Martyrdom: The Coat at My Feet and the Blood on My Hands (from Paul's Perspective)

Saul's Story of Redemption and Transformation and the Pain of His Guilt

---

The unclaimed coat from the fateful day rests heavily in my hands now. It is heavier than when someone first laid it at my feet that day. Stephen’s blood has long since dried on the fabric, but the weight of what happened still presses down on my chest like a stone that won’t be moved.

I can still hear his voice rising above the chaos of that mob. Not screaming, not pleading—praying. How does a man pray while stones are crushing his skull? How does he call down forgiveness on those who are ending his life?

“Lord, do not hold this sin against them!”

Those words pierce me now more than they did then. At the time, I thought it was weakness. Foolishness. The desperate cry of a man who had pushed too far and finally faced the consequences of his religious blasphemy. The self-righteous, foolish blabbering of a man deceived by a heretic.

But now I know that I was the fool. I was the deceived deceiver.

I stood there, twenty feet from the killing ground, watching them strip off their outer garments and pile them at my feet. The leaders, the righteous ones, were impassioned to fulfill their duty to the Torah.

And I?

I was their chosen keeper of coats. The promising young Pharisee who would ensure everything was done according to law and order, giving them fuel for their furious rampage.

As they were dragging him toward the city gates, he stumbled over the coats, and blood fell from his brow, landing on this one I hold. I can’t get rid of it. It forces me to remember the depths of darkness in my soul before the day the light shone on the road. I can’t let it go. I must remember because the memory drives me, day in and day out, to give every last fleeting moment to advancing this message. It empowers me to face prison and persecution as I await the same fate as Stephen in this broken, disbelieving world.

The irony burns now.

We followed the law to the letter—dragged him outside the city gates, used stones instead of hands, kept ourselves ceremonially clean. We dotted every legal i and crossed every religious t while we murdered a man whose only crime was seeing Jesus more clearly than we could bear to believe.

I remember the moment Stephen’s eyes rolled back toward heaven and that otherworldly look crossed his face. “Look!” he shouted, his voice somehow carrying over the noise of the crowd. “I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man STANDING at the place of honor at God’s right hand!”

Standing, he said. Not sitting on the throne, but standing—as if Jesus Himself had risen from His seat to honor His faithful servant. As if he were like a racehorse leaning into the starting gate, anticipating that it would thrust open so he could do what he had been waiting for for eternity and answer the call from His Father that it was time to return.

The rage that erupted from the crowd was instant, violent, and deafening. They couldn’t stand to hear one more word from the martyr’s mouth. Hands flew to ears, voices rose in unified shouting, and then the rush forward like water through a broken dam. I watched it all happen as if time had slowed to a crawl.

The first stone caught Stephen in the back of the head and spun him around. The second opened a gash above his temple. But even as his knees buckled, even as the blood began to flow, he looked up into that same spot in the sky where he’d seen his vision.

I can’t really explain this part, but I wiped my eyes again as it seemed to appear that his face was aglow! Glowing white like an oil lamp in the darkness of midnight.

And then he did the impossible.

He fell to his knees—not from the stones, but deliberately, like a man taking his position for prayer, or maybe it was submission. His voice, somehow still strong despite the trauma, rang out one final time:

“Lord, don’t charge them with this sin!”

Don’t charge them? Don’t charge us?

I felt something crack inside my chest that day. Not my heart—not yet. That would come later on the road to Damascus. But something deeper, something I couldn’t name then. Maybe it was the first hairline fracture in the foundation of everything I thought I knew about God, the Messiah, His followers, and who really deserved to die.

The silence that followed his death was screaming at me. One moment, there was shouting and the sound of stones hitting flesh, and the next

NOTHING.

Just the sound of heavy breathing and the distant call of birds that had been frightened from their perches by the noise.

I looked down at Stephen’s broken body and felt empty. Hollow like a rotted stump in the forest.

We had won, hadn’t we?

We had protected the purity of our faith, defended the honor of our traditions, silenced the blasphemer who dared claim he could see our crucified carpenter standing at the right hand of God.

So why did victory taste like ash in my mouth?

The coats at my feet became my obsession after that. I couldn’t stop thinking about how normal they looked, ordinary outer garments worn by ordinary men who had just committed an extraordinary act of violence. How easily we had slipped from guardians of the faith to executioners.

How quickly misdirected passion became murder. Cold-blooded intentional murder!

That night, I went home and tried to wash Stephen’s blood from my hands, though I had never actually touched him and no red blood stains had touched me. But I felt so dirty and marked. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had somehow been contaminated by what we had done. But as I looked in the mirror, nothing stained my robe. It was the stains on my heart that were strangling me.

I threw myself deeper into the persecution. If I had doubts, I would drown them in activity and bask in the authority they had given me. If Stephen’s words haunted my dreams, I would make sure there were no more voices like his to trouble my sleep. House after house, I dragged out men and women who followed this Jesus, threw them into prison, and scattered the church like leaves in the wind.

From Jerusalem. To Judea. To Samaria. And to the ends of the Earth!

I told myself it was righteous work. I told myself I was serving God.

But late at night, when the work was done and the darkness pressed in around me, I would hear Stephen’s voice again: “Lord, don’t charge them with this sin!”

How do you argue with forgiveness like that? How do you maintain your hatred in the face of such love?

I didn’t know then that Stephen’s death was not an ending but a beginning. The blood of martyrs, they say, is the seed of the church. His scattered followers would take the Gospel further than it had ever gone. His example of dying with forgiveness on his lips would inspire a generation of believers to face their own persecution with the same courage.

And his prayer, that impossible, scandalous prayer for mercy on his murderers, would one day be answered in ways none of us could have imagined. Some of my co-laborers had told me that they had heard that phrase before, on the day the Messiah died. They said he had said the same thing as he hung on that cross, also bloody, also pierced, also dying!

Three years later, on a dusty road outside Damascus, I would meet the same Jesus that Stephen died proclaiming. That same Jesus who must have taught his followers to forgive the unforgivable. The same Jesus who had stood to welcome His faithful servant home would blind me with His glory and call me to follow Him.

The persecutor would become the proclaimer.

The one who held the coats would wear chains for the Gospel. The man who watched Stephen die would himself face stones and beatings and eventually execution for the same faith he had tried to destroy.

Stephen won that day, though none of us knew it at the time. He won by losing, conquered by dying, triumphed by forgiving. And his victory echoes still in every believer who chooses mercy over vengeance, love over hatred, forgiveness over bitterness.

The question that haunts me now is the same one that should haunt you:

When the stones start flying in your life, will you pray for your enemies or plot against them? Will you see Jesus standing to welcome you home, or will you be too busy holding someone else’s coat?

That fateful day, I failed!

The days that followed, I floundered!

But, the day I saw the light, I fell to my knees! I was too blind to see what Stephen saw, but I submitted just as he did. And I was radically and inwardly changed.

Forever new. By the Grace of a recklessly redeeming God, it was as if I were BORN AGAIN!