Homily: When we Reduce God to a Guarantee of Our Own Protections
Fr. Diego Puricelli is a moral theologian and priest of the Diocese of Belluno-Feltre. This homily by our guest author is reprinted freely with permission.
Celebrating the feast of Saint Stephen on the day immediately following Christmas may appear, at first glance, to be an unfortunate choice. The account of the violent death of the first martyr in history, in fact, ruins the enchanted atmosphere of Christmas.
Yet this feast has its roots in a very ancient tradition: as early as the 4th century it was celebrated on December 26, particularly in Jerusalem and Rome. It is not, therefore, a random choice, but an original and intentional placement, dense with theological meaning.
In a few days, then, we will celebrate another memorial, that of the Holy Innocents, namely the children killed by Herod. Here too, once again, the tragic presence of bloodshed, in the aftermath of the most beautiful of announcements. In short, it seems almost as if the liturgy intentionally wants to crack the enchantment of Christmas. But why?
One of the keys to interpretation can be provided directly by the text of Luke, specifically the sixth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. Here Stephen appears from the very start as a man "full of grace and power," whose life is totally crossed by the force of the Spirit. His word, however, is not neutral or accommodating: it is a word that unsettles, that unmasks: in short, that causes a crisis.
And it is precisely this that the text lets us see clearly: the light that comes from God, when taken seriously, is not only a source of consolation, but also of resistance. This, after all, is an intuitive fact. Light, while on one hand it brightens and warms, on the other can be annoying to those who are not used to the light, to those who live in darkness.
If Christmas, therefore, announces the breaking of this light into history, Stephen is one of its first and concrete consequences. His martyrdom, in fact, does not contradict Christmas joy, but simply reveals its price. Now, there is an aspect on which we perhaps do not dwell enough: the very source from which the persecution is born.
Stephen’s persecution, in fact, does not originate in distant environments or those openly hostile to God, but takes shape within a religious context. They are men expert in the Scriptures, guardians of the Law, who feel threatened by his word.
And this is precisely the most uncomfortable point of the story: resistance to the light does not always come from the outside, but can be born and often is born right where one considers themselves to be on God's side.
On this point, the insights of American sociologist Mark Juergensmeyer in his book "Terror in the Mind of God" appear illuminating: in this small masterpiece, the scholar shows how religious violence—a phenomenon transversal to all religions, Christianity included—is not born primarily from an absence of faith, but from an absolutized faith, that is, one incapable of tolerating the challenging of its own certainties.
When God is reduced to a guarantee of one's own identity, to a guardian of the borders and symbolic power of a group, then every "other" word—even when it is most faithful to the Gospel—becomes a threat to be neutralized.
Violence, in these cases, does not serve to defend God—as if God needed to be defended—but to defend a system that has put itself in His place. And this, you know, concerns us much more closely than we are willing to admit. We are often quick to point the finger, to comment, to judge, to talk behind the backs of those next to us.
Much less prompt, however, to recognize the rigidities that inhabit our hearts, the discords between the Gospel we proclaim with words and the one we concretely live, the reassuring comforts that we end up mistaking—and sometimes justifying—as evangelical radicalism.
We stink, and we don't realize it. And whoever reminds us of it, whoever dares to tell us frankly, often disturbs us more than the evil they denounce. After all, all of this should not surprise us: we live in a cultural climate of constant moral impunity, in which no one truly assumes their own responsibility: the blame is always outside of us, never inside.
In this light, one also understands the fate of Stephen. He is not killed because he denies God, but because he announces Him in such a way as to dismantle a closed, self-sufficient religious order, fundamentally impermeable and resistant to any change.
In this, Stephen is truly a crystal-clear image of Christ
And indeed, his death will be an almost perfect overlap with that of the Master: "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit." "In manus tuas, into your hands, Father, I commend my spirit." That is why the blood shed by Stephen is found next to the cradle of the child of Bethlehem: because the God who is born out of love is the same one who, if taken seriously, can cost one's life.
