Revised Common Lectionary (Complementary)

Stephen makes his defence from Israel’s history:

i. THE TIME OF ABRAHAM

7 ^1a Then the High Priest said, “Is this statement true?”

^1b-3 And Stephen answered, “My brothers and my fathers, listen to me. Our glorious God appeared to our forefather Abraham while he was in Mesopotamia before he ever came to live in Haran, and said to him, ‘Get out of your country and from your relatives, and come to a land that I will show you.’

^4-8a That was how he came to leave the land of the Chaldeans and settle in Haran. And it was from there after his father’s death that God moved him into this very land where you are living today. Yet God gave him no part of it as an inheritance, not a foot that he could call his own, and yet promised that it should eventually belong to him and his descendants—even though at the time he had no descendant at all. And this is the way in which God spoke to him: he told him that his descendants should live as strangers in a foreign land where they would become slaves and be ill-treated for four hundred years, ‘And the nation to whom they will be in bondage I will judge,’ said God: ‘and after that they shall come out and serve me in this place.’ “Further, he gave him the agreement of circumcision, so that when Abraham became the father of Isaac he circumcised him on the eighth day.

Stephen’s defence:

ii. THE PATRIARCHS

^8b-10 “Isaac became the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of the twelve patriarchs. Then the patriarchs in their jealousy of Joseph sold him as a slave into Egypt. But God was with him and saved him from all his troubles and gave him favour and wisdom in the eyes of Pharaoh the king of Egypt. Pharaoh made him governor of Egypt and put him in charge of his own entire household.

^11-16 “Then came the famine over all the land of Egypt and Canaan which caused great suffering, and our forefathers could find no food. But when Jacob heard that there was corn in Egypt he sent our forefathers out of their own country for the first time. It was on their second visit that Joseph was recognised by his brothers, and his ancestry became plain to Pharaoh. Then Joseph sent and invited to come and live with him his father and all his kinsmen, seventy-five people in all. So Jacob came down to Egypt and both he and our fathers ended their days there. After their deaths they were carried back into Shechem and laid in the tomb which Abraham had bought with silver from the sons of Hamor in Shechem.