NOTES for Act 6:1-15

Today's reading describes the first problems in the Church's history, which, like all other problems in human relationships, were connected with human sinfulness. The passage concerns those whom the evangelist calls the “widows of the Hellenists” (v. 1). In the Synagogue and the earliest Christian Church, Hellenists were Jews from the Greek-speaking diaspora. There had always been a certain unspoken hierarchy in the Synagogue, in which the Jewish community of Judea and Jerusalem held first place, while those from the diaspora, especially the Greek-speaking diaspora, occupied a less honored position. It is unsurprising that this attitude eventually manifested itself at the Church's fraternal meals, provoking understandable indignation among the Hellenists: the Church was the last place they expected to encounter such discrimination. It should be noted that the corresponding Greek word does not mean “distribution of necessities,” as rendered in the Russian Synodal translation—it only began to be used in that sense in the Middle Ages—but simply “service.” This evidently referred to Church gatherings in the form of fraternal meals centered on the breaking of bread, a practice then widespread not only in the Church but also in Jewish religious brotherhoods. The apostles address the problem by proposing that the members of the earliest Christian community, already considerably increased in number, choose those who will lead their gatherings. For their part, they promise to lay hands on them and pray (vv. 2–3), which, according to the custom of the time, meant admitting these chosen ministers into the apostolic community (vv. 5–6). The purpose was to expand that community by including those who could take on the “service of tables,” so that the apostles themselves could continue to devote themselves to the “service of the word,” meaning preaching and witness (v. 4). Of course, the “service of tables” included more than administrative and practical matters; it also entailed spiritual and pastoral duties. Such a minister was to lead the community's gatherings and bless bread and wine at the breaking of bread, so responsibility for the community's spiritual life also rested with him. As a rule, however, no specifically missionary work was assigned to such a community leader, although the first ministers, called deacons in Greek, were often, like Stephen, no less capable as preachers than the apostles themselves (vv. 8–10). Thus the Church's growing numbers and the imperfection of fallen human nature give rise to ecclesiastical structure. Yet even in these circumstances, the earliest Christian Church, like the Church of the following two or three centuries, did not become an organization with a rigid hierarchy. It remained a movement of communities united above all by shared faith and spiritual life.

We see that as the number of people in the early Church grows (the community already numbered about 8,000 people), the "amount" of love per person, if love can even be measured, decreases. Some of the "nonlocal" widows were forgotten or overlooked in the distribution of food and other necessities of life. This does not mean that people stop loving and love disappears, but it does say that those who come in are bringing with them less love and more sin than is needed to maintain the community's overall level of "burning." Yes, every person is sinful, including the one who joins the Church. And each of us, when we came into the Church, brought our share of sin and our share of love. For we know only One who is alien to sin and brought into this world only love...

But none of this means that one should not go to Church, so that there will not be more sin in it. We come to the Church and to God in order to be freed from the darkness within us; each of us is a member of the Church, without whom it cannot be complete (see 1 Cor 12:14-22). And the Church needs each of us, just as Christ needs the love and acknowledgment of every person.

We are used to the fact that in the Church, as in voluntary organizations, everyone who is ready to take responsibility ends up responsible for everything at once. People run to priests with every kind of question. Most Christian leaders deal with all the problems that arise in communities. The responsible person is responsible for everything.

But the apostles frame the question in a completely different way. They know what the Lord has called them to do: to preach the Word of God. They understand that it is unrealistic for them to combine the ministry of the word with "administrative matters." Therefore they make a choice, and they choose what the Lord has called them to. At the same time, they do not ignore the problem. They simply say that people are needed to deal with this specific issue. The apostles pray for those whom the Church has chosen.

It is probably important for each of us to understand that there are tasks to which the Lord calls us and which we must do, and there are other tasks, also important and necessary, for which the Lord will choose someone else. The hardest thing is probably balance. Let us pray that the Lord gives us the wisdom not to do what He has not called us to do, and to do what He calls us to do, and of course not to demand from priests and leaders that they jump higher than their heads.

