Homily for Feast of St. Stephen

Homily for the Feast of St. Stephen

Dec. 26, 2024
Acts 6: 8-10; 7: 54-59
Collect
Christian Brothers, St. Joseph’s Residence, N.R.

The Stoning of St. Stephen (Adam Elsheimer)

“Stephen, filled with grace and power, was working great wonders and signs among the people” (Acts 6: 8).

The whole story of St. Stephen—the little that Acts tells us of his life and death—is the story of a man who imitated Jesus.  He’s a man of grace and power; he works signs and wonders.  Acts doesn’t give us details except in a long speech that recaps the history of Israel and ends with Stephen’s calling the Sanhedrin “stiff-necked” (7:51) and murderers of “the Righteous One,” viz., Jesus (7:52)—a powerful speech that wasn’t designed to win friends and influence people positively, but did echo some of the charges that Jesus aimed at the scribes and Pharisees.

Then Stephen dies commending his spirit to Jesus (7:9) as Jesus had commended his spirit to his Father (Luke 23:46).  I don’t think it’s coincidental that Luke is the author of both of those commendations.

Our passage today ends without the last verse of Stephen’s story:  “Then he fell to his knees and cried out in a loud voice, ‘Lord, do not hold this sin against them’” (7:60).  Again, it’s only Luke who records that Jesus prayed that his judges and executioners be forgiven (23:34).

Altho today’s reading omits that line, the collect cites it:  Stephen was “a man who knew how to pray even for his persecutors.”  (Those who designed the missal and who designed the lectionary followed Jesus’ advice not to let the left hand know what the right hand was doing [Matt 6:3]).  Stephen’s prayer for his killers cues our prayer “that we may imitate what we worship and so learn to love even our enemies”; we worship our Lord Jesus in the Eucharist and pray that we may imitate him even as Stephen did.

It’s a challenge to overlook slights and other harms done to us.  It’s a challenge even to be patient and kind, to bite our tongues instead of giving a sharp response or making a cutting comment.  If we can be patient, kind, gentle, that will be evidence of God’s grace and the power of the Holy Spirit, evidence that we are placing our lives in God’s hands.