The Face of an Angel
The Face of an Angel
Acts 6
by William Klock
I hate doing administration stuff. I’m really glad that John handles our finances so well and makes sure all our bills get paid. I don’t like filling out annual parish reports and get annoyed when I have fill out one for ACNA and another for the REC. Why can’t they just ask the same questions and share the information? Our church register is stuffed with Post-It notes going back five or six years so I know what to enter in it whenever I eventually get around to sitting down to make all the entries for baptisms, deaths, weddings, membership, and all of that. And I wonder if Peter had his own First Century Post-It note system for dealing with the dreaded admin work that was perpetually threatening to cut in on his preaching and praying. Because that’s what we come to in Acts 6. The church has been growing quickly. There’s something like 5,000 Christians in Jerusalem. We don’t know how they were organised. We know that the apostles and presumable some others regularly spent time in the temple. But they met together in their homes. Were they divided into what we might think of as “churches” or “parishes” with an apostle or two overseeing each—or maybe each apostle overseeing two or three groups? We don’t know. But what we do know is that the twelve apostles were overseeing everything. They were preaching, they were teaching, they were praying, they were pastoring, they were making sure everyone’s needs were met. And it got to be too much, even for twelve of them. I get that. I have a friend who pastors a Baptist church of about 950. They figured out thirty years ago that they need one elder to every hundred people or so in order to pastor well. In Acts we’re talking at least 500 church members per apostle. People started falling through the cracks and complaining. Look at Acts 6. [Page 1086 in the pew Bibles.]
“Now, in those days when the disciples were increasing in number, the ‘Hellenists’ raised a dispute with the ‘Hebrews’ because their widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution of food.”
As we’ve seen in Chapters 2 and 4, these first Christians were very aware that they belonged to a new family and they lived accordingly. They were the beginnings of Gods new Israel. The Spirit had filled them with love for each other—the kind of love that torah had always envisioned for the people of Israel—and so they began to live it out. They fellowshipped with each other. They shared meals together as Jesus’ family and they shared with their brothers and sisters who were in need. They weren’t just overflowing with the love and mercy of Jesus; despite most of them having little, as a people they were overflowing with generosity and abundance.
And there were plenty who were truly in need. Widows would normally be looked after by their own family, but when people joined the church—just as in some parts of the world today—it meant being cut off from their families and the support they once had. The church suddenly found itself providing for a large number of widows. Maybe it was a language barrier or maybe it has something to do with social connections, but the Hellenists—the Greek-speaking widows—the ones who had come to Jerusalem from the great Jewish diaspora—they were falling through the cracks. It surely wasn’t deliberate. It was growing pains. The sheer scope of the church’s charity work had become too much for the twelve to handle efficiently. So the Greek-speaking members of the church take up their cause with the apostles. The fact that their fellow “Hellenist’ believers take up their cause with the apostles, suggests it was a language problem. Maybe these widows didn’t know how or when to ask for food or where to get it and there were simply so church members, that the apostles were no longer able to know the personal needs of everyone. Whatever the case, the apostles realise they have to do something. Luke goes on:
“So the twelve called the full number of disciples together. ‘Listen,’ they said, ‘It wouldn’t be right for us to leave the word of God to serve tables. So Brothers, choose seven men from amongst yourselves who are well spoken of and filled with the Spirit and wisdom. We will put them in charge of what needs to be done in this matter. We will continue to pay attention to prayer and to the ministry of the word.”
The apostles knew what their primary calling was. It was to study and to teach and to preach the word and to pray. Sure, they could do some other things. But when those other things became so big that it meant taking significant time away from their ministry of the word and their time in prayer, well, it was time for the church as a whole to pick up the slack. To sort of quote Paul: God gave some to be apostles and other to—well—to fill the other multitude of roles that need filling in the church. Some are eyes and ears and mouths, others are hands and feet and finger and toes. The body needs them all. And this was common sense. But it also—and I think Luke deliberately frames it this way—it had precedent in Israel’s own story. Think of Israel in the beginning, in the wilderness, just delivered from Egypt, and Moses trying to rule over a thousand and thousands of people and feeling totally overwhelmed. Luke wants us to see the fledgling church as the new Israel and so he shows us the apostles in the position of Moses. It’s time to choose some well-respected men from amongst the people to help. Verse 5: “The whole gathering was pleased with what they said. They chose Stephen, a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit, and Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, and Nicolaus (a proselyte from Antioch). They presented them before the apostles, and having prayed, they laid their hands on them.”
