Christmas 2024: St Stephen’s Day

Most people call the day after Christmas, Boxing Day. The only time they get a hint it has another name is the Christmas carol God King Wenceslas.

The first lines of the carol mention the Feast of Stephen or St Stephen’s Day

Good King Wenceslas looked out,
on the Feast of Stephen,
When the snow lay round about,
deep and crisp and even;

St Stephen was chosen as a deacon to serve the non-Jewish Christian widows and was described as a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit in Acts 6:

Acts 6 v 5

They chose Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit.

However. Stephen soon upset the Synagogue of the Freedmen from Cyrene, Alexandria, and those from the provinces of Cilicia and Asia (Turkey). This synagogue was likely Jews who had been slaves in the distant parts of the Roman Empire and then became free. They had returned to Jerusalem and met at a particular synagogue.

They argued with Stephen and lost. So they lied about how he had blasphemed against Moses.

Stephen was arrested and brought before the Sanhedrin. This was an assembly who would rule on the Jewish customs. The Romans gave the court some powers of punishment.

False witnesses were brought to condemn him, but Stephen gave an apologetic speech. He ended it by criticising the elders, and saying that he saw a vision of Jesus Christ standing at the right hand of God.

At this comment, they dragged Stephen outside the city walls and stoned him until he was dead.

He was the first church martyr.

The common view is that a martyr is someone who suffers persecution and death for their beliefs. Though the word martyr was originally a legal term and meant a ‘witness’.

So an alternative way of looking at this, is it’s someone who is persecuted and killed for being a witness to a belief.

Martyrdom became a common feature of Judean culture during the Maccabean revolt, around the 2nd Century BC. This is where the Seleucid Empire persecuted the Jewish people who carried out their religious and cultural practices.

This continued into the early Christian Age, but this time it was the Pharisee Jews persecuting the Christians, both Jewish and Greek converts.

Soon Rome began persecuting the Christians, but for different reasons. The other Jewish groups had religious exemptions and didn’t need to pay the Empire’s taxes, nor were required to make sacrificial offerings to the Emperor cult.

The persecution went in waves, depending on the Emperor. Some emperors were more focussed on the Christians, while others had more pressing issues to deal with.

The persecutions by the Roman state ended around 4th Century AD.

As the first martyr, and having his feast the day after Christmas, it shows how a Christian should live their lives.

We should recognise the fallen nature through the feast of St Adam and St Eve. Accept Christ into our hearts on Christmas Day. And then go forth into the World as a witness for Him.