The Man Who Held the Coats

The number of them kept growing, and growing fast — and that was when the first argument started. Some of the Jews in Jerusalem had grown up far away and spoke Greek; others had lived there all their lives. Every day food was handed round to the widows who had nobody to feed them, and the Greek-speaking families began to say — quietly at first, and then not quietly — that their widows were being missed.

So the twelve called the whole crowd of followers together. “It is not right for us to leave the word of God behind to wait on tables,” they said. “Look around among yourselves, brothers, and pick out seven men that everybody speaks well of, full of the Spirit and full of good sense, and we will put them in charge of this. And we will keep ourselves for praying and for the serving of the word.”

That sounded right to everybody, so they chose seven: Stephen, who was full of trust and full of the Holy Spirit, and Philip, and Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas and Nicolaus from Antioch. They stood them in front of the apostles, and the apostles prayed and laid their hands on them. And the word of God kept growing, and the followers in Jerusalem grew very many, and a great crowd of the priests themselves began to obey the faith.

Stephen did not stay at the tables for long. He was full of power, and great wonders and signs happened through him. There was a meeting house in Jerusalem for men who had come from Cyrene and Alexandria and Cilicia and Asia, and some of them began arguing with him about Jesus. They argued, and they lost. They could not stand up to the good sense he talked, or to the Spirit he talked with.

So they stopped arguing and did something else. They found men, quietly, and put words in their mouths. “We have heard him say wicked things against Moses, and against God,” the men said. That stirred up the people and the elders and the scribes, and they took hold of Stephen and marched him into the council, where witnesses stood up and said: “This man never stops talking against the holy place and against the law. We have heard him say that Jesus of Nazareth will pull this place down and change the customs Moses handed on to us.”

And everybody sitting in the council turned and looked hard at him. And what they saw, looking at him, was that his face was like the face of a messenger.

“Are these things so?” said the chief priest. Stephen did not defend himself. He told them the story of their own people instead, right from the beginning, and they let him talk.

“Brothers and fathers, listen. The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham before he ever lived in Haran, and said, ‘Go out from your country and away from your family, and come into the land I will show you.’ So he came into this land — the one you are standing in now. And God gave him none of it. Not a foot’s width to stand on. He promised it to him and to his children after him, and Abraham had no child. And God told him his children’s children would live as strangers in a country not their own, slaves there, badly treated, for four hundred years. ‘And I will judge the nation they serve,’ God said, ‘and afterward they will come out and worship me in this place.’ And Abraham had Isaac, and Isaac had Jacob, and Jacob had the twelve fathers of our tribes.

“And those twelve were jealous of their brother Joseph, and sold him into Egypt. But God was with him, and brought him out of every trouble, and gave him wisdom, and made the king of Egypt set him over Egypt and over the whole royal house. Then the famine came over Egypt and Canaan, and our fathers had nothing to eat. Jacob heard there was grain in Egypt and sent them down. The second time, Joseph told his brothers who he was, and sent for his father and all his family — seventy-five people. Jacob went down into Egypt, and there he died, and our fathers with him.

“And as the time came near for God to keep his promise to Abraham, our people in Egypt grew and grew — until a king came to the throne who had never heard of Joseph. He treated our fathers cruelly and made them put their baby boys outside to die. That was when Moses was born, beautiful in God’s sight. They kept him three months at home, and when they had to put him outside, the king’s daughter picked him up and brought him up as her own son. When he was forty he went out to see his brothers. He saw one of them being knocked about, and stood up for him, and struck the Egyptian down. He thought they would understand that God was rescuing them by his hand. They did not. The next day he found two of them fighting. ‘Men, you are brothers,’ he said. ‘Why are you hurting each other?’ And the one in the wrong shoved him away. ‘Who made you a ruler and a judge over us? Do you mean to kill me the way you killed the Egyptian?’ So Moses ran, and lived as a stranger in Midian.

“Forty more years went by. Out in the desert near Mount Sinai a messenger appeared to him in a flame of fire in a bush, and when he came close the voice of the Lord came: ‘I am the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob.’ Moses shook and did not dare look. And the Lord said, ‘Take the sandals off your feet; the place where you are standing is holy ground. I have seen how badly my people are treated in Egypt, and I have come down to get them out. Now come — I am sending you to Egypt.’ This is the same Moses they shoved away, saying, ‘Who made you a ruler and a judge?’ This is the one God sent to be ruler and rescuer both, who led them out with wonders and signs in Egypt and at the Red Sea and in the desert for forty years — the Moses who said, ‘God will raise up a prophet for you from among your own brothers, like me.’ And our fathers would not obey him. They shoved him away too, and turned back in their hearts to Egypt, and made a calf, and brought a sacrifice to it, and were glad in a thing their own hands had made.

“Our fathers had the tent of witness with them in the desert, made exactly to the pattern the one who spoke to Moses showed him. They brought it in with Joshua when God drove out the nations in front of them, and kept it down to the days of David, who asked whether he might find a dwelling for the God of Jacob. But it was Solomon who built him a house. And the Most High does not live in houses made by hands. The prophet says so: ‘Heaven is my throne, and the earth the stool under my feet. What sort of house will you build me, says the Lord? What place is there for me to rest in? Did my own hand not make all of it?’

And then he turned round and looked at them. “You stiff-necked people, with hearts and ears that will not listen — you always fight against the Holy Spirit. Your fathers did it, and so do you. Which of the prophets did your fathers not hunt down? They killed the ones who said beforehand that the Righteous One was coming — and you have become the ones who handed over and murdered him. You were given the law at the ordering of messengers, and you have not kept it.”

