Sermon for the Feast of St. Stephen

admin | 26 December 2013

“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.

The story of the murder of Stephen points to the way of Christ, the way of witness to the truth of Jesus, to the way of redemptive suffering, and to the idea that we have an end with God. “Lord Jesus,” he says, “receive my spirit.” And then with a loud voice, he cries, “Lord, lay not this sin to their charge,” and dies. “He fell asleep,” as our text puts it; the association between sleep and death is ancient. In the Christian understanding, however, it undergoes a kind of sea-change, not just a metaphor for death but an image of something more, an awakening to eternal life. “Death be not proud,” as John Donne’s famous sonnet puts it, where death itself dies. There is the hope of the resurrection through the death of death.

All these things point us to Jerusalem and the events of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. Stephen’s martyrdom witnesses to Christ’s death on the Cross; his words an echo of two of the seven last words of the Crucified. We are reminded of the deeper meaning of Christ’s holy birth. Death is in the story, because good is greater than evil, life greater than death, but only because God enters the world of human suffering and evil. God encounters the suffering occasioned by human evil.

The Gospel is most touching and poignant. Christ laments over Jerusalem, the Jerusalem of human ignorance and arrogance, we might say. Here is the Jerusalem that in times past “has killed the prophets and stoned them which are sent unto thee,” references to the trials and persecutions of the prophets of Israel which illumine something of the sufferings of Christ. But even more touching, perhaps, is the idea of suffering through evil, in this case our rejection of the very goodness of God towards us. “How often,” Jesus says, “would I have gathered thy children together,” an allusion to the patterns of redemption and salvation in the Old Testament, a reference in other words to God’s will for our humanity and to Jesus as God with us, we might say. The image is made even more powerful and poignant: “even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings,” a strong maternal image of divine love and care, images which will be associated with the life and mission of the Church as the body of Christ. But the point is that in the face of God’s wanting to gather together the children of Israel for our good, like a mother hen, “ye would not!” We would not be gathered by God. We reject his way for us.

“He came unto his own and his own received him not.” So we heard on Christmas Eve in the great Gospel of Christmas. It is all part of the story. Christ’s holy birth is God’s great gift of himself to us, a sacrifice in the deepest sense of sacrifice and one which imparts a whole new pattern of service. Suffering is very real; yet its overcoming is through the power of the grace of God in the forms of suffering that we all encounter. Such is the reality of the birth and death of Christ and his resurrection. It is the ultimate vindication of the reality of human personality, of the self.

The great carol, Good King Wenceslaus, shows the further application of this theme of sacrifice and service. In his master’s feet he trod, reaching out to the poor man, and to provide for him the banquet feast worthy of a king. Such is the radical nature of redemptive suffering. God makes something good out of our evil and challenges us to follow in his path. The Feast of Stephen recalls us to the purpose and meaning of Christ’s holy birth. It is joy found in and through suffering and sorrow but a joy that is about Christ in us and we in him. All in spite of ourselves. Such is wonder of Christmas.