Sermon for the Feast of St. Stephen
“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets and stonest them which are sent unto thee”
Christmas brings us to Bethlehem to contemplate the wonder of Christ’s holy birth but its deeper meaning points us already to Jerusalem. They are the twin poles of the devotional and doctrinal imagination of Christianity. Each is bound up in the other. Nowhere in Christmastide are we made more aware of that than on The Feast of Stephen.
He is not only the proto-martyr, the first martyr to Christ, the first figure in the Christian Scriptures to be named as one who died because of his faith and identity with Jesus. He is also the witness to the Christian concept of the connection between sacrifice and service in the face of suffering, indeed, in the face of evil.
Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha as he would come to be known, rejected Hinduism through his encounter with suffering. Stepping out of the shelter of his castles in Nepal, he encountered an old man, a sick man, and a dead man being carried to his funeral byre; all forms of human suffering. He also met a wandering beggar, a Hindu ascetic, whose path Gautama decided to follow in the search for truth and wisdom and in the quest to overcome human suffering. Meditating under the Bodhi tree, he found enlightenment and became in time the Buddha, the enlightened one, inaugurating one of the great religions of the world. What was the enlightenment? It is captured in the four noble truths of Buddhism: suffering exists, the origin of suffering is desire, eliminate desire means the end of suffering, the way of overcoming desire and the self is found in the eightfold path. At the heart of the enlightenment is the idea that suffering arises because of the illusions of the self. There is no you. That is but an illusion and one which leads to suffering. Suffering is part of the illusion of you.
Suffering. The Feast of Stephen shows us another way of overcoming suffering, namely through sacrifice and service in which another truth is discovered and known. We find the truth of humanity in Christ in following him and by the quality of his life in us. It is found, too, in a deeper dimension of suffering, namely, suffering as the result of human evil. Stephen is stoned, a particularly gruesome form of execution, sadly still with us in some parts of the world. He is stoned to death because of his religious conviction, we would say. One of his persecutors, it appears, is a young man whose name was Saul. A persecutor of The Way, as the early followers of Christ were called, Saul will become Paul, the great Apostle to the Gentiles. Here in this ‘Christmas story,’ he is utterly implicated in the murder of Stephen.