Faith at “Stone-point”

It’s not a comforting thought, but what would you say if a terrorist held you at gunpoint and asked you, “Do you believe in Jesus Christ?” Would your “I do” be as firm as on your wedding day, now that “till death do us part” takes on real meaning?

On Wednesday, the Holy Father, Benedict XVI, commented on the first Christian who passed this test with flying colors: St. Stephen. He didn’t stop at “I do”; he gave us the entire seventh chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, a fantastic summary of Israel’s resistance against God in the Old Testament, which ends with Stephen’s conclusion: “You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you are forever opposing the Holy Spirit, just as your ancestors used to do. Which of the prophets did your ancestors not persecute? They killed those who foretold the coming of the Righteous One, and now you have become his betrayers and murderers.” Take that. 

Stoning, the punishment prescribed by Moses for blasphemy (Leviticus 24:16), is a painful, messy way to die. Yet, the fear of a brutal death didn’t stop Stephen any more than it stopped Peter from preaching, as we saw last week. It should be no surprise that the same courage came from the same source – “from his relationship with God, from his communion with God, from the meditation on the history of salvation, from seeing the action of God, which reaches its peak in Christ”: in a word, from prayer. 

His prayer allowed him to see an image of Christ in his martyrdom: “I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!” (Acts 7:56) echoes Christ’s affirmation to his inquisitors in Mt 26:64 (“From now on you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven”), and his two final phrases – “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit” and “Lord, do not hold this sin against them” – mirror Christ’s final petitions to the Father. 

It’s tempting to think that we are doing nothing in prayer, when in fact we are forming the heart of a hero, or rather allowing God to form our heart. It is this little “I do” in our daily prayer that preps us to say “I do” in the moment of decision, in whatever sacrifice Christ asks us to make.

By Colin Gore