It cut them through, and they ground their teeth at him. But Stephen was full of the Holy Spirit, and he looked straight up into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at God’s right hand. “Look,” he said. “I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.”

They shouted so they would not have to hear him, put their hands over their ears, and rushed at him all together. They dragged him outside the city and stoned him there. The men who had spoken against him pulled off their coats to do it, and laid them in a pile at the feet of a young man named Saul, who stood and watched over them. “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit,” Stephen said. Then he went down on his knees and called out: “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” And when he had said that, he fell asleep.

Saul thought it was the right thing to do. He agreed with every bit of it. Some men who feared God came and carried Stephen away and buried him, and made a great lament over him — grown men standing in the street weeping out loud for the first of them to be killed.

And that same day the hunting began. They came after the church in Jerusalem, and the whole gathering was scattered through Judea and Samaria; only the apostles stayed. Saul went at it hardest of all, going into one house after another, dragging out men and women alike and handing them over to prison.

The scattered ones did not go quietly. Wherever they landed they told the good news. Philip — one of the seven — went down to the city of Samaria and told them about the Christ. The crowds listened with one mind, because they could hear what he said and see what he did: unclean spirits came shrieking out of people, and people who were paralyzed or could not walk were made well. There was great joy in that city. A magician there named Simon believed too, and then tried to buy the power to give the Holy Spirit, and Peter told him to beg the Lord instead.

Then a messenger of the Lord spoke to Philip. “Get up and go south, to the road that runs down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” It is a desert road, with nothing much on it.

Philip got up and went. And on that empty road there was a chariot. In it sat an important man from Ethiopia, an official of Candace the queen and the keeper of all her treasure. He had been up to Jerusalem to worship, and now he was going home, reading out loud as he went. He was reading the prophet Isaiah. The Spirit told Philip to keep close to that chariot. So Philip ran, and alongside the wheels he could hear the words. “Do you understand what you are reading?” Philip called up to him. “How could I,” said the man, “unless somebody guides me?” And he asked Philip to climb up and sit with him.

This was the place he had got to: “He was led like a sheep to be killed, and like a lamb that says nothing while its wool is cut off him, he does not open his mouth. He was put down low, and no fair judgment was given him. Who can tell about the family he came from? For his life was taken from the earth.” “Tell me,” said the official, “who is the prophet talking about? Himself, or somebody else?” And Philip began right there, at that very place, and told him the good news of Jesus.

They were still going along the road when they came to water. “Look — water,” said the official. “What is there to stop me being immersed?” He had the chariot stopped, and the two of them went down into the water together, and Philip immersed him. And when they came up the Spirit of the Lord took Philip away, and the Ethiopian never saw him again. He went off down his road full of joy. Philip turned up at Azotus, and told the good news in every town as far as Caesarea.

Then there was the young man who had held the coats. Saul was still breathing threats and murder at the followers of the Lord. He went to the chief priest and asked for letters to the meeting houses in Damascus, so that if he found anybody up there belonging to the Way — men or women — he could tie them up and bring them back to Jerusalem.

He was nearly at Damascus when the light came. It came out of heaven and flashed all around him, and he went straight down onto the ground. And out of it there came a voice. “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” “Who are you, Lord?” he said. “I am Jesus, and I am the one you are persecuting. But get up now, and go on into the city, and you will be told what you have to do.”

The men traveling with him stood there without a word. They could hear the voice and see nobody. They got Saul onto his feet, and when he opened his eyes he could not see. So they led him into Damascus by the hand — the man who had come to arrest the whole city, brought in holding somebody’s arm. For three days he could not see, and would not eat or drink.

There was a follower in Damascus named Ananias, and the Lord spoke to him in a vision. “Ananias.” “Here I am, Lord.” “Get up and go to the street called Straight, and ask at the house of Judas for a man from Tarsus named Saul. He is praying at this minute, and he has seen in a vision a man named Ananias come in and put his hands on him so that he can see again.”

Ananias did not want to go. “Lord, I have heard from many people about this man, and all the harm he has done to your holy ones in Jerusalem. And he is here with authority from the chief priests to tie up everybody who calls on your name.” “Go. This man is a chosen instrument of mine, to carry my name in front of the nations and their kings and the children of Israel. And I will show him how much he must suffer for my name.”

So Ananias went. He walked into the house where the man he was frightened of sat, and put his hands on him. “Saul, brother,” he said. “The Lord has sent me — Jesus, who appeared to you on the road as you came — so that you can see again and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” And straight away something like scales fell from Saul’s eyes, and he could see. He got up and was immersed, and ate some food, and his strength came back.

And then he did the thing nobody expected. He went into the meeting houses of Damascus — the very ones he had brought the letters for — and told everybody in them that Jesus is the Son of God. Everybody who heard him was astounded. “Is this not the man who wrecked the people in Jerusalem who call on this name, and came up here to tie them up and take them to the chief priests?” But Saul only got stronger, and the more he talked the more he showed them from the scriptures that Jesus is the Christ.

After a good many days they made a plan to kill him, and he found out. They were watching the gates day and night so he could not get out. So one night his followers put him in a big basket and let him down the outside of the wall on a rope.

He came to Jerusalem and tried to join the followers there, and they were all frightened of him. Nobody believed he was really one of them. It was Barnabas who took hold of him and brought him in to the apostles, and told them the whole story — the road, the light, the voice, and how he had spoken openly in Damascus in the name of Jesus. After that he went in and out of Jerusalem with them, speaking openly; and he argued with the Greek-speakers until they set about killing him too, and the brothers took him down to Caesarea and sent him home to Tarsus.

And the church all through Judea and Galilee and Samaria had quiet. It was built up, and went on in the fear of the Lord and the comfort of the Holy Spirit, and there were more of them every day.