyr follows immediately the day of the Birth of Christ? By no means. Just as we rejoice and mourn at once, in the Birth and in the Passion of Our Lord; so also, in a smaller figure, we both rejoice and mourn in the death of martyrs. We mourn, for the sins of the world that has martyred them; we rejoice, that another soul is numbered among the Saints in Heaven, for the glory of God and for the salvation of men.”

“Beloved,” he goes on to say, “we do not think of a martyr simply as a good Christian who has been killed because he is a Christian: for that would be solely to mourn. We do not think of him simply as a good Christian who has been elevated to the company of the Saints: for that would be simply to rejoice: and neither our mourning nor our rejoicing is as the world’s is. A Christian martyrdom is no accident” … “A martyr, a saint, is always made by the design of God, for His love of men, to warn them and to lead them, to bring them back to His ways. A martyrdom is never the design of man; for the true martyr is he who has become the instrument of God, who has lost his will in the will of God, not lost it but found it, for he has found freedom in submission to God.” In an allusion to what will be his own temptation, he says, “the martyr no longer desires anything for himself, not even the glory of martyrdom;” for that will be the form of his greatest temptation: “the last temptation is the greatest treason/to do the right deed for the wrong reason.” It is a powerful thought. “So thus as on earth the Church mourns and rejoices at once, in a fashion that the world cannot understand.”

The Feast of Stephen illumines the deeper meaning of our Christmas playtime. And it shows us the nature of true discipleship, walking in the steps of our Lord and Master, as in the Carol, “Good King Wenceslaus.” They are the steps of the forgiveness of our enemies without which the peace of Christ is meaningless. Stephen, in the lesson from the Acts of the Apostles following the example of Christ on the Cross, prays for the forgiveness of his murderers, “Lord lay not this sin to their charge,” placing their enmity in the mercy of the one who prays, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Our Christmas joys are deepened not cheapened by the celebration of the first Christian martyr, St. Stephen, precisely so if we can take to heart his example and its connection to the deeper meaning of God’s being with us in the humility and the intimacy of the humanity of Christ. His being with us is for the sake of our redemption. It is a testament to the greater glory of God. God convicts our hearts of our own failings in order to reconstitute us in the power of his redemptive love. Bethlehem and Jerusalem are simply two parts of the Christian dialectic of the love of God for our humanity. Each is present in the other.