What was it that so enraged the members of the Freedmen Synagogue in Jerusalem, that they threw out the angelic faced Stephen and stoned him to death?
His speech to that congregation does not appear in our readings, at the Eucharist, and I, at least, wasn’t really aware of it- but I am now!-and I think it’s worth giving you a very brief resume (because to be honest, it does go on a bit).
It is intended to answer the accusation that Jesus and his growing group of followers wanted to destroy the Temple and overturn the Law of Moses. So it recounts the history of Israel and the Israelites from Abraham to David and the Prophets, emphasising the promises of God that the Israelites would be a great nation and occupy the Promised Land. While these promises had gradually been fulfilled, the Israelites, and now the Jews, had according to Stephen, misunderstood throughout this long story the true nature of the promise; they had tried to pin God down in a Temple and had missed the point of his immense generosity, in reducing worship and righteousness into inflexible rules and tradition. In particular, they had failed to see the action of the Holy Spirit, by which I think Stephen means the essential action of God in the world, manifested in in the prophets whom the Israelites rejected and finally in the person of Jesus whose life, death and resurrection, realised fully God’s love for his creation: that love we personify in the Holy Spirit that moves in such subtle, stormy and unpredictable ways.
Unsurprisingly, this enraged Stephen’s audience. The Synagogue of Freedmen probably consisted mainly of freed slaves and who were likely to have comprised many converts to Judaism. Like many converts, certainly those to what one might call the more extreme forms of Christianity, they may have been especially devoted and jealous of the traditions and practice of the religion in which they had found their home. It was possibly undiplomatic of Stephen to tell them they had got it all wrong, and their violently angry reaction was predictable.
We need to remember that, the early church would not have seen itself as an entity distinct from Judaism, but rather, the natural culmination of Judaism. Peter, Stephen and Paul in their recorded sermons are not trying to convert Jews but let them see that the Gospel is the natural conclusion of Judaism.
All this is a preamble to seeing Stephen’s sermon as relevant to the contemporary church, especially the contemporary Anglican Church. Stephen was commenting on the members of his own faith. What he says helps us to address other Christians.
I suspect I am not alone in thinking that there are areas in which contemporary Christianity has been perverted or misconstrued, just as Stephen says Judaism had gone wrong. This has sometimes been for plainly political ends, sometimes, to be charitable through an honest but erroneous understanding of the Gospel. I am conscious that the pulpit is not a political stage, but when that stage is used to preach ideas which are grotesquely at variance with the Christian Gospel, we have a duty to call it out. The God in whom we believe is not favour of war and the killing of innocent people; He is not xenophobic and treats all, especially the stranger as deserving compassion and help. Jesus nowhere says that killing people is right.
As far as war is concerned it is true that Christian philosophers have developed a theory that justifies some war in some circumstances and seeks to regulate the way in which war is waged; it is those often subtle and nuanced principles which underly the International Law on war. The present wars in the Middle East observe none of those rules; perhaps their subtlety is beyond the principal belligerents. Or perhaps they think the woeful precedents of belligerence in the name of Christianity justifies their warmaking. We can find help in confronting these errors in Stephen’s sermon. His final words to his increasingly hostile audience are
“ How stubborn you are, heathen still in at heart and deaf to the truth! Like fathers like sons. Was there ever a prophet whom your fathers did not persecute? They killed those who foretold the coming of the Righteous One ; and now you have betrayed and murdered him, you who received the Law as God’s angels gave it to you, and you have not kept it.”
Throughout his sermon, Stephen has emphasised the gift of God, but a gift that works slowly and unpredictably characterised especially by the action of the Holy Spirit. It is the essence of the Law “given by angels” rather than tables of rules written on stone tablets. God himself is present among his people and conceived as moving around in an impermanent tabernacle, not to be pinned down in the immobile permanence of a Temple with all its ritual.
So our task should be to help the perverters of Christianity to understand that the great creative love of God is not to be found in any fixed tradition, nor by picking out texts from scriptures which standing alone appear to justify some action. We need to see the full sweep in the action of the Holy Spirit initiating creation as it blew over the inchoate waters and inspiring every element of the world with God’s love. A love that has no space for warmongering or xenophobia, nor any fear or hatred of any of God’s creatures. This a love that is recognisable most notably in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus but which resists any attempt at definition or confinement. Amen
*This sermon was written in the
Now when they heard these things they were enraged, and they ground their teeth against him. 55 But he, full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God; 56 and he said, “Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing at the right hand of God.” 57 But they cried out with a loud voice and stopped their ears and rushed together upon him. 58 Then they cast him out of the city and stoned him; and the witnesses laid down their garments at the feet of a young man named Saul. 59 And as they were stoning Stephen, he prayed, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” 60 And he knelt down and cried with a loud voice, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” And when he had said this, he fell asleep.