Acts 6:15 And all that sat in the council, looking steadfastly on him, saw his face as it had been the face of an angel. I. STEPHEN'S CIRCUMSTANCES AND TRANSFIGURATION. 1. It was A.D. 37 that he died. The circumstances of that year in the government of the Jewish people were altogether exceptional. Pilate had left the country, and Judaea was, for the time, without any representation of the Imperial Government, and thus the power over life and property remained absolutely in the hands of the Jewish council. 2. Stephen, young, full of vigour, and as bold as he was intellectually strong, had stung into activity the furious hatred of the fiercest fanaticism. Foiled in argument, exposed to the jeers or contempt of those who watched the contest, they determined to have their revenge. 3. There were probably three component elements in the gathering of that fatal day.. (1) The mob of spectators no way uninterested in the trial. The question at issue was one which seemed to touch the quick of national exclusiveness — the tenderest point in a Jewish mind. (2) The bench of judges, which included the rank and learning of the Jewish hierarchy. Some had grown old in the lore of Judaism; some were young in years but versed in the study of the law; all were the possessors of the sacred Scriptures, whose meaning was shrouded from them in the dismal fog of darkened minds; all were the slaves of an iron tradition and the victims of a distorting prejudice. (3) Last in that strange assembly was one young man, with the hopes of life still fresh before him. With the joy, felt by all men who in any sense deserve it, of conscious strength and rectitude, he had committed an unpardonable crime; he had loved truth better than custom, faithfulness to conviction better than popularity; he had hated the stagnation of an unworthy tradition, and risen above the temper of the habitual respectability of his time. 4. The trial began. The witnesses were examined and performed their expected duty of falsehood. Then as the president's interrogation came, the eyes of the assembly were turned on Stephen. Certainly Jesus was with him, and His promise, that the true words would be "given" in the hour of need, supported his spirit. Certainly heavenly powers were upon him, and the light of God's glory was streaming through his soul. Every eye was riveted on the face of Stephen, and the vision of that inner splendour flashed upon them with an unearthly loveliness. "His face was like the face of an angel." A face is the dial-plate of the soul. It takes the lights and shadows of varying feelings, hopes, and fears, and by expression records for others the inner variation of the movements of the soul. Hence the effect upon us frequently of a face in a crowd. Our eyes, resting for the moment upon the features of one happening then to be in rapturous joy or overwhelming sorrow, have rested — and we feel it — on the revelation of a human life. So some faces come to us, remembered indistinctly, and yet haunting our very dreams, moving us — by their slight and delicate tracery of pathos and suffering — moving us to the deepest, keenest sympathy. Now, what was the power of this face on which was riveted the gaze of the council? What? why, the angels are God's messengers; they see the face of the Father; they catch some expression of the uncreated beauty. Once on earth that had been seen in its real loveliness. Once it had awed the multitudes, subdued the intrusive band in the garden, flashed on Peter and melted him to penitence, gazed on the Magdalene and wakened her to heavenly love; now the likeness of its loveliness was seen on the face of the martyr, because in his soul was Jesus the crucified. II. His DEFENCE. The vision of the martyr was a mighty message; but his lips threw that message into words. There, at least, is outlined his message; there for us is trace his character. Note — 1. That earnest desire for truth which is the first real requisite to its attainment. To kindle curiosity, to keep alive an honourable ambition in the young, not merely for reward, but for the acquisition of knowledge, is the duty of every good teacher. To know and apply the best that has been done and thought by those before us is the duty of all of us. And this desire for knowledge, when sanctified and ennobled by a reverent spirit and eager thoughts of God — how beautiful, how good it is! Alas I the fashionable spirit of doubt and unbelief, so often a mere cover for the laziness of an utterly worldly temper, is turning the 'noble-hearted young men of England into mere childish triflers. St. Stephen had evidently desired truth, and searched and studied the Scriptures, and that eager and loving spirit had had its reward. One reward was the vigorous intellectual grasp of the subject which he had to handle with readiness and under the appalling pressure of a trial for life. 2. Turn to the speech itself. (1) It indicates the noblest eloquence. True eloquence is one of God's choicest gifts. To abuse it is always terrible; because the possession of no weapon can involve a greater responsibility than of that one by which a single mind can sway a multitude. But eloquence has its degrees; the truest is primarily and intrinsically the eloquence of thought. If clear and powerful thought — alive with the vis vivida of genuine pathos or fiery feeling, and expressed in shapely words — be presented to the ear and mind of man, he has the rarest and the best. And in such cases even all we possess is the written record; even then the words have something of a power of life to penetrate through the thickest wrappings of the human soul. This has been felt in Demosthenes, Cicero, Chrysostom, Bossuet, Massillon, and Lacordaire. From the few recorded words of St. Stephen we feel the same. (2) Before the mind of the martyr was the vision of a world-wide religion, and this was in sharp contrast with the narrow and passing character of Judaism. Before his mind, also, was the true, the necessary, issue of the Mosaic teaching — viz., Christ and the wide reach and sacred sovereignty of the Catholic Church. The dignity of the speech was, of course, enhanced by the danger of the speaker; but in it, on the points of the argument, every syllable told. The subjects he handled needed all his vigour, as centuries have conclusively proved. They are just those subjects of the deepest importance which concern and interest us still — the character, office, and claim of the Church of our Master. (3) Stephen's elucidation of the meaning of Jewish history and worship was the fulfilling in word of the duty performed so nobly in his life, and so heroically in his death. In this he is to the humblest of us a splendid and real example. The beginning, middle, and end of that duty now as then, is — Jesus Christ. To be faithful to Him, in each of us, is to make sense of fact and of history. He gave a reasonable explanation to accepted facts. An everlasting Judaism, with all the rest of men excluded, would have been a senseless solution of the history of the Jewish Church. That Church was like a broken clue unless it eventuated in Catholic Christianity; Moses and his teaching would have been an insoluble problem unless worked out in Jesus Christ. The power of this first argumentative statement of these important truths was in the fact that it made Jewish history hang together; its astonishing dignity lay in this, that it was the first. III. THE FORCE BEHIND HIM AND ITS EFFECT. 