Today we read how the Church overcomes another crisis situation. The problem is no small matter...
Today we read how the Church overcomes another crisis situation. The problem is no small matter: in a community where love for one another should be the principle of relationships, the neglected suddenly appear, and, as usually happens in the world, they turn out to be members of a "socially vulnerable minority": the widows of the "nonlocal" Hellenists, Jews who had come to Jerusalem from the diaspora and believed in Jesus.
So the weakest found themselves not at the center of everyone's attention and love, but the opposite. What matters for us now is not the indication of such a misfortune in the Church (the lack of love and indifference of Christians surprise no one today), but how it is resolved: Stephen appears on the scene, a deacon and martyr, full of the Holy Spirit, wisdom, faith, and power, along with the other six deacons, ready to restore peace and love in the community of the first disciples.
God, one way or another, acts through people who are open to the guidance of His Spirit. And for you and me, what matters most is to be exactly such people, people of the Spirit, wisdom, and faith, so that through us the Lord can lead toward perfection the world He created for His Glory.
6
6:9 There arose certain of the synagogue which is called - It was one and the same synagogue which consisted of these several nations. Saul of Cilicia was doubtless a member of it; whence it is not at all improbable, that Gamaliel presided over it.Libertines - So they were styled, whose fathers were once slaves, and afterward made free. This was the ease of many Jews who had been taken captive by the Romans.
6:14 We have heard him say - So they might. But yet the consequence they drew would not follow.
6:15 As the face of an angel - Covered with supernatural lustre.They reckoned his preaching of Jesus to be the Christ was destroying Moses and the law; and God bears witness to him, with the same glory as he did to Moses, when he gave the law by him.