St. Stephen

Today the church throughout the world honors St. Stephen, the deacon and protomartyr.

Our Treasury of Daily Prayer offering for today includes a magnificent meditation (page 1057) by St. Valeius Herberger (1562-1627), beautifully translated from the German by the Rev. Dr. Benjamin T. G. Mayes. I use the Treasury for daily Matins and weekly Vespers - and cannot recommend it highly enough. It has proven to be an invaluable resource.

The collect in the Treasury (also found on page 1057) for today is likewise poignant and spot-on:

Heavenly Father, in the midst of our sufferings for the sake of Christ grant us grace to follow the example of the first martyr, Stephen, that we may also look to the One who suffered and was crucified on our behalf and pray for those who do us wrong; through Jesus Christ, our Lord, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

There is, however, an incorrect statement in the explanation for “St. Stephen, Martyr” on page 1058 that should be corrected in future editions:

When some of his colleagues became jealous of him, they brought Stephen to the Sanhedrin and falsely charged him with blaspheming against Moses (Acts 6:9-14).

The use of the word “colleagues” implies that Stephen was betrayed by fellow Christians, perhaps even fellow deacons. The motivation of “jealousy” is also simply wrong. The reality of who brought false charges against Stephen (and why) is in the text itself:

Then some of those who belonged to the synagogue of the Freedmen (as it was called), and of the Cyrenians, and of the Alexandrians, and of those from Cilicia and Asia, rose up and disputed with Stephen. But they could not withstand the wisdom and the Spirit with which he was speaking. Then they secretly instigated men who said, “We have heard him speak blasphemous words against Moses and God.” And they stirred up the people and the elders and the scribes, and they came upon him and seized him and brought him before the council, and they set up false witnesses who said, “This man never ceases to speak words against this holy place and the law, for we have heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place and will change the customs that Moses delivered to us” (Acts 6:9-14).

These were not Christian or diaconal “colleagues.” These were Jews of various area synagogues who found themselves losing debates with Stephen in disputations about Scripture and about Jesus. Their motivation wasn’t “jealousy,” but rather the same as what Stephen said in his speech before the Sanhedrin that enraged them to the point of stopping up their ears and shedding innocent blood: a desire to silence the prophetic Word of God by means of violence.

When they were losing the debate, they turned to the authorities to silence the one whom they could not best by fair and open discourse. And when the authorities found themselves in the same situation, they used force - an extrajudicial lynching - to silence the one speaking the prophetic Word.

This calls to mind the very charges that Stephen rendered against the Sanhedrin and their ancestors in the first place that so enraged them to the point of murder:

“You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit. As your fathers did, so do you. Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? And they killed those who announced beforehand the coming of the Righteous One, whom you have now betrayed and murdered, you who received the law as delivered by angels and did not keep it” (Acts 7:51-53).

This also calls to mind the author of Hebrews:

And what more shall I say? For time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets — Some were tortured, refusing to accept release, so that they might rise again to a better life. Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword. They went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, mistreated— of whom the world was not worthy—wandering about in deserts and mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth (Heb 11:32, 34b-37).

There are certainly cases of inter-church treachery and jealousy within Christendom in the church’s history. But the arrest, trial, and execution of Stephen was not one of them. This is one of those uncomfortable examples of passages of the New Testament that are sometimes softened out of fear of being called anti-Semitic. The European Jewish Congress is pressuring governments to require Christian Bibles to include “anti-Semitism warnings” in the introductions or margins. I don’t know if this softening was the motivation here or not. Perhaps it was simply a mistake. Probably so. But while we - at least here and now in the western hemisphere - are not being persecuted and martyred for our confession, we are certainly subjected to social and cultural (and sometimes legal and political) pressure to moderate and downplay our confession of Jesus, our quotations from, and interpretation of, Scripture, and our exclusive confession of how salvation is possible for the sake of Christ alone.

The 2003 film adaptation of The Gospel of John included a self-imposed anti-Semitism warning at the very beginning:

Just recently, bishops (sic) of the Church (sic) of England declared that certain hymns are “problematic” for asserting that Jesus is “the true Messiah.” Two hymns in particular were hauled before the Sanhedrin of this woke-captured counterfeit ecclesiological shell of what once was, namely, “Lo, He Comes with Clouds Descending” (LSB 336) and “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” (LSB 357), the latter of which was specifically called out for mentioning “captive Israel.” In addition to churches (sic) appeasing Judaism, we also see churches (sic) and formerly Christian societies wet-nursing Islam. In Magdeburg, the world watched in horror as a Saudi refugee and migrant who was critical of Germany’s treatment of Saudi refugees, smashed his car into a crowd of people gathered for the Christmas market. It was captured on video. It’s a miracle that more people were not killed. Christians (and the descendants of Christians) have been under attack in Europe by Islamist extremists who have been invited, like rampaging medieval Turks, into the formerly Christian strongholds, for many years now.

Governments opening their borders to foreign invaders are actual examples of treachery, at least within the umbrella of nominal Christianity. This kind of betrayal from within was not the case of Stephen’s betrayers and murderers.

And as women become leaders of church and state, we see more and more appeasement: reluctance for Christians to rightly confess Christ, and hesitancy for governments to ply their godly vocation to protect the populations under their care . In 2015, the lesbian bishop (sic) of the Church (sic) of Sweden (which claims to be Lutheran) banned crucifixes from a church (sic) so as to make Muslims feel more welcome. And not long after Sweden opened its borders to “migrants” for fear of being accused of some -ism or that, the formerly safe and virtually crime-free Sweden now has “no go zones” (Orwellianly christened “vulnerable areas”) where even news reporters are intimidated and harassed. Women all across Europe are prey to non-Christian men engaged in predation against them.

And while Christians are obliged to pray for, and forgive their enemies as did St. Stephen with his dying breath, we are also called upon to confess rightly (again, as St. Stephen did with his dying breath) and not soften the hard edges of our Christians confession.

Stephen was not betrayed by jealous fellow Christians. He was persecuted by Jews with whom he was debating his confession of Jesus, and he was murdered by Jews who could not abide his prophetic confession - which we Christians confess to be the very Word of God. And while the state has the duty to protect its citizens from violent attack, we as individual confessors of Jesus have the vocation to pray for our enemies, but not to water down our confession of Jesus. We are to tell the truth, even if it is unpopular, “problematic,” or leads to murderous rampages of people who stop up their ears.

Thanks be to God for St. Stephen’s life and death, which is an example of both forgiveness and steadfast confession of who Jesus is, and the preaching this truth according to God’s Word, in the words of the hymnist, “To men who like or like it not” (LSB 586).