“Lord, lay not this sin to their charge”
The readings for the Feast of Stephen are in stark contrast, it might seem, to the feelings of good will and good cheer associated with Christmas. How strange that the wonder of Christmas night and Christmas morn should be followed by the stoning of Stephen as recorded in Acts and by the dire words of Jesus about “kill[ing] the prophets, and ston[ing] them which are sent unto you”? Images of stark and disturbing violence. How is this good news, we might ask? How to reconcile this with the Christmas messages of peace on earth and good will toward men? And yet, the Gospel insists that these things are really all a blessing.
“Blessed is he that cometh in the Name of the Lord”. The three holy days of Christmas illuminate the radical meaning of Christ’s birth. It is not about ignoring and denying the realities of sin and evil, the realities of the cruel suffering inflicted by humans upon humans. Rather what we see is what is proclaimed in carol and song: “Christ was born for this!” Born for what? Born to bring redemption and healing to a broken world, born to suffer and die that we might have life in him.
In a profound sense, St. Stephen’s Day illustrates the meaning of the Christmas anthem from 1st John. “In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only-begotten Son into the world that we might live through him”. The love of God means loving your enemies and blessing those that persecute you. Such is the radical nature of divine love which alone transcends the divisions and animosities of our hearts and world in disarray.
Stephen is the proto-martyr, the archetype of Christian witness, not simply by being killed, but by the spirit in him by which he faces death. Another lives in him, we might say, and that other is Christ. Christmas is really about our lives as lived in the love of God; God with us and we with God, we in him and he in us. That sense of co-inherence and mutual indwelling establishes an entirely different perspective on how we think about the darkness and evil of our souls and our world. Stephen’s words deliberately echo Christ’s words on the Cross, the words of forgiveness. Those are the words of love conveyed towards us as sinners which in turn shape our words towards those who seek our harm.
“They know not what they do”, Jesus says on the Cross in praying forgiveness for us. They – we – know not what they do in spite of all of the assurances and certainties of our self-righteousness. Such is the arrogance of our ignorance. It is always about a grotesque overreach and abuse of power. We arrogate unto ourselves a power over the lives of others and over ourselves. But life is a gift, something given, not something posited or created by us. In our own times, there is the dominant assumption that we are self-complete autonomous beings free to choose whatever we want to be without restraint or limit, freed from creation and freed to the illusions of ourselves as ends unto ourselves. Our claims to rights and privileges are assumed as inviolable. We neglect how such claims constantly pit us against one another in a kind of war of every man against every man. It is endlessly divisive.
For we are not complete and our motives are endlessly mixed and confused. “The good that I would, I do not; the evil that I would not do is what I do”, as Paul acutely observes about our fallen humanity. St. Stephen’s Day reminds us of the world of human evil, on the one hand, and the radical nature of divine love which redeems that world, on the other hand. The blessing of this day belongs to the blessing of Christmas. “Blessed is he that cometh in the Name of the Lord”, it says, not blessed are we in ourselves and in our own names and through our own pursuits.
And is this not precisely what we pray in the liturgy in the Benedictus just before the Prayer of Consecration and Communion? “Blessed is he that cometh in the Name of the Lord: Hosanna in the highest”. There it is: the blessing of acting out of the love of Christ and letting that love move in us. Another lives in us. And is this not what God seeks for us? “How often,” Jesus says in a most moving and poignant phrase, “would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!” The Christmas mystery is about the radical nature of God’s love which alone counters the desolation of our world and our hearts. “Love ye your enemies”, Jesus says, and what he says he is and what he is alive in us in the witness of our lives to him.
It is not easy but the struggle is to let Christ dwell in us, to let him be born in us who has been born for us. God sent his only-begotten Son into the world that we might live through him. The Feast of Stephen shows us what it means to let Christ live in us. Thus it deepens for us the great mystery of Christmas.
“Lord, lay not this sin to their charge”
Fr. David Curry
Feast of St. Stephen, 2022