Preached at Christ Church, Worton and Christ Church, Bulkington
Acts 7. 55-60; John 14. 1-14
“Lord, do not hold this sin against them.”
On a long flight this week, I watched an extraordinary film from Iran, called It Was Just an Accident. A veteran director named Jafar Panahi, who has been imprisoned for previous films, shot it on location in Iran without official permission. The story follows a former political prisoner working as a mechanic. One day, a customer brings in a car to be fixed, and the hero recognises him by his peg leg: it’s his old torturer.
Early 16th Century depiction of the stoning of Stephen, St Lawrence’s Church, Lohja, Finland. © Gerry Lynch, 23 July 2017.
He tracks the secret policeman down, kidnaps him, and takes him out into the desert ready to kill him, but can’t bring himself to do so because he isn’t entirely sure of his identity. Then follows a bizarre drive around Tehran, where the hero collects other former political prisoners to see if any can be entirely sure that the man who is now drugged in the back of his van was indeed their torturer. A very black comedy, the film succeeds partly because it refuses either to sanitise or to dehumanise the villain, who is a ruthless killer but also a loving husband and tender father. The heroes, in turn, must battle to preserve their humanity in the way their torturer has failed to guard his, as they face a choice between grace and revenge.
St Stephen faced a choice between grace and revenge. Just before today’s first reading, from the Acts of the Apostles, he had been dragged up before a religious court on trumped-up charges and defended himself in a sweeping speech which concluded by warning his hearers that they are the latest in a long line of Jerusalem Jews to resist the Holy Spirit, persecute God’s prophets, and fail to keep the Law they claim to revere.
This sends the crowd into a violent rage against Stephen, but as they are about to mob him, he sees a vision of Heaven opened, and “the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God”. Now, Christ is usually depicted as being seated at the right hand of the Father, so this is normally interpreted as standing as an advocate for Stephen, and maybe also standing to receive him.
Perhaps it was this vision of Christ’s presence with him that allowed Stephen to do what he did next: taken out and brutally lynched, his last words are, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” This is the standard of forgiveness by which we are called to live as Christians.It isn’t easy.I certainly don’t manage to live up to it all the time. But it is how God teaches us to act. Such forgiveness is what God is like.
How do we know what God is like? Today’s Gospel reading says that in Jesus we see God in human form – “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father”, Christ tells Philip. The creator of the universe is beyond our comprehension – “immortal, invisible … in light inaccessible hid from our eyes,” as we sang a moment ago. We share such a view of God with Judaism and Islam, and finds echoes in many of the great Eastern religions.
Yet Christianity also says something different. When we see Jesus, then we see the Father. We don’t see the whole of God and we can’t comprehend God in His entirety – of course not – but in Jesus we do truly see God, not a reflection of God or a divine spark or avatar, but God in all His fullness, made one of us.
Now, let’s ask: where is Jesus when He tells Philip that whoever has seen Him has seen the Father? This is part of the famous “Farewell Discourse”, the long speech that Jesus gave to His disciples in the Upper Room in His very final moments with them before being arrested on the night before He died. It was on the Cross the next day that Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
In forgiving His persecutors even in the face of death, Stephen reflected Christ’s willingness to forgive His murderers, which shows us God’s nature. It is God’s nature to forgive the unforgivable, even as it is being perpetrated. The Bible tells us so.
At the heart of the Christian faith is the truth that God gives us what we do not deserve. In that same final speech, Christ tells His closest followers that He is going to prepare a place for them, and will come again to take them to Himself. Even Peter, Philip, Thomas, and the rest of the apostles, aren’t saved by their own actions, but by those of Christ on the Cross. The Cross where Christ forgave His enemies; the Cross where John records His final words as “It is finished”; the Cross where, as the Church of England’s liturgy has said for five centuries, Christ made the “full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world”.
The forgiveness Christ both showed and won on the Cross was enough to overcome the sins of Paul who, still then known as Saul, skulked approvingly on the sidelines when Stephen was butchered, a characteristic move of this hard-hearted fanatic who persecuted the first Christians so cruelly. Yet Paul too was saved – saved by Christ, not by his own considerable efforts.
One of the hardest things for us to accept is that no sin is beyond the capacity of God to forgive. It is in this key that we need to read Christ’s statement that “No one comes to the Father except through me.”
It is not for us to know whether all people will ultimately be saved. Certainly without divine judgement, there can be no justice for all those billions whose lives in this world were marked by pitiless injustice. There are plenty of people whom I find it hard to imagine in heaven.
Yet any judgement which simply casts aside the souls of anyone who isn’t an explicitly professing Christian seems profoundly unjust. It is not just the harshness of this that seems alien to the character of Christ as revealed in Scripture, but its concern with outward forms over the reality of what is in the heart, and the way it reduces salvation to a mechanical process. When a group of Iranians, few if any of whom are Christian, make a film that celebrates forgiveness an “eye for an eye”, are they not revealing the Christ in whose image they are made, even if they do not know Him explicitly as Lord and Saviour? We cannot know how God’s judgement will fall, but we can recognise the shape of His image when we see it. It is only Christ who saves, but we are perhaps too keen to put limits on whom He saves and how.
And for our part, when we reject revenge in the name of Christ, surely we touch something deep in those around us, of all faiths and none, by revealing our humanity at its most divine, and so witness to the reality of our Faith.
That is something to practise in our own everyday lives. Most of us bear a number of grudges, some of them very intensely felt, some very destructive. It is the job of all of us to end them, if it lies within our power to do so. Never forget the warning that as we judge others, so we shall be judged ourselves.
Nobody said this was easy. But one thing to cling to is that our judge will be the same Jesus Christ who forgave those who doomed Him to such a cruel and unjust death.
Stephen saw the standing Christ and forgave; we have seen the risen Christ – now go and do likewise.
Now thanks be to God the Father, who has given us the victory through Our Lord Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
