Living and Dying Like Jesus--May 8, 2023

Living and Dying Like Jesus--May 8, 2023

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 7:59-60]

I hear people talk sometimes about their desire to pass away quietly in the night, or their desire to die doing their favorite things, or splurging with lots of extravagances they had never let themselves do before. And in the course of that daydreaming and/or imagining, the concluding line is often the same: "What a way to go..."

Luke turns that thinking on its head with the story of Stephen's death, a story many of us heard this past Sunday as our First Lesson--because this is Luke's "What a way to go" moment. He highlights for us the way that Stephen dies like Jesus, and Luke seems to hold that up as a blessed thing, even if it is not easy or pain-free. You might recall that the various Gospel writers each give different versions of Jesus' final words (thus raising the question of how helpful it really is to spend a lot of time talking about "the seven last words of Jesus," since no single writer gives us all of them and since each has his own point in mind in the storytelling). Matthew and Mark have those devastating words from Psalm 22, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?", John ends with the bit about his mother being taken in by a disciple, and then being thirsty, and then the final sounding word, "It is finished." And then there is Luke who gives us three different final sayings of Jesus, two of which are echoed in Stephen's death. Jesus says from the cross, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing," and then cries out "in a loud voice" as Luke points out, "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit." They are not the godforsaken words that Matthew and Mark lift up, and they are not the pregnant and mysterious words of John's gospel. They are life-giving words, trusting words, even—one can almost say—hopeful words. Luke sees Jesus' death as a supreme tragedy and horror, and yet also somehow blessed. And that is exactly how Luke gives us the story of Stephen's death, too—tragic, and yet somehow blessed.

Stephen's final words echo Jesus' final words—not, presumably, because he thinks he has to sound pious or copy Jesus, but because he has been enveloped in the same kind of peace and trust that gave Jesus the courage to die praying for forgiveness over his enemies. You get the sense that this is just what happens to people in whom Jesus is given free rein—we can't help but become Christlike. Now I'll be the first to admit that I'm hardly a good Christ to my neighbors for much of the time—and that we all have our moments when we do a shoddy job of encountering others with the love of Jesus. But Stephen's story gives me hope—that the more I am pulled into this life of faith, the more I am enfolded by the love of God which embraces and disarms "the enemy" and "the other," the more I will be formed into the likeness of Christ's love. I want to be the kind of person who can live and die like Stephen—which is to say, who can live and die like Jesus. I want to become the kind of person who can genuinely love neighbor and stranger and enemy, and who can so deeply trust the living Jesus that even death is like the letting go of a clenched fist or falling back into the hands of One who promises to catch me. I will admit that such trust is hard to come by—it is hard to let myself be overtaken by this deep love of God, because it is frightening and new and strange. But one of the implicit promises in the story of Stephen's death is that, without having to sit and force myself to sound artificially "religious" or to copy what I think I'm supposed to say to come across as a Christian, we who follow Jesus will be made into his likeness. We can be people who die well, and who live well, too—because we know we are held by the God whose love will not let us go. It can't have been easy to go through what Stephen went through, and I'm not sitting here writing today with a death wish or a self-destructive streak. We followers of Jesus are not supposed to seek out our own demise. 

But I've got to tell you—dying with a word of trust in the God who receives us and a word of love for our enemies—what a way to go...

Lord of our lives and our deaths and our promised resurrection, give us the trust that leads to hope, the hope today that leads to courage, and the courage that leads to love in action today.