by CCW | 26 December 2014 13:00
The words are familiar to us from the Benedictus in the liturgy just before The Prayer of Consecration at Mass. A phrase from Psalm 118 (v.26), it is also familiar to us from the story of Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday also read as the Gospel for The First Sunday in Advent. Perhaps less familiar to us is Matthew and Luke’s use of the phrase in the context of judgment and warning by Jesus to the Scribes and Pharisees in Jerusalem.
Jerusalem. Not Bethlehem and yet the mystery of Christmas in Bethlehem is incomprehensible without reference to Jerusalem. The Feast of Stephen illumines the deeper meaning of Christ’s Nativity. It has altogether to do with service and sacrifice, things perhaps that we don’t really want to hear and yet these are the things that belong to the greatest truth and dignity of our humanity. They belong to the Christmas mystery.
What, if anything, is known popularly about St. Stephen is known by way of a nineteenth century carol by John Mason Neale, Good King Wenceslaus, that refers to a touching medieval legend and one which captures certainly the theme of service and even the idea of the imitation of Christ which is certainly at the heart of The Feast of Stephen. The lesson from The Book of The Acts of The Apostles concludes the story of Stephen with his martyrdom; he was stoned to death for his testimony to Christ and in the moment of his dying he, like Christ on the Cross, prays for the forgiveness of his executioners, not the least of which is Saul who will become Paul the Apostle. “Lord Jesus,” Stephen says, “receive my Spirit,” an echo of the last word of Christ from the Cross, “Father, into thy hands I commend my Spirit” and then, echoing the first word, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do,” Stephen’s last word is his prayer, “Lord, lay not this sin to their charge.” The words of the dying, it seems, are often the beginning of something profound and deeply moving.
Stephen is the proto-martyr in the Christian understanding of things and what makes his feast so important is the way it illumines the deeper meaning of human redemption. His feast signals the idea of redemptive suffering and the nature of Christian witness as participation in the sufferings of Christ. We probably forget certain aspects of the larger story of Stephen.
He was one of the seven deacons, for instance, and alone of those “seven men of good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom” who were appointed “to serve tables,” meaning to distribute charity, Stephen also provides an eloquent witness or apologia, a defense of the Christian faith, as recorded in Acts. It is a remarkable sermon which looks back upon salvation history to Abraham, to Moses, and to the prophets as leading to Jesus who, like the prophets before him, was “betrayed and murdered.” His defense leads to his martyrdom. For “when they heard these things they were enraged, and they ground their teeth against him.” The lesson this morning takes up things from there.
But Matthew’s Gospel brings home the deeper point about redemption through suffering and sacrifice even as Stephen illustrates as well the theme of Christian service. They all belong together: service, suffering and sacrifice. They are the essential components of redemption without which Christmas is just so much empty sentimentality.
Our blessedness is found through witness, through following in our master’s steps, through our participation in his redemptive sacrifice. It is the radical meaning of Christ’s impassioned words to Jerusalem and to us. “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee; how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!” Such strong words of divine love in the face of human recalcitrance!
“Ye would not.” It is an haunting indictment upon the darkness and the blindness of our humanity to the goodness and the truth of God. “He came unto his own and his own received him not.” And yet, God gathers us together but only through the outstretched arms of the crucified Christ, the sacrifice that reveals our hearts enraged and in sorry disarray and that reveals the divine love which redeems, restores and perfects. Yet something, too, is required of us. It is our participation in the mysteries of redemption signaled in the words of our liturgy and in the Gospel for The Feast of Stephen: “Blessed is he that cometh in the Name of the Lord.”
Somehow along with the inseparable and inescapable conjunction of sorrow and joy in human experience, there is a greater triumph, the triumph of grace and salvation, blessedness found even in the midst of the hardest things of life through our being with Christ in his love for us.
Fr. David Curry
The Feast of Stephen
December 26th, 2014
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2014/12/26/sermon-for-the-feast-of-st-stephen-4/
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