It’s worth noting: the seven names are Greek names. One of these men was even a proselyte, meaning he was a gentile who had converted to Judaism and was now a Christian. Presumably the seven were meant to serve the whole church, but the church chose seven men who were especially able to help with the problem at hand: the Greek-speaking widows. So the church elects these men, brings them before the apostles for their approval, prays for them, and then it’s the church that lays hands on them. Now, almost every English translation says that it was the apostles that laid hands on these seven, but the Greek text doesn’t really bear that out. It says they, the church, elected the men and brought them to the apostles and there’s absolutely nothing in the text that indicates a change of subject before Luke says that “they” laid hands on the men. The church—probably a representative few—laid hands on the seven, not the apostles.
And when we look at what was involved, it suggests even more that it was the church doing the laying on of hands. There are several words in Hebrew that, in English, all get sort of generically translated as “to lay hands”, but the Hebrew behind the idea here, has the sense of pressing down on something—as if you’re sharing or transferring something of yourself to another: your sins to a the scape goat, or the people of Irael “pressing down on” the Levites who will represent them and fill in for their firstborn sons, or Moses pressing his hands down on Joshua and making him his representative and successor. Remember, the whole point of this is that the apostles knew “serving tables” wasn’t their job. Their job was word and prayer. It was the job of the wider church to look after the welfare of each other and so it’s appropriate that the church not only elects these seven men, but also “ordains” them, if you will.
And what were the seven? Traditionally we’ve called them deacons. Deacon comes from the Greek word to serve—in this case to serve (διακονεῖν) tables, which is symbolic of making sure the widows get their charity. But otherwise, what we see these men doing doesn’t look all that much like what we see deacons doing later in the New Testament. In fact, when the apostles talk about “serving tables”, there’s a probably a word play there—“tables” is a banking or accounting term, not just a word for a literal table—that suggests that what these men were really doing was overseeing, administering the distribution of food and, more broadly, the resources of the church. And if that was the case, they look a lot more like bishops. I could be wrong, but what I would tentatively suggest, is that these seven men were the first men to be appointed to pastoral office in the church, before that role had split into bishops on the one hand and deacons on the other. I think these guys were, more or less, both proto-deacons and proto-bishops. And while their primary duty was to oversee the church’s charity, the church chose them because they were full of the Spirit. And in Acts, what that means is that they were bold and unafraid proclaimers of the good news about Jesus.
So, writes Luke in verse 7, because of the apostles could now be devoted to the word to prayer and because these seven men were now ordained to ensure the church was being what the church is supposed to be, “The word of God increased and the number of disciples in Jerusalem multiplied greatly. This included a large crowd of priests who became obedient to the faith.” Brothers and Sisters, when the church—the people and the leaders—are boldly proclaiming the word of God and are diligent in prayer, God will multiply it. We might miss it, but Luke makes the point: It’s not us. We don’t grow the church. It’s God. The power lies with him. We need to trust his word and we need to proclaim it. We need to pray and entrust our ministry to him. Not gimmicks, not money, not all the other things churches often do to try to make themselves effective. Just preach God’s word and pray. He’ll bring fruit from it. And be patient, because God works on his own schedule, not ours. And, we might miss it: Luke makes a point of telling us a significant new step in the church’s growth: now it’s attracted a crowd of priests. And that would not have gone unnoticed by the leaders of the temple. Luke doesn’t say anything here, but this means the Jewish leaders are getting more concerned, getting more angry, becoming more inclined to violent action.
