Skip to main content

The Death of Stephen

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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I don't believe in an interventionist God

Matthew 28.1-10, 1 Corinthians 15.1-11 I like Nick Cave’s song because of its audacious first line: ‘I don’t believe in an interventionist God’. What an unlikely way to begin a love song! He once explained that he wrote the song while sitting at the back of an Anglican church where he had gone with his wife Susie, who presumably does believe in an interventionist God - at least that’s what the song says. Actually Cave has always been very interested in religion. Sometimes he calls himself a Christian, sometimes he doesn’t, depending on how the mood takes him. He once said, ‘I believe in God in spite of religion, not because of it.’ But his lyrics often include religious themes and he has also said that any true love song is a song for God. So maybe it’s no coincidence that he began this song in such an unlikely way, although he says the inspiration came to him during the sermon. The vicar was droning on about something when the first line of the song just popped into his ...
14 comments
Read more

Giotto’s Nativity and Adoration of the Shepherds

John 1.10-18 In the week before Christmas the BBC broadcast a modern version of The Nativity which attempted to retell the story with as much psychological realism as possible. So, for instance, viewers saw how Mary, and Joseph especially, struggled with their feelings. But telling the story of Jesus with psychological realism is not a new idea. It has a long tradition going back seven hundred years to the time of the Italian artist Giotto di Bondone. This nativity scene was painted in a church in Padua in about 1305. Much imitated it is one of the first attempts at psychological realism in Christian art. And what a wonderful first attempt it is - a work of genius, in fact! Whereas previously Mary and the Baby Jesus had been depicted facing outwards, or looking at their visitors, with beatific expressions fixed on their faces, Giotto dares to show them staring intently into one another’s eyes, bonding like any mother and newborn baby. Joseph, in contrast, is not looking on with quiet a...
1 comment
Read more

Luther and Loyola

James 1:17-27 Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23 Within Christianity there has always been a tension between two poles. At one end of the spectrum stands Martin Luther, who said that Christian faith is about trusting in God to put us right - or make us righteous - through the saving death of Jesus. Luther came to this conclusion when he was a professor of New Testament studies in a little town in Germany called Wittenberg. One year he decided to teach his students about Paul’s letter to the Romans and that’s when it suddenly dawned upon him that Christian faith is all about trust. At the other end of the spectrum , stands someone like Ignatius Loyola the founder of the Society of Jesus. He spent a lot of his later life in crisis, first struggling to overcome severe wounds that he had suffered when he was a soldier and then during two short periods locked up in a cell by the Spanish Inquisition. He came to believe that the Christian life is a similar sort of struggle, a lifelon...
Post a Comment
Read more