by CCW | 26 December 2025 13:00
What most know about St. Stephen, if anything, is probably from the carol, “Good King Wencelaus”, a 19th century English Christmas carol by John Mason Neale set to a 13th century medieval tune collected in a 16th century Finnish collection of carols, Piae Cantiones. Neale’s carol is based upon a 10th century duke in Bohemia, now the Czech Republic, about whom not much is known, other than is being favorably inclined towards Christians. The carol makes no mention whatsoever of the Christmas story and yet, paradoxically, it is one of the most popular Christmas carols! Nonetheless, the carol touches in at least two ways upon some of the most significant features of the Christmas Mystery and the Christian Faith.
The Feast of Stephen, explicitly mentioned in the carol, is one of the three great Holy Days of Christmas. Stephen is the proto-martyr of the Christian Church. Along with The Feast of St. John the Evangelist and The Feast of the Holy Innocents, St. Stephen’s Day contributes to our understanding of Christ’s Incarnation. Lancelot Andrewes notes that Christ’s Good Friday and his Christmas Day are “but the evening and the morning of one and the same day”; a point which John Donne twenty years later also echoed; both of them highlighting the necessary connection between the Nativity and the Passion. They are inseparable. “His whole life was a continual passion”.
T.S. Eliot notes in his play Murder in the Cathedral the central paradox which goes to the heart of the Christian Faith. We celebrate Christ’s Nativity with the Eucharist which recalls and re-presents to us his Passion. As the carol In Dulci Jubilo puts it “Christ was born for this”. Perhaps, it is not really all that strange that on the very day after Christmas we celebrate the first martyr of the Christian Church, St. Stephen, whose story in some sense or other has become associated with the carol and with Christmas.
The two ways in which Stephen is significant in terms of the mystery of Christmas is that he was, first, one of the early deacons of the emerging Christian church, known then simply as ‘The Way’ – the Christian Tao, as it were, and secondly, his sacrifice is explicitly modelled on Christ’s crucifixion and echoes Christ’s first and last words from the Cross. “Father forgive them; for they know not what they do” is Jesus’s first word on the Cross to the Father. Stephen’s last word is “Lord, lay not this sin to their charge”. “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit”, Stephen prays, an echo of Christ’s last word, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit”.
Service and sacrifice are inseparable and belong to the essential mystery of Christmas: the opening out to us of the vision of life in God through the Incarnate Son. “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,” as John says in one of the Christmas anthems. The diaconate is the ministry as service, an essential feature of all the forms of Christian life, particularly the ordained ministry, and, as we see with Stephen, that service extends to sacrifice.
But what about the carol “Good King Wenceslaus”, a carol which seems to have no real connection to Christmas other than the mention of a journey of compassion in the winter world of central Europe, specifically, Bohemia, on The Feast of Stephen? The spiritual connection lies in the words: “In his master’s steps he trod”. This points to the imitation of Christ embodied in works of service and charity. What moves in the story of the carol is the love which moves in Stephen in his service and sacrifice. There is, to be sure, in the carol another allusion, albeit more obliquely to Christ. The journey is to the home of a poor man, who lives “right against the forest fence, by St. Agnes’ fountain”, a reference not just to another saint but to Christ as the Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God.
Yet there is, I think, one other feature of the imitatio Christi which the Feast of Stephen offers us. The Gospel is especially clear by way of Christ’s words about persecution and suffering, about the strong and disturbing realities of “the killing and the stoning of the prophets and them which are sent unto thee”. This picture of desolation ultimately belongs to something greater, to a vision of blessing precisely through our identity in Christ. “Blessed is he that cometh in the Name of the Lord”. To be a follower of the Way of Christ means sacrifice and persecution. This phrase, said in the liturgy just before the Prayer of Consecration, recalls us to that understanding.
This is a strong affirmation of a recurring and repeated theme in the Scriptures: the idea that great good comes out of suffering and persecution, out of human sin and evil. This alludes to Christ’s own story and in terms of the Christmas mystery. “He came unto his own, and his own received him not”, as John tells us in the great Gospel for Christmas Eve. Yet what we behold in “the Word made flesh” is “the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father”, a vision of one who is “full of grace and truth”. Stephen in Acts faces persecution for his commitment to the service of Jesus. “Being full of the Holy Spirit, Stephen looked up stedfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God.”
His vision recalls the healing miracles of Christ, to his “looking up to heaven and saying Ephphatha”, for instance, “that is, Be opened”. Stephen’s openness to the way of God is a distinctive feature of his witness. He walks and talks in the way of his master and lord. He witnesses to the great wonder of forgiveness and compassion even towards those who have sought his harm; in short, to the way of being in Christ who has come to us to bring redemption and life to a dark and weary world. His witness testifies to the blessedness of the Christmas mystery: to our being in Christ and his life in us.
Fr. David Curry
The Feast of Stephen, Xmas 2025
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2025/12/26/sermon-for-the-feast-of-st-stephen-15/
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