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Facing a certain and immediate future: Crucifixion for Our Lord, and Stoning for Saint Stephen, both of these men turn to prayer. But look at the essence of their prayer: it’s not for themselves, but for others.
Our Lord prays for His disciples and for those who will come to believe in Him through their future ministry of teaching. He prays for their unity — and for ours — even though there will be visible disunity in days to come:
+the betrayal of Judas
+the denial of Peter
+the questioning of the Resurrection by Thomas
+all the rest dispersing in fear in the Lord’s hour of need.
It will be the Holy Spirit who unites them, binding them together in a cohesiveness that resembles the interior life of the Most Holy Trinity. This cohesive action will take some time for preparation and formation, hence the Lord’s post-Resurrection appearances over a period of forty days. It also involves patience and hope which would address the anxiety that the Apostles must have faced in the mercifully brief ten days between the Ascension and Pentecost.
The measure of success which would prove the efficacy of the Lord’s prayer is not, for the moment, the expansion of Christianity as it has grown with divine assistance over the next two millennia. He prays that His Apostles might know the truth about the identity of Christ as the Incarnate Second Person of the Holy Trinity, and that this acquired knowledge and assurance will provide a basis for unity in the Church which will come forward.
While His trust in God is thorough and even holy, the Lord leaves nothing to chance for either the Apostles or His future Church, with our limited abilities and our proclivity for sin. He will send the Holy Spirit to affect the desired knowledge of Christ and achieve the unity for which He hopes. Without a certain knowledge of Christ and a selfless desire to become one in Him, where would we be as a Church today?
Even with the guidance of the Holy Spirit we mere humans have witnessed major disunity in the history of the Church for which Our Lord prays:
+the Orthodox Schism in the 11th century
+the Protestant Revolt in the 16th century
+the factioning of the post-Vatican II Church into:
-liberal or conservative camps
-progressive or traditionalist spheres, and…
-widespread dissent concerning Church Moral Teaching.
Yet the Lord never gives up on us: He sits even today at the right hand of the Father, interceding for us, sending the Holy Spirit. He will not allow the Gates of Hell, upon which we sometimes knock with our sins, to prevail against His Church. The Feast of Pentecost which we are about to celebrate, reminds us of this: Our hope for unity lies not in any form of self-determination, but in our openness to the Holy Spirit who will create unity and catholicity where there is sometimes unwise diversity or willful dissent.
Enter now Saint Stephen. Today’s passage from The Acts of the Apostles brings us late into the game in the story of his martyrdom. Why is this man of heroic faith being stoned? He draws the ire of the synagogue leaders for proclaiming the superiority of Christ over Moses and the Temple. A nimble speaker, he further infuriated the leaders by besting them in debate.
In the midst of his trial, Stephen is suddenly graced with a vision of the Risen Christ standing at the right hand of God. Christ had prophesied this, and now St. Stephen is saying that the prophecy has been fulfilled. This enrages the Sanhedrin to the point of stoning him as a blasphemer. As his life is slipping away from him in the very act of martyrdom, St. Stephen, like Our Lord, begins to pray. And, like Our Lord, he prays for his persecutors in words strikingly similar to those of the Lord on the Cross.
What, then, do we learn from St. Stephen? In the Gospel we learned that Christ prays for us constantly, giving us a model for our own prayer to God the Father. Saint Stephen teaches us to pray for one another, even as we suffer at one another’s hands. The attitude of Our Lord at His Crucifixion and of St. Stephen at his stoning show us that prayer which entrusts both our friends and our persecutors to the Holy Spirit strengthens the Church and brings a new sense of unity and serenity.
We find ourselves this week liturgically sandwiched between the Lord’s Ascension and the Holy Spirit’s descension, an almost simultaneous experience of
+going and coming
+absence and presence
+emptiness and fulfillment.
This gives to the Feast of Pentecost, which we will soon enjoy, an aura of hope in the midst of the difficulties of the human condition, that the Lord’s final promise will be perpetually renewed by the presence and work of the Holy Spirit in the Church, as the Lord said, “Lo, I am with you until the end of time.”