The growth of Jerusalem's Christian community evidently did not proceed without problems. The main problem was that maintaining the “one heart and one soul” with which the sacred writer describes the first Christians' life proved far from easy. This is why the problem arose with the widows of those the book's author calls “Hellenists.” Most likely, these were Jews of the diaspora, sometimes referred to by that word, although Gentile converts to Judaism cannot be ruled out. In any event, one thing is clear: some people in the community had come to be treated as second-class members, pushed into the background during the Church's worship.

It should be noted that the original text speaks not of some “distribution of necessities”—the Greek diakonia acquired that sense only several centuries later—but specifically of “daily service,” or “everyday service,” as the Greek expression can also be translated. This was the Church's service associated with the ritual meal and the breaking of bread. It was at these meals, apparently, that the Hellenists' widows began to feel relegated to the background. The author does not say exactly how this happened, but the fact remains.

The apostles understood the spiritual meaning of what was happening perfectly well: as the community grew, people had joined who were not yet ready for serious and fully developed spiritual work. They began paying too much attention to the outward characteristics of those entering the community, including their origins or the fact that they had not been born Jews but had become Jews through conversion to Judaism. None of this, of course, has any significance for spiritual life. Someone whose whole attention is directed to spiritual life and spiritual work simply does not notice such things, because they are of no importance to that person.

It is different for someone not seriously engaged in spiritual work. Such a person often substitutes religious life for spiritual life, and in religious life all the things listed above are, of course, important and carry considerable weight. Apparently, at some point in the earliest Jerusalem Christian community, the religious element, even if it had not begun to prevail over the spiritual, had at least become conspicuous enough to create entirely unnecessary tension in communal life. Something had to be done. The apostles understood that they could not undertake the “service of tables,” because the “word of God”—as the Torah was then called—occupied all their time. They therefore proposed that the community choose ministers, “deacons,” who would take on the “service of tables.”

Such a minister was first to organize the gathering and then lead it, becoming the presiding minister responsible for guiding the newly formed small community. Usually it was this “deacon” who performed the breaking of bread during the ritual meal. From then on, he was to ensure that nothing in his small community disturbed or destroyed its spiritual life. The apostles henceforth retained only the “service of the Word”: testimony to Christ and instruction of Christians in the Torah within the context of that testimony.

They admitted the newly chosen ministers into their own community by laying hands on them and praying for the Holy Spirit to descend upon them: that breath of God which makes a person capable of bearing ministry and doing God's work. Thus the apostles resolved a problem that might otherwise have caused a serious spiritual crisis in the community. The earliest Christian Church began to acquire the structure of a religious brotherhood traditional in those times, for the ministry of a presiding leader of a small community united by a ritual meal and the breaking of bread was a traditional brotherhood ministry of the period.

The community is growing, and everyday concerns are accumulating and becoming increasingly difficult to handle. Much in the journey of the New Testament Church resembles the journey of the Old Testament people: just as Moses, when he could no longer manage the burden, once appointed worthy people as his assistants, so now the apostles appoint ministers to deal with practical matters.

All would be well, except that the reason for introducing new ministries was not so much the organizational and household concerns themselves as the complaints of one group of believers about unfair treatment by another group of believers like them. The breach opened by Sapphira and Ananias widens; human hostility is brought into the community, and the first crack appears in the Church. It has not yet led to a schism: the conflict was resolved in time by a sensible distribution of duties. But the roots of the first conflict lie deeper. They are in our sins, which we not only forget to reject and cease to notice, but all too often and carelessly bring into the Church itself.

The account of the reprisal against Stephen begins immediately after the mention of his appointment to ministry, and the story of his witness lasts longer than the story of the ministry itself, so that we do not even know whether Stephen was given much time to work normally. But from what is said we can see that Stephen was a good worker, and it appears that what he did was enough for Christ's opponents to turn specifically against him.

