Saint Stephen, Deacon and Protomartyr (Transferred)

Rembrandt, Stoning of Saint Stephen, 1625

Have you ever heard of “The Witness Days?” The term was unfamiliar to me until a few days ago. It refers to the multiple commemorations of martyrs surrounding the seasons of Advent and Christmas: Saint Andrew on November 30, Saint Thomas on December 21, Saint Stephen on December 26, the Holy Innocents on December 28, and Saint Thomas Becket on December 29.

The Greek word martyr means “witness,” and in the Church’s tradition it has come to signify those holy men and women who bore witness to Christ unto death. This church is dedicated to the Protomartyr, or first martyr, Stephen. Although Saint Stephen’s Day is the day after Christmas, the Prayer Book permits us to celebrate it on the Sunday following because it is our patronal feast.

Every year, many commentators remark on the seeming incongruity between the celebration of the Lord’s Nativity and the commemoration of Stephen’s grisly martyrdom, execution by stoning, the very next day. So much of the devotional imagery and language surrounding Christmas focuses on the angelic hymn extolling peace on earth. Yet the stoning of Stephen on December 26 and, even more, the slaughter of the Holy Innocents on December 28, seem to belie that promise.

So, this morning, it seems appropriate to reflect on this apparent discontinuity. The juxtaposition of Christmas Day, and Saint Stephen’s Day stands to teach us much about the nature of the Christian faith.

The first point to note is that the coming of the Christ child into the world provokes deadly opposition. He comes as the Prince of Peace, the bearer of God’s Kingdom. But that prospect presents itself as a threat to the ruling powers of this world. The birth narratives in both Matthew and Luke’s Gospels both emphasize this point in very different ways.

In Matthew, on learning from the wise men of the recent birth of one born to be King of the Jews, King Herod the Great immediately orders the slaughter of all the male children aged three years and under in the vicinity of Bethlehem. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph escape in the nick of time and take refuge in Egypt.

In Luke, by contrast, the note of opposition is sounded in the form of a warning by the old man Simeon, when Joseph and Mary take Jesus up to the Temple in Jerusalem to present him to the Lord forty days after his birth. After hailing the child as the long-awaited Messiah, “a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to thy people Israel,” Simeon foretells, “Behold, this child is set for the falling and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is spoken against … that thoughts out of many hearts may be revealed.”

Simeon is saying that the coming of Christ into the world precipitates a crisis in the classical sense of the word. The word “crisis” comes from the Greek verb “to judge” or “to decide” and it signifies a time when a difficult or important decision must be made, often for or against something or someone. Related to the words “critic” and “critical,” it suggests a time requiring the exercise of critical judgment. The coming of Christ into the world confronts people with the existential question of how they will respond to him – by accepting or rejecting him – and in so exercising their human judgment they invoke divine judgment upon themselves in the process.

Those who decide for Christ in this moment of crisis must expect to suffer opposition and persecution just as Christ himself suffered opposition and persecution. Our Lord says as much on multiple occasions. For example, in Matthew 10:34 he declares: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

These words remain as true today as in the early centuries of Church history. Throughout the world, more Christians are suffering persecution and martyrdom than ever before. In the twentieth century more Christians suffered martyrdom than in all the previous centuries combined; and the twenty-first century is shaping up to be as bad or worse.

Commentators often remark on the similarities between the trial and stoning of Stephen in the Acts of the Apostles and the trial and crucifixion of Our Lord in the Gospel passion narratives. Stephen is tried before the Sanhedrin, just as Jesus was. False witnesses testify against him, just as they testified against Jesus. At the critical moment in the trial, Stephen looks into heaven and declares, “Behold, I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God,” just as, at his trial, Jesus had declared, “from now on the Son of man shall be seated at the right hand of the power of God.” Stephen is cast out of the city to be stoned, just as Jesus was taken outside the city walls to be crucified. Finally, Stephen’s dying prayers, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit,” and “Lord, do not hold this sin against them,” directly echo our Lord’s words from the cross: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” and “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!”

So, just as Christ came into the world ultimately to suffer death on the cross, so those of us who call ourselves Christians may well find ourselves called to suffer opposition and persecution for our witness to Christ. Insofar as we bear such adversities patiently and with love, we become more and more conformed to Christ, more and more united with him in his sufferings, just as Stephen was, and hence all the more effective in our witness.

Notice how boldly Stephen testifies before the Sanhedrin. He doesn’t mince words. It’s disappointing how contemporary church members often seem embarrassed to be Christians and feel compelled to make excuses for their faith. “Yes, I’m a Christian, but not like those dreadful fundamentalists …“ “Yes, the Church has committed its share of crimes with its inquisitions and crusades, but my church isn’t like that …” Enough already! That kind of talk just buys into and internalizes the hateful propaganda the world has always used to persecute and oppress us, from the days of King Herod until now. Better to take a leaf from Saint Stephen’s notebook and bear witness to Christ without excuse, and without apology.

And it is precisely Christ’s Incarnation – his birth at Bethlehem and his subsequent life, death, and resurrection – that enables us to bear such witness to him faithfully. Here is the deepest linkage of all between Christmas Day and St. Stephen’s Day. In today’s Old Testament reading, Jeremiah prophesies bravely against the inhabitants of Jerusalem at great risk to himself. But in our reading from the Acts of the Apostles, Stephen has gained something that Jeremiah lacked: namely the knowledge that Jesus will be with him in bearing whatever suffering he may have to endure. Thus dying with Jesus, Stephen gains the assurance of rising with Jesus in glory.

