Saint Stephen

And yet, long before that terrible hour outside the city gate, Stephen began his service with a very ordinary task: seeing to the daily meals of the poor widows of the community, so that no one was overlooked. His road to martyrdom began in a young Church learning to share its bread and clothing fairly and kindly.

There were then two groups in the community: Greek-speaking Jews, most of whom had come back from Jewish communities abroad, and local Hebrew-speaking Jews. The Greek speakers began to complain that the poor widows in their group were being overlooked in the daily distribution of food, while the other group was favored.

The young community at once faced a very practical question of fairness. Those who were alone and helpless, with the least voice, were easily forgotten in the very place where everyone called one another brother and sister: a paradox any community knows, even today.

The Twelve Apostles called the whole community together. Since they could not neglect prayer and the preaching of God’s word to wait on tables, they proposed that the community choose seven men of good reputation, full of the Spirit and wisdom, to be entrusted with this work of service. The whole community agreed. The seven chosen were brought before the Apostles, who laid hands on them and prayed.

Stephen’s name headed the list of the seven: a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit. The Church has always seen in the Seven the beginnings of the ministry of deacons.

Scripture does not record Stephen’s birth, age or hometown. His name is Greek and means “crown”, a name from the same language as those who had complained, and one that takes on deeper meaning in light of the crown of martyrdom he would soon receive. He appears first not as a preacher, but as someone his brothers trusted to care for the weakest members of the community.

Some members of the “Synagogue of the Freedmen” (descendants of Jews once enslaved and later freed), together with Jews of the diaspora from Cyrene, Alexandria, Cilicia and distant Asia Minor, stood up to argue fiercely with him. These must have been people used to living between two cultures, used to sharp debate in fluent Greek. Yet they could not stand against the wisdom and the Spirit with which he spoke.

Beaten in argument, they secretly put men up to accusing him falsely of blasphemy against Moses and God, against the Temple and the Law. They stirred up the crowd, seized Stephen and dragged him before the Sanhedrin, the highest religious council of the Jewish people at that time.

That image speaks of deep peace, of a soul wholly united to the Lord in the fiercest storm. It does not make the false accusations any less dangerous: the man who day after day had seen to fairness for the poor now faced the most outrageous injustice of his life.

He recalled how Joseph was hated by his own brothers and sold into Egypt, but God was with him and used that very misfortune to save the whole family from famine. He told of Moses, rejected and driven away by his own people, then sent back by God to free them from slavery; and of how that people had so often stubbornly turned their backs on God, even after receiving the most precious words of life.

Stephen’s long speech was not a history lesson to fill time. It was a forceful answer: God has never let Himself be confined within the four walls of a Temple built by human hands. He has always walked with His people, even in exile, and history shows that His truest messengers were always the first to be rejected by those who claimed to be most devout.

Finally, filled with the Spirit, he bluntly exposed the hypocrisy of the very men sitting in judgment on him: they were always resisting the Holy Spirit, just as their ancestors had persecuted the prophets, and they had betrayed the Righteous One. That stinging rebuke belongs to a very tense debate within the Jewish world of that time, and must never be twisted into a condemnation of the Jewish people for all time; Stephen himself and his whole community were Jews.

The man who had just retold the history of salvation now bore witness to One who was alive and reigning. The One they had condemned to death and crucified naked on Calvary was now in the glory of God, and at those words their fury could no longer be held back.

They shouted aloud, covered their ears as if they could not bear another word, and rushed at him together, dragging him outside the walls of Jerusalem to stone him, for the Law required executions to take place outside the holy city. The witnesses took off their cloaks to throw more freely and laid them at the feet of a young man named Saul. That young man stood there approving the killing of a righteous man, not knowing that before long he himself would carry the name of the One Stephen had just proclaimed.

Scripture does not give the exact date of this event, only that it happened in the 30s of the first century, before Saul was struck down on the road to Damascus. Saul did not throw a stone himself, but his approval and his guarding of the cloaks became a painful memory that Paul the Apostle never forgot, and never once tried to hide in his letters.

Those two prayers echo the trust and forgiveness of Jesus Himself on the Cross. The disciple became like his Master in the very way he faced human violence and cruelty. Stephen’s forgiveness does not make the killing right, nor does it erase the responsibility of those throwing the stones.

Right after Stephen’s death, a fierce persecution broke out across Jerusalem. The believers had to scatter throughout Judea and Samaria to escape, leaving behind homes and fields. And yet the very people scattered by that storm carried the seed of the Gospel with them and sowed it wherever they went. Out of sorrow, the death of the first martyr became fertile ground that bore fruit he could never have foreseen as he fell.

The Church celebrates Saint Stephen on December 26, right after Christmas. The first martyr is placed beside the manger of Bethlehem in the liturgical calendar as a reminder that the joy of the Son of God coming into the world is not a soothing lullaby, but a love that dares to go with us into the darkest and most painful places of earthly life.

For Vietnamese Catholics, Saint Stephen holds together two things that should never be separated: serving at the Lord’s altar, and caring for the bowl of rice of the poor right beside us.