Stoning of St. Stephen, Giulio Romano
Life-Giving or
Death-Dealing
10 May 2020
Fifth Sunday of
Easter Year A
Parish Church of
Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)
God, give us hearts open to change and grow,
Ground us in You,
Our Rock and Unshakeable Refuge. Amen.
There is this a little detail in
today’s reading from Acts, the stoning of Stephen: the guy who held everybody’s cloaks so their
arms would be free to hurl those rocks was a young man named Saul. By so doing, the story says, he consented to
the murder.
When the world is divided, you have
to make a choice of whom you support. If
you support Stephen, you risk dying with him.
If the crowd, you share blame in the horror you turned a blind eye
to. Merely standing on the side means
you go with the oppressors. As the Rev.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote: “He
who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to
perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really
cooperating with it.”
Saul, who later will become such a
force for good in the story, is thus introduced in the narrative of Acts.
It’s easy to divide the world into “good
guys” and “bad guys,” especially when one group is hurting another. But confusing the struggle between good and
evil with group identity is wrong. Jesus
warns us over and over to not fall into this trap.
“Be wholly complete like God—who
impartially gives the blessing of rain and sunshine equally to the ‘righteous’
and the ‘wicked’” (Matt. 5:44, 48). “The
first will be last and the last first”… ‘good guys’ will be turn out to be bad,
and the ‘bad guys’ turn out good (Matt. 20:16). A pillar of righteous living goes to the Temple
to pray and so does a notorious sinner—the Pharisee and the Tax Collector—and
guess who goes home right with God? (Luke 18:9-14). “Forgive others as you would want to be forgiven.”
Then, on the cross, the line here quoted by Stephen: “Father, forgive them, for
they do not know what they are doing.”
The deep logic to Jesus’ stories and
words here is this: every single one of
us is a mixture of good and bad. We are
all God’s creatures. Labeling a person
or group as wholly “Good” or “Bad” only confuses matters.
The line between good and bad is not
between groups of people, but runs down the middle of each and every human
heart. So we need to help and pray
even for our enemies. “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are
doing.”
When asked, “who is my neighbor, to
whom do I owe love,” Jesus tells a story of righteous priest and Levite turning
a blind eye to human suffering, while a wicked, unclean heretic foreigner—the
Samaritan—stops and has compassion. In
this story, the religious ask “what will happen to me if I stop?” and keep
walking. But the Samaritan asks, “what
will happen to this poor man if I don’t stop and help.”
Today’s passage from 1 Peter quotes a
text from Isaiah that says where the difference between good and evil truly
lies:
“Look! I am placing a foundation stone in Jerusalem,a firm and tested stone, a precious cornerstone, safe to build on. Whoever trusts in it need never be shaken.I will test you with the measuring line of righteousnessand the plumb line of uprightness.”Since you have made your refuge out of lies,a hailstorm will knock it down.Since it is made of deception, a flood will sweep it away.” (Isaiah 28:15-17).
“Righteousness” and “uprightness”
are the standard God uses to test us:
these two words in Hebrew can be translated more concretely as “justice
or fairness” and “compassionate acts or almsgiving.” If we don’t have these, Isaiah says, we are
liars deceiving ourselves, on unstable ground.
Jesus was thinking about this very passage when he gave his parable of the house built on a rock and not on sand and when he gave Peter his name, meaning “Rock.”
1 Peter also quotes Psalm 118 here: “On this day the Lord has acted, I will rejoice and be glad in it!” “You turned death into life.” You took the stone the builders discarded as flawed and placed it as the capstone!”
Christians since the beginning have
used this Psalm to describe the resurrection of Jesus. It is a mainstay in our
Easter liturgies. The very fact that
Jesus’ case was so hopeless—dead and buried in a quarried tomb—is why Peter
uses this image of the stone rejected as a sign of victory over death, sin, and
suffering.
Peter adds a final passage to tell
us of this mystery of the heart, another oracle from Isaiah:
14The Holy One can be either a Hiding Place
or a Boulder blocking your way,
The Rock standing in the way of the willful …
A net preventing trespass…
15Many are going to run into that Rock
and get their bones broken,
Get tangled up in that net
and not get free of it.” (Isa 8:14-15)
Jesus, the living rock, can be our
foundation or our ruin. Grounded in Hum,
we are life-giving; apart from Him, death-dealing. It’s not in our group identity that the
difference lies. It is in whether we
cultivate fairness and justice, and practice compassion and acts of solidarity
with those in need. It is in whether we
seek our own benefit or work and pray for the blessing of others.
Do not be deceived or led astray by
tribal calls of good-us vs. evil-them.
Do justice, love compassion, walk humbly with God. Follow Jesus, and
your grounding is sure.
In the name of God,
Amen.
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