Sermon for the Feast of St. Stephen

admin | 26 December 2021

“How often would I have gathered thy children together,
even as a hen gathers her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!”

Click here to listen to an audio file of the Service of Matins & Ante-Communion for the Feast of St. Stephen.

The Feast of St. Stephen marks the first day after Christmas and inaugurates the three Holy Days of Christmas which are a profound commentary on the radical meaning of Christmas. Christ would gather us into his love. If the Feast of St. Thomas affirms the radical nature of the Incarnation and the Resurrection of Christ by way of holy questioning about the intrinsic goodness of creation and of the body, then St. Stephen’s Day highlights love as sacrifice in forgiveness in the face of persecution. He is the first martyr and prototype of martyrdom in the Christian Church even before its coming to be. But the Feast of St. Stephen signals the deeper meaning of Christ’s Incarnation. God’s engagement with our world is in the face of its animosities and evils, but they are our animosities and evils. It means love as service and sacrifice in forgiveness.

“I send unto you prophets and wise men and scribes,” Jesus says, ”and some of them you shall kill and crucify”. It is a strong critique of those in power and authority. While Stephen is the proto-martyr of the Church, his feast is equally a commentary on all institutions of power whether sacred or secular, to use a later terminology. More importantly, it is about the transforming power of forgiveness, the central point which Collect and Lesson explicitly reference and which is implicit in the Gospel.

Philosophy as learning to die is an ancient theme without which we cannot know how to live. Gilgamesh, in the great Epic which bears his name, is catapulted into the quest for wisdom by the death of his friend, Enkidu. “As my brother is, so shall I be”. He confronts his own mortality in Enkidu’s death which leads him upon the journey to see Utnapishtim “to question him concerning life and death”. It marks the beginning of a long, long journey of the understanding in human culture; in short, of philosophy as a way of life. But only by way of learning to die.

The Feast of St. Stephen, too, is about learning to die in order to live. His death, as the lesson from Acts makes clear, follows explicitly the pattern of Christ’s Crucifixion. As with St. Thomas, once again, we see the integral connection between Christmas and Easter, a connection which so many of the carols of Christmas also make. “Now ye need not fear the grave”, “Christ was born for this”, to cite but one example.

It is for this reason that T.S. Eliot in his classic drama “Murder in the Cathedral”, a reworking of the story of the martyrdom of another Thomas, Thomas à Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, has Thomas preach a Christmas Sermon which highlights the sacrifice of Stephen as integral to the meaning of Christ’s holy birth. It marks the Interlude between Part I and Part II of the play. “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”. Death and life go together.

The play explores the dynamics of power and its temptations. Thomas encounters the figures of four tempters about his relation of his power as Archbishop to the power of the King. The first temptation is to sacrifice truth and duty to past friendships, to leave well enough alone to get along; the second, to subordinate spiritual authority entirely to temporal power, which makes a “pretence of priestly power”; the third, to conspire with another worldly powers, the Barons of England, in this case, against the power of the King; in short, to use spiritual authority for the sake of worldly ends. These are strong temptations and expected, as Thomas himself says. It is the fourth temptation that is unexpected. It is the temptation to use his spiritual power to bind the King and the Bishops by way of martyrdom, using martyrdom as a means to a political end. “King is forgotten, when another shall come: Saint and Martyr rule from the tomb.” In all of these temptations, the things of the spirit and truth are used for other ends.

In a brilliant insight, Thomas sees the problem; it is a betrayal of truth itself made most explicit in the last temptation. He famously says, and this is just before the sermon interlude in the play, that “the last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason”.

Both the lesson from Acts and the Gospel from Matthew show the misuse and abuse of authority. Stephen is stoned for his profession of faith in Jesus. In the Gospel, Jesus says “prophets, and wise men, and scribes” who were sent by God, were killed by the religious leaders, the Scribes and Pharisees. It is an indictment about the misuse of power. In the lesson, Saul the Persecutor who will become Paul the Apostle, stands by condoning the stoning of Stephen.

John tells the story of the woman taken in adultery. She is brought before Jesus as a way of testing him about the literal requirements of the Law, namely, stoning those caught in the act of adultery. The response of Jesus is poignant and intriguing. He bends down and writes “with his finger on the ground”. What he wrote we do not know. Then he says to the Scribes and Pharisees who had brought her to him, “He that is without sin among you, let him be the first to cast a stone at her”. He then again bends down and writes, again we know not what, on the ground. “Convicted by their own conscience”, John tells us, all the accusers melt away, leaving Jesus alone with the woman. “Has no one condemned you,” he asks her. “No one, Lord”, she says, to which Jesus says, “neither do I condemn thee: go and sin no more”. It is a scene of tender forgiveness in the face of condemnation. Forgiveness, we might say, is written on the ground just as in this morning’s Matins lesson about Cain and Abel, God says, “your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground”. Forgiveness overwrites human sin on the ground of our humanity.

Stephen dies for his witness to Christ as the Son of Man but he dies with the words of Christ on his lips and as witness to his heart. It is about Christ in him. “Lord, lay not this sin to their charge”, he says, even as Jesus said, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”

Our motives and intentions are often more confused and unclear than we realise. We may do the right thing but for the wrong reason or, conversely, the wrong thing for the right reason. Our churches and our liturgy would gather us to Christ not to condemn and condone evil and wickedness but to call us to witness to the truth of God in Christ. That truth is about forgiveness as the moving principle in sacrificial love and service. It is out of the love of Christ that Stephen dies confessing Christ and forgiving his persecutors. It is not too much to suggest that the author of the Acts of the Apostles has a sense that the Saul who condones the stoning of Stephen is perhaps moved by this witness to death and life, and so will be changed himself. Stephen has learned how to die in order to live; it is about dying and living to God. The witness of the martyrs is not about themselves but about God and to bring us back to God.

As Eliot has Thomas à Becket say, “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”, like Christ in the mothering image of a hen gathering together her chickens under her wings. “The true martyr … has lost his will in the will of God, not lost it but found it, for he has found his freedom in submission to God”. “Thy will be done” as we pray in the Lord’s Prayer, recalling Mary’s word to the Angel, “be it unto me according to thy Word.” The martyr seeks nothing for himself, “not even the glory of martyrdom”.

We live in uncertain times and are subject to the certainties and uncertainties of those in authority as well as to the vagaries of our own opinions and emotions. The Feast of St. Stephen illuminates for us something of the deeper meaning of Christmas. It is about love in sacrifice and service, about love as forgiveness which is the only and true counter to our fears and pretensions. It is what truly gathers us for such is Christ gathering us to himself despite ourselves. The way of suffering is the way of sacrifice, the way of the love of Christ in us. We rejoice and mourn at one and the same time.