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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadGreater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 605. The Deacon
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Stephen was such a martyr that we have almost forgotten that he was anything else. The blaze of glory in which his life closed hides from our vision the train of virtues that kindled it, and hundreds thrill with the story of his martyrdom who consider his long speech before the Council a tiresome repetition of Old Testament history. But this want of emphasis, as we might call it, or want of proportion, with which most of us treat the story of Stephen, is not due to the Scriptures themselves. For a time even though the Book in which the story lies is called the Acts of the Apostles, the Apostles disappear, and the whole crisis of which Stephen is the chief factor and which culminates in the conversion of Saul, and the opening of the world to the Church, and her mission to the Gentiles, is achieved without one of them being present. Stephen stands alone to our view. Even the deacons who have been ordained with him for this special service are withdrawn, and Stephen stands alone. It is comparable with only one other great loneliness in all Scripture: “I have trodden the winepress alone; and of the people there was no man with me.” “And they all left him and fled.” But you will remember what He said: “The cup that I drink ye shall drink; and with the baptism that I am baptized withal shall ye be baptized.” These words were first of all fulfilled in Stephen.
Now this loneliness of his is not due to any divergence or branching off of the current of the Church's life. There is, as we all know, a loneliness of the eddy-cut off from the main current and turning and returning upon itself, always by itself; but Stephen's loneliness was not of that kind. His ministry and his career were the channel down which the main current of the Church's life was carried swiftly to wider fields, when all the ordinary, recognized receptacles of that life were still holding their contents stagnant. Stephen is the central figure between Jesus and Paul. Let us illustrate with another metaphor. Let us think of a prism-that three-sided bar of glass on which, if you cast a pure undivided sunbeam or ray of light, it will, by passing through it, be broken up into its component parts and colours, beautiful, full of radiance of various sorts. Stephen was such a prism in the Church life. On the one side of him you have the pure clear unbroken peace of the Church's childhood, steadfast faith and pure joy, the unbroken peace of the early days of Christianity, all simple and white as can be, but yet unconscious of its true character; and on the other side of Stephen you have that same life, but broken, scattered and bleeding, yet bleeding so as to show its heart.