"Good King Wenceslas looked out on the feast of Stephen".

We have sung these words many, many times down the years but do we know when IS the feast of Stephen? I suppose the fact we sing it at Christmas time and that the second line goes" when the snow lay round about" is a clue. The feast of Saint Stephen falls on December 26^th.

He was the first martyr of the early Christian church and all we know of him is to be found in Acts of the Apostles, chapters six and seven. He was one of the seven men chosen as deacons by the twelve apostles to deal with the task of distributing funds to the widows of the Greek-speaking Jews. A dispute had arisen between the Greek Jews and the native Jews when the former claimed the widows of their community had been neglected. Stephen, described as a man richly blessed by God and full of power, went among the people performing miracles and wonders. Inevitably, his fame brought him into conflict with the Sanhedrin. When they could not defeat him in argument, certain members of the synagogue bribed others to swear that they had heard Stephen speaking against Moses and against God. He was summoned before the High Priest to explain himself and this he did in considerable detail. His speech is to be found in Chapter 7 of the Acts of the Apostles. His theme was that the Jews had resisted the spirit of God, that Christ had superseded the Temple and that the Jews, having often persecuted the early prophets, had again gone against God’s will by sending Jesus Christ to his death.

As can be imagined, this enraged his listeners and when Stephen looked up to heaven and said that he could see it "opened and the Son of Man standing at the right-hand side of God" his fate was sealed. He was accused of blasphemy, seized and dragged outside the city and stoned to death. The witnesses to this event left their cloaks at the feet of a young man called Saul! Before he died, in circumstances mirroring the death of Jesus dying on the cross, he cried out to the Lord, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit" and also "Lord! Do not remember this sin against them!"

The Bible goes on to say that Saul approved of the murder and from that day the persecution of the early Christians began. Stephen was buried by some devout men, mourning him with loud cries. His feast was kept in the East and West from the fourth century and his cult received a boost in 415AD when his supposed tomb was found by the priest Lucian at Kafr Gamala. His relics were transferred first to Constantinople then to Rome. As befits his role as a one of the seven deacons he has become the patron of deacons and in the later Middle Ages he was invoked against headaches! He is commemorated in several French cathedrals and many churches in England. There are several ancient examples of his representation, two of the finest being an early Renaissance work by Jean Fouquet in Berlin from a diptych at Merlun and a cycle by Fra Angelico at the Vatican Feast. In Norman England several churches were dedicated to him and the popularity of his name as a Christian name has stood the test of time.