Witness Equals Martyr

Monday of 3rd week of Easter

I’d like to think that preaching has come a ways since the days of Stephen. If you read the rest of this chapter of Acts, you get the impression that Stephen had some kind of martyr complex. Remember that the word martyr in Greek means witness. He was so on-fire with zeal for Jesus and the Church that he stood up before these rabid Jewish zealots and accused them of apostasy for refusing to believe that Jesus was the Messiah.

Note well that Luke tells us here that Stephen’s face was like that of an angel. We have to be careful here. We are so used to thinking of angels like Rafael’s cherubs that we forget that an angel is a being of power and majesty. Angels appeared in power, not as little baby-faced critters flitting about with butterfly wings. Their first words were typically “don’t be afraid,” because they elicited fear.

So what Luke is saying here is that Stephen appeared with a kind of divine aura of power around his face. When he opened his mouth, it was a powerful word that came forth. At the end of his speech, they had two choices. They could either believe him and accept baptism as the fulfillment of the covenant with Abraham, or they could close their hearts permanently and kill him for blasphemy. They chose the latter.

Stephen seems to have thought that the battle with the Synagogue of Freedmen was so apocalyptic that it called for drastic matters. His audience didn’t just write a complaint letter to the Sanhedrin. Stephen put his life where his mouth was, and lost it, only to gain it in the life to come. With his dying breath he forgave his murderers.

In today’s culture we are often challenged to witness for life and for the Church, and against the evils of pornography, euthanasia, abortion and exploitation of the poor. Usually we can do this in a civil and even understated manner. But we also have to know where to draw the line in the sand–beyond this I cannot be pushed. I am told that one of the victims in the 2005 Minnesota massacre was praying at the time of her death. We remember the earlier story of the girl at Columbine who refused to turn her back on Jesus when challenged by the gunman. If someone walked in here right now and started shooting anyone who didn’t curse Jesus, what would we do? What would I do? The way things are going, we’d better ask ourselves that question.