But, first, Stephen’s story. Look at verse 8: “Stephen was filled with grace and power and performed great signs and wonders amongst the people. But some from the Freemen’s Synagogue, as it was named, and from Cyrene, Alexandria, Cilicia, and Asia stood up and disputed with Stephen. They could not, however resist the wisdom and the spirit with which he spoke.” Stephen preached in the gospel in the synagogues. And here’s the thing. Luke makes a point of saying that Stephen wasn’t just full of power; he was also full of grace. We’ve all heard people speak who are full of power, but are short on grace. They can be jerks. Maybe they’re right, but just the way they speak makes people angry. But that’s not Stephen. He’s speaking with great grace. But the folks listening still aren’t having any of it. Not that Palestinian Jews were any more receptive, but Luke kind of gives the sense that maybe these folks—they’re all hellenised, diaspora Jews like Stephen—maybe they’re overly defensive of their Jewish heritage because they feel deficient in some way for not being Palestinian Jews. Whatever their motivation, they’re angry with what he says and they get even angrier because they couldn’t resist him. And then they get even angrier—we’ve all seent his happen—they’re even angrier, because he’s not angry in response. He’s full of grace They couldn’t refute what he was saying. But rather than concede, they dig in and at that point there’s only one thing left to do: they make false accusation of blasphemy. Verse 11:
“Then they put up men to say, ‘We heard this man speaking blasphemous words against Moses and against God.’ They aroused the people, the elders, and the scribes. They set upon him, seized him, and took him in front of the assembly. They set up false witnesses to say, ‘This man never stops speaking words against this holy place and the law. We heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place and change the customs which Moses handed down to us.’ Everyone who was sitting in the assembly looked hard at Stephen. They all saw that his face was like the face of an angel.”
It sounds a lot like the accusations against Jesus, when he was accused of saying he would destroy the temple and rebuilt it in three day. Of course, yes, he said that, but his point was that God was doing something new, that God was about to fulfil his promises, and that God would establish a new temple in which he would come to dwell with his people. But the Jewish elders didn’t hear it that way, not because Jesus wasn’t clear, but because they couldn’t accept that God was fulfilling his promises through Jesus. If Jesus was the Messiah, he was doing it all wrong, at least so far as they were concerned. He couldn’t be the one.
And now exactly the same thing is happening to Stephen. We don’t have his words, but based on the false accusations against him as well as his defence that will follow in Chapter 7, we have a pretty good idea what he was saying and it was closely related to what Jesus had said. Just like Jesus, just like Peter, just like the preaching we see through Acts, Stephen told the story of God and his people and how it leads to Jesus.
There were four things that were all-important for the Jews and that marked out their identity. There was the temple; the torah or law; the land of Israel itself and especially Jerusalem, where the temple was; and there was their ethnic identity as Jews—the sons and daughters of Abraham, delivered by God from Egypt when Moses led them through the Red Sea to Mt. Sinai. Those things marked them out as God’s people. Those things marked them out as separated, as different from the pagan peoples and nations around them. Compromise those things, and you’d be sliding down a slippery slope into the same idolatry that had got their ancestors exiled to Babylon. So when Stephen spoke, as any of the Christians would have, about God establishing a new temple or about Jesus fulfilling torah, out came the angry charges of blasphemy.
But those first Christians—just like Jesus—were never attacking the temple or the law. The problem was that Israel—despite knowing her own story so well and so thoroughly—had forgotten where it was going and then failed to recognise how Jesus was bringing it to its climax. When Jesus or when Peter or when Stephen said that God was doing a new thing, what people like the priests and the scribes, the Pharisees and the Sadducees, people like Saul of Tarsus heard was that these Jesus people were saying was the law and the temple were bad.
What Stephen (like Jesus and Peter before him) was trying to say is that the word of God tells a story and that this story was moving forward and, as it moved forward, new things would happen. This didn’t mean that the old things that had happened were bad. Just the opposite! They were good. They were necessary to get the story to the point it’s at now. Imagine you take a trip to Montreal. First you drive your car to Nanaimo to get to the ferry, then you take the ferry to Horseshoe Bay, then you get off the ferry and get on a bus that takes you downtown, where you take SkyTrain to the airport, where you finally board an airplane that flies you across the country. The fact that you left your car parked in Nanaimo to get on a ferry or that you left Skytrain to get on an airplane or even that you stopped travelling once you arrived in Montreal, none of that means that the car or the ferry or the bus or the airplane or even the trip itself was bad. You couldn’t get where you are without them! And, just so, God gave Israel the law. God gave Israel the temple. And they were good things. They were necessary things. They were gracious things. They were things that prepared the people for and brought them to the part of the story where Jesus became a part of it.
