Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Son of Man standing: Stephen's death
Acts 7:54-60
54 Now when they heard these things, they were cut to the heart, and they gnashed at him with their teeth. · WEB
He sees the exalted Christ standing rather than seated, and dies asking forgiveness for the men killing him — and the writer calls the death sleep.
They were cut to the heart, and they gnashed at him with their teeth. The first half of that sentence has appeared twice already in this book with different outcomes; here conviction turns immediately into rage. The gnashing is animal, and the writer chooses the word for it deliberately about a court of law.
Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, looks up and sees two things: the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God. He reports it aloud, and in his own words the title changes: I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God. It is the only time anyone but Jesus uses that title in Scripture, and it is used at the moment when the man who used it of himself before this same court Mark 14:62 is vindicated in front of it.
The posture is the detail. Everywhere else the exalted Christ is described as seated — the session Peter preached from a psalm at Pentecost. Here he is standing. Nothing in the text explains why, and any explanation is inference. But the natural sense of a seated judge or ruler rising is that something has drawn him to his feet, and what is happening below is the death of the first man to be killed for his name.
The court's response ends any pretence of procedure. They cried out, stopped their ears, and rushed at him with one accord. Men who are stopping their ears have given up on refutation; the blasphemy they punish is a vision they refused to hear described.
He is thrown out of the city and stoned, and the witnesses lay their garments at the feet of a young man named Saul. The witnesses in a stoning threw first, which is why they needed their hands free, and the law required them to do so. The detail is dropped without comment and the name means nothing yet. This is how the book introduces the man who will write most of the New Testament: as a coat rack at a lynching.
Stephen's two sentences from under the stones are both echoes of the cross, and both are addressed to Jesus. Lord Jesus, receive my spirit — where his master had said Father, into your hands I commit my spirit Luke 23:46. The prayer at Golgotha was made to God; Stephen makes his to Jesus, which is as clear a statement of what he believed about him as anything in his speech. And what is committed is the spirit, the life-breath that God gave and to which he returns it Ecclesiastes 12:7 — the same word, and the same act of entrusting.
The second is Lord, don't hold this sin against them, said kneeling, with a loud voice, so that the men throwing could hear it. One of them was Saul.
Then the last clause, and the writer's own choice of words for what happened: he fell asleep. He has just recorded a violent public execution, and he describes the death in the term Scripture uses again and again for the dead who belong to God John 11:11 1 Thessalonians 4:13–14. The man is not said to have gone anywhere. He entrusted his life to Christ, and he sleeps, and the whole weight of the sentence rests on who is holding what was entrusted.
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