Few people in Britain know that Boxing Day is kept by the Christian churches as the feast of St Stephen, the first Christian martyr. But if they do know, it is not because they have a great familiarity with the church calendar. Many today do not even know, after all, what Christians commemorate at Easter, let alone on a day mainly set aside for turkey sandwiches and visits to the sales. Yet while the other two festivals within the Christmas octave, St John and the Holy Innocents, are hardly known at all, St Stephen’s day does still have a vague presence in popular thought because of John Mason Neale’s hymn or carol, published in 1835 and still a favourite, ‘Good King Wenceslas’. According to the legend versified by Neale, ‘Wenceslas’ (Vaclav the Good, duke of Bohemia in the tenth century) ‘looked out’ at the snowy scene in which a poor man was gathering winter fuel ‘on the feast of Stephen’. The story commemorated in the carol is so much better known than the account of Stephen’s martyrdom in Acts 7:54-60 that 26 December seems more a celebration of St Wenceslas than of St Stephen. The meaning of the day is taken to be that of the carol’s last lines:
Therefore, Christian men, be sure,
wealth or rank possessing:
ye who now do bless the poor
shall yourselves find blessing.
This is, of course, in no way a bad or wrong-headed message. It is one of the traditional themes of Christmastide, when we remember, as St Paul put it, that ‘you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich’ (2 Corinthians 8:9).
St Paul is here speaking primarily of the metaphorical ‘riches’ Christ had as God, and the equally metaphorical ‘poverty’ involved in his becoming incarnate in our world. But he immediately links this with God’s concern for the literally poor – the passage from which these words are taken is concerned with Paul’s collection for poor Christians in Jerusalem – and there are many exhortations in the Old Testament for those with enough to remember poor people and to share their goods with them.
Many believe that Jesus was also poor in a literal sense, though the Gospels are unclear about that: Mark, for example, seems to indicate that he had a house in Capernaum, and a carpenter wouldn’t have been on the bread line. But still, if what we take away from singing the carol is the importance of ‘sharing our food with the hungry’ (Isaiah 58:7), no one, least of all in a country where there is increasing dependence on food banks, should regard that as anything but a good outcome.
This is not, however, the original, or perhaps the deepest message of ‘the feast of Stephen’. Stephen’s martyrdom did not result from his care for the poor, but from the way he witnessed to the faith by insisting on something that was, and is, much more controversial: what is now often referred to as ‘speaking truth to power’.
Stephen is presented in the account in Acts as the first exemplar of the imitation of Christ, and this not only in his suffering, and his prayer that God might forgive his executioners, but also in preaching a message that challenged the religious authorities. We do not know exactly why Jesus himself was arrested and convicted, but we may be sure, in his case too, that it was not because he taught that people should be kind to the poor. That was a teaching wholly uncontroversial within first century Judaism. The unwelcome challenge he presented lay more in the contentious claim that God had repudiated the Temple in Jerusalem, and with it the authorities who had, in the words of Jesus, ‘made it a den of robbers’ (Luke 19:45-6). Anti-Temple rhetoric seems likely to have been what offended the Jewish leaders enough to get Jesus indicted on a false charge of treason against Rome, framed in such a way that the Roman governor could hardly fail to act on it. A similar attack on the Temple seems to have been the reason for Stephen’s execution (Acts 7:47-50). In the accounts we have, in the two-volume work we know as Luke and Acts, Jesus and Stephen are both clearly described as denouncing the Temple, and it seems to be implied that that was at least one major factor leading to their condemnation.
Whether that is the whole story, historically speaking, we can’t be sure, but it is certainly how the biblical writers appear to have seen the matter. Stephen’s long speech to the Sanhedrin (Acts 7:2-53) retells the history of Israel so as to bring out the repeated pattern of national sin, much as the prophets had done (see for example Amos 4:6-12, or Ezekiel 20:5-31). Its climax is his attack on the Temple as a fatal attempt to domesticate God, as though God could literally dwell in a shrine made by human hands. This final jibe is what his hearers cannot stand. Stephen’s message is not, simply and uncontroversially, ‘be kind to those in need’, important as that is. Rather, it throws down a challenge of a sharply political kind to the existing order of the day. Stephen is not simply a kindly forerunner of Vaclav the Good, as conceived by the legend underlying Neale’s carol. He is more like John the Baptist, as we encounter him in our Advent readings.