But they tuned this part out. Some modern Christians do the same. I’m not sure where it comes from. Maybe it comes from listening to Luther with only one ear. But we get the idea that the old covenant was a bad thing. People will get the wrong idea that the old covenant was about being saved by works and that’s why Israel refused Jesus, who came to offer salvation by grace. A thousand time, no. If that’s what Stephen had been saying, the Jews would have been right to be angry with him, because he would have been wrong. The status of God’s people has never been because of works; it has always been because of grace. That’s part of how the old covenant prepared people and led them to the part of the story where Jesus enters.
Other times we just ignore God’s story altogether and try to write our own. But what’s often even more dangerous is when we know God’s story to a point, but then we lock it down and refuse to let him take it in a new direction. We do that. And that’s what these folks mad at Stephen are doing. Jesus just couldn’t be where the story they knew was heading; instead, Jesus became a threat to their version of the story.
And yet Stephen persisted. Even as they dragged him before the Sanhedrin with a slate of false witnesses against him. And think about that. They’re convinced they’re in the right. They’re convinced that they represent God and everything that is good and right and true. They think they’re the heaven on earth people. And yet what do that they do in response to his preaching? They lie. By their actions they condemn themselves. And in contrast stands Stephen. For all his speaking with power, he’s full of grace. And as he stands before the Sanhedrim, as false witness after false witness testified against him, the Spirit, God, transforms—almost transfigures him—to the point that the whole assembly is left staring at him. Luke says his face became like the face of an angel.
As far as literal appearance, I don’t know what that means. But the important thing is that everyone recognised what was happening and in that moment, the Spirit revealed Stephen—and along with him the church—for what he, what they, what we really are: In that moment Stephen was revealed as the face of Jesus’ heaven on earth people. He was actively part of the church living out heaven on earth. He was preaching the good news about Jesus and he is the fulfilment of God’s promise to bring heaven and earth back together. And in the middle of this controversy, in the middle of the false accusations, in the middle of these men who, despite all the evidence, were digging in their heels and refusing to accept the message about Jesus, refusing to let God lead the story they new so well in a new direction, God himself vindicated Stephen and made him a manifestation of heaven on earth. Stephen was full of the Spirit, a little temple in miniature full of God’s presence. As if the shekinah—the cloud of glory visibly representing God’s presence that had been missing from the temple ever since Israel’s exile—suddenly became present with Stephen. God announcing: “In this man, in this people, through my son, in this gospel I am fulfilling my promises. Listen to him.”
Brothers and Sisters, this should be a picture of us. The bit where Stephen was transfigured and looked like an angel—whatever that means—that was unique. But the rest of it, that ought to be us. A people committed to be a covenant family, not just overflowing with talk of love and grace and mercy, but a family of people where love and grace and mercy are abundant in real, practical ways. A family where we make a point of doing what needs doing to make sure that nothing gets in the way of that love and grace and mercy. We ought to be a people of word and of prayer who are bold for the gospel, because we know that the power lies not with us, but with God. His word, not ours, brings life. His Spirit has the power to renew minds and regenerate hearts. And so we pray, entrusting ourselves and our ministry to him and we proclaim not our word, but his. We tell the story that leads the world to Jesus. And if we’re doing all these things, that word, that story will have power, but our telling of it will also be full of grace.
The world, the flesh, and the devil will do their worst. People will dig in their heels. People will tell lies about us and about the story and the good news we proclaim. People may even violently persecute us one day. But remember: It’s all of grace. The story that leads us through the law and the prophets, through torah and temple, is all about the grace of God towards rebellious sinners, and so is the story that leads to forgiveness and life with God, the story that leads us to Jesus and the Spirit and eventually to the New Jerusalem. Brothers and Sisters, it’s all of grace. Live the story of God’s grace and the light of heaven will permeate the church. Proclaim the story of God’s grace, and that light will being to permeate the world.
Let’s pray: Lord, fill us with your grace. And don’t just fill us with it; ensure that we’re ever and always overwhelmed by the knowledge and understanding of your grace, so that we will live it out in practical terms as your church and so that we will go out with boldness to proclaim your good news, not to win arguments, but make your grace known. Through Jesus we pray. Amen.