CHRISTMAS 2014 -- At the Midnight Mass

John Duns Scotus, 1266-1308

Christmas is the feast that we Anglicans celebrate best. The glories of the Anglican musical and liturgical tradition come into their own with the choir of King’s College, Cambridge, singing the festival of nine lessons and carols, showcasing choral gems from David Willcock’s arrangement of Cecil Frances Alexander’s “Once in Royal David’s City” to Harold Darke’s setting of Christina Rossetti’s “In the Bleak Midwinter.”

Attempting to explain why it is that Anglicans celebrate Christmas so splendidly, some commentators point to the central place of the Incarnation in Anglican theology and spirituality. I find this explanation entirely persuasive. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. At Christmas we take particular delight in recounting the story of his taking flesh in all its vivid and earthy detail: the inn, the stable, the manger, the shepherds, the angels, and the animals.

And yet – from time to time I hear church members make slightly supercilious and denigrating remarks about the celebration of Christmas. It’s all well and good to commemorate the birth of Jesus, they say, but the theological significance of Christmas pales in comparison with that of Holy Week and Easter. Our Lord’s death on the cross and resurrection are what really matter to Christian faith.

To evaluate such claims, we need to look a bit more closely at the classical Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. At Bethlehem, God the Son, the eternal Second Person of the Holy Trinity, came down from heaven to be born at a particular place in a particular time, to share in our human nature, and to participate in our human condition. But why?

The standard and indeed correct answer is that he came to save us from sin and death. In the biblical account, Adam and Eve disobeyed God and the whole human race inherited the guilt of their sin. We need not read the story of Adam and Eve literally to understand it as a definitive interpretation of the human condition. We are fallen creatures, held captive by sin, unable by our own efforts to redeem ourselves or to live as God intended when he created us. So in the Incarnation Christ came among us to redeem us by dying on the cross.

One possible implication of this account, however, is that Christ’s conception and birth of the Virgin Mary have significance only as preliminaries to his atonement. To suffer and die for us, he had first to be born as a human being. A further implication is that if Adam and Eve had not sinned, the Incarnation would not have taken place.

In the medieval West, this line of thinking even led some to regard the fall of Adam and Eve as a good thing for having occasioned the great blessing of Christ’s coming into the world. In the hymn known as the Exsultet, sung by the deacon at the blessing of the Paschal Candle during the Easter Vigil, we encounter the famous lines: “O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam, which gained for us so great a Redeemer!”

The fifteenth-century English carol “Adam lay ybounden,” expresses the same basic idea. If Adam had not sinned by taking the apple in the Garden of Eden, then our Lady (the blessed Virgin Mary) would never have become Queen of Heaven. So the carol concludes: “Blessed be the time / That apple taken was / Therefore we moun singen / Deo gratias!”

This view became widespread in the Christian Church, at least in the West. But from the beginning a number of theologians of impeccable orthodoxy took the opposite view: that even if Adam and Eve had never fallen, the Incarnation would likely have taken place anyway. Saint Irenaeus made this suggestion in the second century, and Saint Maximus the Confessor developed it in the seventh. Both theologians proposed that, even before the Fall, God created the world with the precise intention of becoming incarnate in it as a human being.

Medieval scholastic theologians debated the question with enthusiasm, as they were wont to do. In the thirteenth century, Saint Thomas Aquinas took the negative position, pointing out that Scripture consistently describes the Incarnation as a remedy for human sin – as, for example, in I Timothy 1:15, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” Yet after concluding that the Incarnation would probably not have taken place if humanity had not sinned, Thomas immediately adds that God’s power is not limited, so that God could have become incarnate under any circumstances he chose.

Taking the opposite position, the thirteenth-century Franciscan theologian John Duns Scotus argued vigorously that it was unfitting for God’s greatest deed ever of becoming incarnate to have been contingent upon Adam’s sin, such that if Adam had not sinned, the Incarnation would have remained undone. (In subsequent years, as in so many other theological controversies, the Dominicans tended to follow Aquinas, while the Franciscans tended to follow Scotus.)

But why would God have become incarnate as a human being apart from the purpose of redeeming fallen humanity? All the writers I’ve mentioned propose in different ways that by becoming incarnate and participating in our human nature, God communicates his infinite life, wisdom, and love to us finite human beings. He shares in our human life so that we may share in his divine life, and so fulfill the purpose for which he created us: to live in union with him for eternity.

We should exercise due caution about making any sweeping claims on this question. The suggestion that God would have become incarnate even in the absence of human sin is a contrary-to-fact hypothetical speculation. We can never know the answer for sure because, as it happened, humanity did fall, and Christ did come into came into the world to save us from our sins. What we can say, perhaps, is that if we had not sinned, then Christ would not have had to suffer and die on the cross. The Incarnation of the Son of God may well have taken place anyway but would likely have taken a very different course.

So, we’re left with a speculation, but an edifying speculation all the same. At Christmas, we give thanks to God for sending his Son into the world to save us from sin and death. At the same time, the possibility that he would have come anyway, even apart from the Fall, confirms our characteristically Anglican intuition that Christmas cannot be reduced to a mere prerequisite to Holy Week and Easter. This festival celebrates a mystery that to some extent stands independently and in its own right.

To put it bluntly, even apart from Holy Week and Good Friday, there might well still be Christmas. Even if he had not had to suffer and die on the cross, the Son of God might still have been born as one of us, to teach us, enlighten us, and bring us to the fullness of eternal life and joy in God’s presence. This evening’s celebration proclaims that promise and that hope, in which we do well to rejoice with all the enthusiasm we can muster.