There is one feature of the commemoration of St Stephen that is obvious, although, from a historical point of view, it may also be accidental. We celebrate his martyrdom on the very next day after Christmas Day – suddenly wrenching our eyes away from the peaceful scene in Bethlehem to contemplate, incongruously, a man being stoned to death. Christian writers, however, have seen in this weird juxtaposition a deliberate paradox pointing to much that is distinctive about Christian belief. An ancient Matins responsory, still used in the modern Liturgy of the Hours, sets it out very simply and profoundly:
Yesterday the Lord was born on earth, that Stephen might be born in heaven; he entered into the world, that Stephen might enter the heavens.
Stephen’s martyrdom does not negate the joy of the Nativity, but is in some mysterious way a confirmation of it. The point is developed in a sermon for St Stephen’s day by Fulgentius of Ruspe, a contemporary of St Augustine in North Africa, which is also used in the modern Office of Readings: ‘The love that brought Christ from heaven to earth raised Stephen from earth to heaven; shown first in the King, it later shone forth in his soldier.’ The symmetry strikes such writers only because of this accidental placement, which sets the celebration of the church’s first martyr immediately next to the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ. The ideas this suggests to them, however, are general truths of the Christian faith, with its odd belief in human life with God as an indissoluble blend of suffering and glory so puzzling to many sceptical observers.
The paradox here is expounded effectively by T. S. Eliot, in the Christmas sermon he puts into the mouth of Thomas Becket in Murder in the Cathedral:
Not only do we at the feast of Christmas celebrate [in the Eucharist] at once Our Lord’s Birth and His Death: but on the next day we celebrate the martyrdom of His first martyr, the blessed Stephen. Is it an accident, do you think, that the day of the first martyr follows
immediately the day of the Birth of Christ? By no means. Just as we rejoice and mourn at once, in the Birth and in the Passion of Our Lord; so also, in a smaller figure, we both rejoice and mourn in the death of martyrs. We mourn, for the sins of the world that has martyred them; we rejoice, that another soul is numbered among the Saints in Heaven, for the glory of God and for the salvation of men. Beloved, we do not think of a martyr simply as a good Christian who has been killed because he is a Christian: for that would be solely to mourn. We do not think of him simply as a good Christian who has been elevated to the company of the Saints: for that would be simply to rejoice: and neither our mourning nor our rejoicing is as the world’s is.
The gospel Christians proclaim does certainly entail some such interplay of joy and sorrow, whether Eliot — always inclined to highlight the sorrow! — got the balance completely right or not. The juxtaposition of Christmas Day and the Feast of Stephen, whether deliberate or not, says something about this theme, this complication of mere seasonal cheerfulness through the acknowledgement of the sufferings not only of Christ, but also of the world he came to save. But it points, too, to the opposite (but not equal and opposite) insistence that these sufferings will be mysteriously transformed by joy. As we recall at Easter, Christ’s wounds remain in his risen body, but that body is much more than merely a resuscitated version of the one that was crucified, because in him everything is made new. With due respect to Eliot, the joy outweighs the sorrow.
The arrangement of the church’s year may often strike us as rather shambolic, because it grew rather than being planned. The Christmas octave, surely, despite a few rationalisations in the light of Vatican II, could still do with a bit of tidying up. But in so strangely placing the celebration of St Stephen on 26 December it gives us the opportunity to reflect on some central truths of our faith. The placement may be fortuitous, but it is also fortunate.
John Barton, an Anglican priest, is Emeritus Oriel & Laing Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture in the University of Oxford, and a Senior Research Fellow of Campion Hall. His most recent book is The Word: On the Translation of the Bible (Allen Lane/Penguin). A version of this article appears on the Catholic Herald
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