1. No mental vigour on such a desperate crisis would have availed to any purpose unless it had been seconded by intrepidity of spirit. And this courage of St. Stephen was no physical excitement nor vulgar audacity. He was essaying the rugged and difficult track of Christian martyrdom on which many indeed have travelled after him, but none had passed before. And here be it not forgotten that we are scarcely conscious how strongly we are swayed by the voiceless testimony of those who have gone before. If public opinion is a mighty power in life, stronger at times is the public opinion of the dead. To feel behind him a long array of public witnesses, of tim achievements of brave generals and successful politicians, is for a soldier or a statesman to be confident in the inspiring genius of a great people. Noble ancestors help to noble deeds. And even in daily life, for some one else to have first succeeded, is to ourselves at least half the powerful element in our own success. Stephen, however, knew no merely human example; struggling for a cause, new, untried, and deemed altogether contemptible, he "possessed his soul" with a heroic patience, and bore his part with literally unexampled courage. Christian, do you flinch from the duty placed upon you? Think — around you is a "cloud of witnesses"; behind you the long array of the greatness and the suffering of the Christian Church. I pause in passing to remind you that as it is easy to follow a multitude to do evil, so it is not altogether difficult to go on the side of goodness if it chance to acquire the patronage of the majority. But the real test of principle, the real exhibition of Christian courage is, when standing alone, perhaps the object of scoffs and taunts, you sternly take the path of duty and witness to Jesus Christ. 2. "Sternly," did I say? — that brings me to another feature in the martyr's character: its extraordinary wealth of tenderness. Tenderness in a Christian comes first — we cannot doubt it — from his sense of human weakness and human need. The scene at the death of St. Stephen reminds us of that at the death of Christ. And both are the outcome of the deepest tenderness; no mere softness of a natural kindliness, or a natural shrinking from others' pain, but the true tenderness of a soul awakened to the depth of man's sorrows, and the greatness of his destiny. 3. Do you ask the secret of such a combination of tenderness and courage in any tempted man? There is one answer: An unshaken, a deep, a supernatural union with Jesus Christ. He first, in the fullest sense, obeyed the precept, or realised the prediction — "Ye shall be witnesses unto Me." 4. Thus came the end. There are times when, from the spiritual blindness or the profound prejudice of an audience, the possibility of persuasion is gone. In such cases one duty remains to an honest man, the duty at all hazards of a faithful testimony. Such was the case with Stephen. All else tried in vain, this at last was left. It was the inspiration of such a duty that prompted his daring peroration. Obstinate resistance to Divine remonstrances had been their national, their historic danger; if persisted in, it was sure to be their ruin. At least they should be warned. "Ye stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears," etc. Hell was opened upon the souls of the judges, but heaven was, not merely on the face, but in the heart and on the lips of the criminal. Not to bow before Divine revelation is to join the ranks of the rebel angels. The judges had chosen sides; so had the martyr! IV. THE ISSUES OF HIS MARTYRDOM. A great life, even though it seems to end in failure, must have great consequences. Stephen was a pioneer in suffering and in the spread of truth. The immediate consequence was "an open door" to a wider world than the Church could act upon in Jerusalem, because there the door seemed closed. Stephen was the first to clear men's minds, in some measure, of the mistaken dream that Christianity must pass through Judaism. And further, the impression made by his courage and his constancy could not have failed to be deep and lasting on many minds. On one we know it was. Saul had heard words that longed in his mind and rankled in his memory; had seen a vision that he could not forget, a first faint outline, surely, of that face which afterwards he saw in completed dignity amid the noonday glory of the Damascus road. We know that, to the end of his days, in deep penitence, in touching humility, in most loving sorrow, the intense and tender nature of the great apostle was penetrated by the sad memory of the death of Stephen. The revelation of the richer details of results is reserved for "that day when the secrets of all hearts shall be revealed." V. LESSONS. 1. The soul must be true to itself. There may be a disloyalty to self, which is rather a spiritual suicide than a spiritual treason. "Every soul seeking God faithfully is led by Him who is the Guide to truth. To be faithless to the voice that warns and teaches is so far forth to mar in us the image of the Eternal, and to paralyse spiritual power. 2. In the world of revealed faith all power of witness depends upon conviction. To act upon conviction is to work your lever from a fulcrum which affords scope to move a world. Conviction is the fruit of a temperate, a true, a prayerful life. Doubt is no basis of action. Do not trifle with your faith; hold prayerfully what you know; and pray, when there is any dimness, for the clearer light which is never withheld from those who earnestly seek it. 3. Act with courage upon conviction, and act with charity. The Christian needs unflinching firmness, with unflagging love. Whence come such powers so needed and so majestic? The answer is, from Christ. 4. Begin at once; begin now. None are too young to witness to Jesus. The young creature whose soul was battered out of the shattered body on that morning of martyrdom, might have pleaded youth as a reason for reserve. He did not. How noble, how beautiful, is a young life given to Christ! 5. When all possible struggle is over we may witness to Jesus by the calmness of a loving resignation. (Canon Knox-Little.) Parallel Verses KJV: And all that sat in the council, looking stedfastly on him, saw his face as it had been the face of an angel. |
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