It is impossible to refute Stephen; there is nothing to answer him on the merits, but they want to silence him by any means, and here lawlessness begins on the part of the accusers. In every unrighteous reprisal against Christ's disciples there is something reminiscent of the reprisal against the Teacher Himself: again the accusers stirred up the people and the elders and the scribes, again they produced false witnesses... But the Teacher had warned them in advance: "If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you..." (John 15:20).

The ingenuity of the accusers speaking on behalf of the Temple and the Sanhedrin was not particularly sophisticated. The charges against Stephen repeat those that probably these very same people had once brought against Jesus Himself. The same familiar method: seize on words clearly spoken allegorically and try to charge the speaker with an offense “against the people, the Temple, and the Torah.” In the religious law of the Second Temple period, a particular set of actions constituted an offense “against the people, the Temple, and the Torah.” It included everything connected with acts against the people, the Torah, and the Temple. Anyone, for example, who voluntarily sided with authorities causing any kind of harm to the people was considered an offender against the people.

Anyone who ventured publicly to advocate abandoning the Torah as the law by which the people lived, denied its authority, or publicly urged its violation would be an offender against the Torah. If the Savior's well-known words about destroying the Temple were understood literally rather than allegorically, He could readily have been accused of a sin against the Temple, and thus against the sanctuary. All such offenses were punishable by death. Knowing this, the enemies of both Stephen and Jesus Himself sought to bring the gravest possible charge against them to secure a death sentence.

The grounds were to be those very words about the Temple which Jesus, by His own account, could build in three days if someone destroyed it. The accusers focused on the form: “Destroy... and I will build.” With sufficient determination and an obviously accusatory bias in the judicial inquiry, the speaker could be accused of calling for the Temple's destruction. However, the charge was so plainly absurd that it failed in Jesus' case. The high priest then simply abandoned the formal charge, seized on other words of Jesus, and accused Him of blasphemy, which he no longer thought it necessary to prove through formal judicial proceedings.

Now they are trying to accuse Stephen of the same thing and on the same grounds as Jesus Himself. Stephen had probably repeated the Savior's words about the Temple's destruction more than once in his preaching, interpreting them as his Teacher did: as referring to His death on the cross and resurrection. To stop the preacher, someone among the Sanhedrin's people then suggested trying to do to him what they had failed to do to Jesus: charge him with an offense against the Temple and pursue that charge to its conclusion through precisely a formal judicial procedure.

If proven, an accusation of so serious an offense against one of the brotherhood's ministers, who was also an active preacher, would have dealt the Church a severe blow. It might even have provided grounds for formally banning the Church, which then existed in Judea as one of the many religious brotherhoods registered with the Sanhedrin. The stakes were high, and both Stephen himself and the whole Church faced a serious trial.

During the first three days after Christmas, we remember three different ways of confessing Christ and giving ourselves to Him. First we remember St. Stephen. He is the clearest example of how we should conduct ourselves if we are to be consistent in our choice and our trust in God. Stephen was one of those who were faithful in little, and therefore much was entrusted to him. He worked, preached, and bore witness to Christ through deeds and miracles. To work for Jesus, to take responsibility for what you do and for the people entrusted to you—this is the disciple's and brother's first and simplest path. Each person has a different measure of work along this path, and Stephen, a man who carried out his work to the end, who did not retreat a single step and gave his life for Jesus, is an example and helper to us all on this path.

On the first day after Christmas, the Church celebrates the feast of Saint Stephen, the first martyr. It is no accident that his feast is the first after Christmas. Stephen was the first to follow the path of Jesus all the way to the end—to death. It is the path of complete self-giving, of complete self-forgetfulness. And look at what happens when Stephen speaks of his vision. Those around him stop their ears. Surely this is not merely the pious desire of devout traditionalists to protect their ears from what they regard as blasphemy. They sense an unknown power in Stephen's words. Those words could change something in their hearts... and so they stop their ears and stop him—in the only way they know how.

For us, perhaps, it is important to reflect on our own response to a word addressed to us. Do we not sometimes feel a powerful urge to stop our ears?