Feast of St. Stephen 26th Dec 2018 St. Paul’s Athens.

Rev. Canon L W Doolan

 

Today is the Feast of Stephen, well known even in one of our Christmas carols, Good king Wenceslaus.

We make today a very big metal and spiritual jump. Within 24hours we have gone from celebrating the birth of the Saviour to a saint who died for his faith. On the one hand the Redeemer is born, then suddenly the cost of discipleship.

In the Orthodox calendar today is kept as a Synaxis of the Holy Mother of God. For us there is a synaxis between Jesus and suffering – we point almost straight away towards Good Friday and martyrdom. Appropriately, of course, the Mother of God is no stranger to the maternal suffering of seeing her son on a cross.

Stephen’s death is recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, and so he is considered the proto-martyr of the Christian church – the first person recorded who died for his faith in the crucified and risen Lord. His death is also notable because it is none other than Saul, St. Paul, who oversees the stoning of Stephen – maybe this experience was a contributory factor in changing Paul’s mind and heart to open up towards receiving Jesus into his life.

Stephen of course comes from stephanos which means a garland, so he is the first to receive the garland of martyrdom – a place in heaven and in the church’s life, for his unswerving faith.

Martyrdom was and is a fact of religious life. We associate it nowadays perhaps with suicide bombers of extreme Islam, but it is there right from the start with Christianity. It means literally a ‘witness’, witnesses even to the point of death. How many of our Christian brothers and sisters woke up this morning fearing death for their faith.  International reports show that Christians are the most persecuted faith in the world.

There was a time in the late Roman empire when martyrdom was considered such a privilege that the Roman authorities realized the greatest punishment they could inflict on Christians was NOT to put them to death.

So today we turn our attention to the cost of following Jesus – to the way of the cross, remembering that one of the Wise Men brought myrrh for the embalming of a dead body, and old Simeon tells the Blessed Virgin that a sword will pierce her own heart.