Faith, Not Belief: 5th Sunday of Eastertide

Part 4 of Eastertide 2008


1st Peter 2:2-10; Acts 7:55-60; Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16; John 14:1-14


Most Sunday morning Christians will likely hear the story of the martyred Stephen’s enraptured vision of Jesus waiting to receive his spirit, and how – like Jesus – St. Stephen prayed that this sin not he held against his persecutors. They will associate that story with Jesus’s final discourse in the Gospel of John, in which he at last reveals to his disciples who he really is – i.e., the Son of God, who has gone ahead to prepare a place for us. The message is clear: Faith as belief saves us from death. The continuing sermon from the writer of 1st Peter assures the faithful that they are “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people . . . called . . . out of darkness into his marvelous light.”

But when the entire story of St. Stephen is read, especially the speech he reportedly made (ignored by The Elves), which enraged “the Jews” to such an extent that stoning was the only logical response, we find what amounts to a spiritual assault on the Jewish religion.
Acts is not history remembered. Nevertheless, it has traditionally been treated as though it were. The problem is that the story of Stephen’s arrest claims that the members of the synagogue of the Freedmen “secretly instigated some men to say, ‘We have heard him speak blasphemous words against Moses and God.’ . . . [and] They set up false witnesses. . . .” However, careful reading reveals that there was no need for false witnesses to prove their point.
For hundreds of words, the writer of Luke-Acts puts into the mouth of the character Stephen his version of the story of the Hebrew people from Abraham through Joseph and Moses. Time after time the writer (novelist?) changes the details so that the Hebrew people are portrayed as unwilling to follow God’s law and as routinely killing the prophets. “[T]his, despite the fact that in the Old Testament . . . there is hardly a single prophet that the Jews can demonstrably be said to have killed, not even Moses. But where accusations go, history is no arbiter of truth.” James the Brother of Jesus, Robert Eisenman (Penguin Books 1998) p. 442.

In Acts 7:17-19, Stephen says that the Egyptian king “forced our ancestors to abandon their infants so that they would die.” Actually, according to Exodus 1:15-21, the king of Egypt ordered the Hebrew midwives to kill all the Hebrew boy babies as soon as they were born, but the midwives “feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them.” As a consequence, “God dealt well with the midwives; and the people multiplied and became very strong.” Further, Stephen claims that Moses was abandoned by his mother (Acts 7:19). Every Christian Sunday School child knows that Moses’ mother was afraid that he would be murdered by the Egyptians, so when he got too big to be hidden, she built him a little boat out of reeds covered with mud, and set it afloat. His sister kept a close watch. By the grace of God, he was found by one of Pharoah’s daughters, who adopted him, thereby allowing him to become the leader and liberator of the Exodus story – one of the most powerful of the foundational sacred stories of world spirituality. See Exodus 2:2-10. The writer of Luke-Acts does his best to discredit the Jewish people, claiming that they rejected Moses, and have no authority over the Temple because “the Most High does not dwell in houses made with human hands.” With this comment, he indicts Solomon – second only to King David in greatness –who had built the house of God, and by implication David himself, who suggested the idea in the first place.

By the time Stephen gets to his climax (which the Elves have also conveniently neglected to include in the readings), it is hard to imagine not picking up the nearest rock and joining the melee. “You stiff-necked people,” he roars, “uncircumcised in heart and ears, you are forever opposing the Holy Spirit, just as your ancestors used to do. . . . you are the ones that received the law as ordained by angels, and yet you have not kept it.” The members of the synagogue of the Freedmen had been treated to a diatribe full of insult and false interpretation of sacred story. This was not some kind of unprovoked assault; St. Stephen the Martyr had it coming.

These readings from Acts, John, and 1st Peter must not be taken out of the context of the late 1st and early-to-mid 2nd Century, C.E. The Temple – where the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus lived, had been destroyed; the Holy City Jerusalem had been sacked; the people of Judea, whether of the Jewish or other spiritual systems, were scattered. The Jewish religion was busy reorganizing itself into synagogues in diaspora rather than focusing on Temple worship. The Christian variation of Judaism was very busy defining itself as not Jewish, based on sketchy memory and unreliable oral tradition about what Jesus actually said and did, interpreted 20 or so years after the death of Jesus by Paul, in the midst of political battles over authenticity. What eventually emerged from this cauldron may or may not be useful to post-modern, 21st Century Christianity.

What is definitely not useful is romanticized piety about persecution, or political accommodation with injustice. Stephen is the poster child for the former; 1st Peter’s letter for the latter. That writer’s metaphor about “living stones” to be “built into a spiritual house” is at least bad taste, if not outrageous, when paired with the highly suspect myth of the stoning of Stephen.

The reading from John Chapter 14 is one of the most beloved of the entire canon. “Let not your heart be troubled. Believe in God, believe in me. In my Father’s house are many dwelling places . . .” These words have been solace for the living and the dying for two thousand years, especially when combined with the “faith” demonstrated by Stephen the Martyr. Jesus is God, and all who believe that he rose from the dead will go to heaven. In addition, one of the most magical phrases in Christendom is found in verses 13 and 14: “I will do whatever you ask in my name so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.” The spell often seems to work: Parking places materialize; cars stuck in snowbanks are freed; miraculous cures happen against all medical odds. But it is a capricious God that saves some but not others, blesses some but not others, answers some prayers, but not all. So many believers are left wondering where God is, why God does not answer prayer, even prayer in Jesus’s name. But the laws of physics cannot be disregarded or overturned. Believers who want miracles that circumvent the physical laws of the Universe will find this interpretation disappointing and frightening.

So shall we throw out the entire set of readings? To paraphrase the Apostle Paul, by no means. Jesus’s last teaching to his disciples is not about Jesus’s physical return in an apocalyptic parousia. Instead, John’s Jesus empowers his disciples to continue the work in his name. Jesus says he is going ahead into death to prepare a place for his followers. If they believe him, and trust his words, they will have the same powers he did in this present life. The place that is prepared, to which Jesus said he was going, is not a physical heaven above a triple-decker Universe. Instead, it is a mystery, into which Jesus asks that we have the courage to follow him. Those powers that are ours if we trust his word are neither magical, nor metaphorical. Instead, these powers are those of the profound balance of the natural world. The lilies of the field are clothed; the birds of the air are fed. Followers of Jesus’s Way, who trust the vision that Jesus taught, live in Covenant with creation, not in opposition to it. When we live in alignment with God’s incredible kingdom, we experience inclusive, distributive, justice-compassion, and find peace, regardless of the circumstances. Thus, in partnership with Jesus’s spirit, the Holy Spirit of God/dess, followers of Jesus’s way have the courage and the strength to continue the ongoing great work of justice-compassion here and now.