NOTES for Act 6:8-15

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?

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.

Today's reading describes the first problems in the history of the Church, which, like all other problems in human relationships, were connected with human sinfulness. They concerned those whom the Evangelist calls 'the widows of the Hellenists' (v. 1). In the synagogue and in the early Christian Church, Jews from the Greek-speaking diaspora were called Hellenists. There had always been a certain unspoken hierarchy in the synagogue, in which first place was given to the Jewish community of Judea and Jerusalem, while those from the diaspora, especially the Greek-speaking diaspora, held a less honored position. It is hardly surprising that this attitude eventually manifested itself at the Church's fraternal meals as well, provoking understandable indignation among the 'Hellenists': the Church was the last place where they expected to encounter discrimination of this kind. It should be noted that the corresponding Greek word does not mean 'distribution of necessities,' as reflected in the Russian Synodal translation—it only began to be used in that sense in the Middle Ages—but simply 'service.' Evidently this referred to the Church's gatherings, which took the form of fraternal meals centered on the breaking of bread, a practice widespread at that time not only in the Church but also among Jewish religious brotherhoods.

The apostles resolve this problem by proposing that the members of the early Christian community, which had already grown considerably in number, elect people to lead their gatherings. They in turn 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 of this admission was to enlarge the apostolic community by including those who could take on the 'service of tables,' so that the apostles themselves could continue to devote themselves to the 'ministry of the word,' that is, preaching and witness (v. 4). Of course, the 'service of tables' included more than administrative and practical duties: it also entailed spiritual and pastoral responsibilities, since such a minister was to preside over community gatherings and bless the bread and wine at the breaking of bread. Responsibility for the community's spiritual life therefore rested on him as well. As a rule, however, no specifically missionary work was assigned to such a community leader, although the first ministers—the Greek name for them was deacons—were often, like Stephen, no less able 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 ecclesial structure. Yet even under these conditions, the early 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 a common faith and spiritual life.