Acts 7.55-60 (https://www.biblegateway.com NRSVA)
Stephen wins no awards for diplomacy. Like the proverbial Yorkshireman, he calls a spade a spade. If he hopes that a bit of straight talking will invoke a spirit of contrition and repentance he’s badly misjudged the mood of the meeting! His listeners are already infuriated, but now he calls out that he can see a vision of Jesus standing at the right hand of God. That’s the final straw. The crowd lynches him and so he becomes the first Christian martyr. Luke has no hesitation in calling this a murder.
Yet Stephen appeals to Jesus not to hold this sin against them. He also echoes Jesus’ own words from the Cross, ‘Receive my Spirit.’ In fact, on the face of it, Stephen quotes two of Jesus’ sayings from the Cross, but - as we saw in Holy Week - the words, ‘Father forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing’ aren’t found in the earliest manuscripts of Luke’s Gospel. But either way, there is a clear reference here to the Cross. This is what it might mean in practice to take up our own cross and follow Jesus.
Paul admitted, for instance in his letter to the Galatian Christians, that in his youth he had ‘violently persecuted the church of God’. He doesn’t spell out what that entailed and nowhere in his letters does he mention this incident. Had he told Luke about it on their travels, or does Luke link Paul - here called by his Jewish name - into the story just because he knows this is the kind of thing that Paul once got up to? One person’s tragedy is ‘just another day at the office’ to a casual bystander.
Luke seems to be making the point that God can bring good things out of tragic, and even wicked, events. A buildup of similar experiences eventually weighed on Paul’s conscience and prepared him for ‘a revelation of Jesus Christ’ (Gal 1.12) which would change not only his life but the course of world history.
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