When they hand you over,
do not worry about how you are to speak
or what you are to say.
You will be given at that moment what you are to say.
We need to be open to what the Father wants to say to others, rather than being so focused on our own plans that we don't hear his guidance. We tend to calculate that probability that certain statements will have a certain desired effect. But our insight is limited. Only God knows what people truly need to hear. This was evident in the speech of Stephen to those with whom he debated. Who could have predicted that a lengthy discourse on salvation history followed by some harsh words that placed his opponents within the context of that story of salvation were what they might need to hear?
You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always oppose the holy Spirit; you are just like your ancestors.
Most of us are probably more likely to err on the side of excessive kindness, only telling others what we think they want to hear. When we choose to speak harshly we often do it just for the sake of provoking others, with no sense that such words could be helpful, or cause people to open their hearts. Even in the case of Stephen it was not clear that his words immediately had a beneficial effect. After all, hearing all of this "infuriated" them. But it eventually became obvious that Stephen wasn't speaking for the sake of self-satisfaction. He wasn't responding to aggression with aggression. He was brave and bold enough to say the words that God gave him to say. These words seemed at first to be a condemnation. But they might ultimately have led to a realization. For the contrast between the unruffled and angelic Stephen and the riotous crowd that stoned him could not have been stronger. In his openness to the Father, Stephen became a Christlike figure. Not only his words and actions, but even his death resembled that of Jesus himself. He offered his life, innocent though he was, for the sake of his testimony to those who were guilty.
As they were stoning Stephen, he called out, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” Then he fell to his knees and cried out in a loud voice, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them”; and when he said this, he fell asleep.
But we may ask, did Stephen's apparent openness to the Father actually bear fruit? We only have hints of how this might have been so. But the strongest of these is the witness to his execution by the name of a Saul of Tarsus. Clearly this event in itself didn't somehow magically trigger his conversion. But it must also have been part of the larger context that allowed his world altering response to Jesus on the road to Damascus. When Jesus told Saul that it was he himself he was persecuting Saul might well have thought back to the moment described in today's Gospel, in which Stephen himself very much embodied the presence of Jesus in the face of persecution. It would have been a real life example that helped the revelation of Jesus make sense.
We are not suggesting that we should give ourselves license to say whatever hotheaded and aggressive things we think might be the most likely to provoke others. We are not suggesting that poking the bear is ultimately an effective strategy. What we are suggesting is that God has a broader perspective than we do about what others need to hear. It is not so much a matter of permission to say whatever we feel as a matter of being on the watch for things we should say that we might others be afraid to say, since they don't actually come naturally. That's the point. They only come supernaturally. And it is then that the cracks in even the hardest hearts might shift just a little, letting the light shine through at last.
Matt Maher - He Shall Reign Forever
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