Today’s Scripture Readings

Gospel Reading

NRSV

Beware of them, for they will hand you over to councils and flog you in their synagogues; and you will be dragged before governors and kings because of me, as a testimony to them and the Gentiles. When they hand you over, do not worry about how you are to speak or what you are to say; for what you are to say will be given to you at that time; for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you. Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death; and you will be hated by all because of my name. But the one who endures to the end will be saved.

The Irish band, U2, once sang that “We hear it every Christmas time, but hope and history don’t rhyme, so what’s it worth? This Peace on Earth.”

The implication is that the peace of Christmas is really a fairytale when we consider the brutal realities of the world around us. What is it worth, really, to wish everyone peace and goodwill at Christmas, while all the while humanity tears itself apart through hatred, violence and greed?

There is no satisfactory answer to this question, no combination of words or logic that will resolve the paradox of suffering in a world that we proclaim to be the creation of a loving God. But the Feast of St Stephen, situated on the day after Christmas, suggests a pathway towards living with that paradox. For we celebrate the Protomartyr, the first Christian to die for the faith, immediately after the Nativity of Christ.

This stark juxtaposition tells us a fundamental, maybe frightening, truth about following Jesus: that doing so will inevitably put us in conflict with the structures of power that dominate our world. Indeed, his coming into the world revealed just how much our human systems, secular and religious, rely on violence to create order.

So, the gospel agrees: hope and history don’t rhyme. But the naked sincerity of Stephen’s freely offered forgiveness for his murderers shows that our hope is greater than history, because it is in forgiving one another that we participate in bringing Christ’s peace to our world. A fragile-seeming peace, indeed, since any of us can break it at any time by withholding forgiveness. But it is the only peace that can truly endure. Long after every false peace imposed by violence has been overthrown by some other violent power, forgiveness remains a possibility, a hope.