St. Ed Said

Did you all notice the small offhanded note in the Acts reading today? Not the vision of heaven Steven has at this moment. It’s not the stones being prepared to be thrown. Not the prayer of forgiveness that ends the story. It’s the coats, the coats given to one of the most important biblical characters in all of the New Testament. Acts tells us that when the crowd rushed Stephen, the witnesses, the men who had testified against him, the men whose job it was to throw the first stones, these men laid their garments at the feet of a young man named Saul. It seems like such a small detail in the middle of a murder. I tried to do a little research about stoning, because as we hear over and over, the Jews did not put people to death. They did not have a method of capital punishment. However, stoning was not a chaotic mob throwing whatever was at hand. I am not sure what you all know about this process, but it is much more methodical and intentional than we think. Stoning was a procedure. It ...