Playing Jesus' Tune

Playing Jesus' Tune--November 20, 2018

"When they heard these things, they became enraged and ground their teeth at Stephen. But filled with the Holy Spirit, he gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. 'Look,' he said, 'I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!' But they covered their ears, and with a loud shout all rushed together against him. Then they dragged him out of the city and began to stone him; and the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul. While they were stoning Stephen, he prayed, 'Lord Jesus, receive my Spirit.' Then he knelt down and cried out in a loud voice, 'Lord, do not hold this sin against them.' When he had said this, he died." [Acts 7:54-60]

If God's kind of victory looks like a cross for Jesus, then it shouldn't surprise us that God's kind of victory looks like this for Jesus' followers.  We are playing the same song--the tune Jesus taught us--each on our own instruments, but it is the same melody.

Let me take that a step further: Jesus' death on a cross isn't just one more in a line of countless rushed Roman executions.  There were innumerable crucifixions carried out under the authority of the Empire, after all, and yet Christians are convinced that there is something unique and powerful about the death of their particular homeless, penniless rabbi, Jesus.  For one, Jesus did not meet death fearfully bargaining, cursing his God or his executioners in a fit of rage, or despairing and despondent.  He died, Luke told us (see Luke 23), at complete peace with God, praying from the psalms, "Into your hands I commend my spirit," and calling on God to forgive those who were holding the hammer that had put nails in his hands.  Jesus' victory begins there--before we even get to Easter glory--because Jesus would not be broken by Empire. He would not give into the violence, hatred, and fear that Rome and all the other powers of history have used to get their way.  And this is his victory. Jesus would not lash out to kill his enemies, and he refused to give himself over to their tactics.  Before we even get to the stone rolled away on Sunday morning, Rome's power has been exposed as smoke and mirrors, and the power of death itself is already hamstrung, simply by virtue of Jesus' complete and utter faithfulness to the way of God rather than to the way of Rome, of self-centeredness, of fear, and of power.  

And then second of all, of course, the New Testament would have us believe that Jesus' cannot be held in even by the grave.  Resurrection breaks out, and Jesus rises beyond the power of Roman centurions, and even beyond the grip of death itself.  The cross is a double victory, then, both because of how Jesus remains faithful to the way of God even all the way to death, and how Jesus rises from death after the cross.

So if that is true for Jesus, then here is something wonderful and awesome: the followers of Jesus share in that same victory.  That's how Luke--the same guy who wrote the Gospel we call by his name--wants us to understand the stoning and death of Stephen (no relation).  Luke wants us to see that when an angry mob got stirred up to kill this early servant-leader in the church, Jesus' kind of victory was visible again.  Stephen has learned to die victoriously, and he has learned it from Jesus himself.  He has learned to sing the same tune Jesus sang, to play the same melody with his own life.

Look at the last words on Stephen's lips here as Luke gives us the story.  He is echoing Jesus!  "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit," he asks, seeing the risen Jesus while the angry crowd roars to drown out a message it cannot comprehend.  "Lord, do not no hold this sin against them," he prays, seeking forgiveness for the lynch-mob that has encircled him.  Where do you suppose Stephen gets these ideas from?  Who taught him this kind of response to this kind of hatred, this kind of ignorance that yells louder so it doesn't have to listen to what it doesn't agree with?  Where of course, but Jesus?  Stephen's death--the first time someone died for faith in Jesus, according to Luke's storytelling--is a witness that the early church got it.  The first followers of Jesus understood that Jesus' kind of victory isn't won by overpowering an enemy with bigger guns and more ammo, or more centurions and spears--it is won by suffering love that will not bend to the power of hatred, of fear, or of death.  Stephen dies pointing to and echoing the tune, so to speak, of Jesus.

And that means evil's defeat continued into the community of Jesus' followers--it couldn't corrupt Jesus, and it couldn't corrupt his disciples into returning evil for evil.  Much like Kipling describes in his poem "If," Jesus and his community "being lied about, don't deal in lies...or being hated, don't give way to hating." The powers of death, hatred, and evil couldn't get Stephen to go to his death cursing the ones hurling rocks at him, and in that, Stephen participated again in Jesus' victory.  And that wasn't all--as Luke subtly notes, there was a young man named Saul watching all of this unfolding, holding the coats for the rock-throwers, nodding approvingly as they killed Stephen.  But we know this Saul better by his Greek name: Paul.  This same young man would be transformed before long (it takes another chapter of the book of Acts) to become a follower of the same Jesus, and Paul/Saul brought a message to the world that declared God in Christ loved his enemies and died for their forgiveness in order to save them.  The angry mob intended to silence this Jesus and his movement when they stoned Stephen to death, but in fact, they only gave it more power to witness authentically to the love that lays down its life even for the enemy in order to save them.  Jesus' strange kind of victory strikes again, even for the young man named Saul holding the coats at a stoning.

If you are looking for some scene in the Bible where Stephen gets to come back from the dead and get revenge on his killers in a final act of "victory" over them, I'm sorry.  That never happens.  That is not how Jesus' kind of victory works, and that is not the kind of victory his followers seek after. Jesus' kind of victory reconciles enemies, forgives sins, and gives up on attempts at revenge or "saving face."  Jesus' kind of victory is bigger than all of that, and he calls us to be bigger than that as well.

So for us on this day, sharing in Jesus' kind of victory will mean looking like Jesus--the way he lays down his life forgiving his enemies, the way he asks for God's mercy on his persecutors, the way he can confidently commend his life into God's hands, the way he is at total peace with the way of God.  And we have to know now, in advance, that the world will look at that and will not recognize it as victory. The world will see it and think it has won, just like the angry mob thought it had won over Stephen when the last rock was thrown, and just like the Respectable Religious Leaders and the Romans thought they had won when they nailed Jesus to a cross. They did not understand--how could they?--that they had actually sown the very seeds of God's kind of victory, a victory so large and wide and deep that it even swept up the very enemies of God in its embrace.  They did not realize that their attempts to stamp out the movement of Jesus actually scattered seed into the whole world to make the Kingdom grow.  They did not understand that Jesus' victory comes through giving yourself away.

But we are invited to see that, to understand it, and to stake our lives on it.  

Today, let us share in Jesus' kind of victory--not giving into the hatred, the lies, the violence, the bitterness, and the greed of the world's way of doing things.

Today, let us surrender our old need for getting even or looking tough, and discover the great power that lies in refusing to sing the world's song, but rather playing Jesus' melody in our own key.

Today, let us look for ways to embody a love so big and wide that it defeats enemies by embracing them and transforming them into friends.

This is Jesus' victory song.  It is our tune today, too.

Lord Jesus, let us reflect your kind of victory in the ways we lay down our lives today, too.