5th Sunday of Easter
By Very Reverend John Arnold, Sunday 10th May, 2009
The Ethiopian Eunuch – Acts 826-39
(Jesus said ) Go and make disciples of all nations. (Matt 2819a)
Rarely has a command been obeyed like this one. St Luke in Acts shows the Apostles first preaching the good news of Jesus Christ in Jerusalem, then moving north into Samaria to a people who were ethnically the same as the Jews but socially and religiously separate from them, next as in the story we heard today turning south towards the Negeb and beyond that to Africa, finally moving East and then West until they reach Rome and establish a new base for their mission. Ethiopia, which corresponded to present day Sudan, was regarded as lying at the very edge of the known world. Just as a thousand years ago it seemed important to the mediaeval church to establish a cathedral in Trondheim, which was then the northernmost inhabited place on earth, so two thousand years ago St Luke found it important to present as the first Gentile convert a man from the deepest south. Why? To show that right from the start there were no limits to the Kingdom of Christ.
Interestingly enough the fact that the Ethiopian was black, which might be thought to have been a limitation, was then of no interest at all. Racism, as we know it, is a modern phenomenon deriving most of its force from half-baked so-called scientific notions of the nineteenth century, which are now discredited by the same scientific method as that on which they claimed to be based. Much more important was that this man was doubly cut off from Israel and therefore from the hope of salvation under the Law. The first reason was that he was a Gentile. However he could have become a proselyte, accepting circumcision and the obligations of the law, and in that way be admitted as a second-class citizen into the ranks of the people of God. According to Acts, the Christian faith spread most rapidly among gentile proselytes, like Philip himself.
The second impediment however was not so easily overcome. He was a eunuch, not surprisingly in those days for a high official at the court of a Queen; and according to Deuteronomy 231 he could therefore not be ‘admitted to the Assembly of the Lord’. He was ruled out by both nationality and disability. And there was a Catch 22 in that as a eunuch it was physically impossible for him to be circumcised. He may therefore stand as a representative of all those who seek to enter a promised land but are kept out by discriminatory rules and regulations and by conditions, which are impossible to fulfil.
The astonishing thing, which shows what a remarkable person this Ethiopian was, is that he was not so alienated and put off as to give up reading the Hebrew Scriptures in his search for enlightenment. I hope he came across the story of the Ethiopian eunuch, who rescued the prophet Jeremiah from a lingering death in the cistern of the royal palace in Jerusalem (Jer 38). Like the Ethiopian eunuch in our story he has no name; he is called Ebed-melek but that simply means ‘the King’s servant’ just as our Ethiopian is ‘the Queen’s servant’. As far as the narrators are concerned they are simply government property (GIs); the important thing is that they can be servants of the living God and of his servants the prophets as well. Here already in the Hebrew Scriptures are hints of a universalism, the availability of salvation for all, which will only be fully realised by the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
But there is something else even more obscure and mysterious in the Hebrew Scriptures, which is realised and illuminated in the New Testament, and that is the figure of the suffering servant in Isaiah, chapter 53. For centuries scholars had been asking the question, which the Ethiopian puts to the text he is reading, and they still do: ‘About whom is the prophet speaking? About himself or about someone else?’ I think the answer must be ‘both’, because all poetry is to some extent autobiographical. But it only works, if it connects with and in someway reflects the autobiography not only of the writer but also of the reader. Philip boldly says explicitly that Isaiah was writing about Jesus. That is how the early church appropriated the Hebrew Scriptures. He does not need to say something, which is implicitly obvious, namely that the prophet is writing about you, the Ethiopian eunuch, just as he is writing about me and each one of us, if when we read his words we understand them as applying to us. The Ethiopian eunuch reads: ‘like a sheep he was led to the slaughter, and like a lamb silent before his shearer, he does not open his mouth’; and he remembers his own humiliation, his own pain and passivity and silence on the day when he was castrated, as likely as not like a sheep with shears. All his life he has been trying to understand the meaning of what happened to him then on the worst day of his life. Now he sees his own sufferings transfigured in the light of the sufferings of Christ and for the first time he understands the meaning of his life. This is conversion, the moment when I see my own story – not a success story but a story of weakness and of failure – in Christ’s story, which is also not a success story but a story of cross and passion; and the two blurred images – the image of God and the image of myself – come together in a single focus, in what St Paul calls, ‘the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.’ (2 Cor 4,6).
But individual conversion is not everything. According to St Luke both in his Gospel and here in Acts, justification leads to sanctification, to incorporation into a community and into the life of faith. The pattern of this story is the same as the pattern of the story of the walk to Emmaus. In both a troubled person, trying to understand a tragedy, is joined by a mysterious stranger. On the way to Emmaus between Resurrection and Ascension it is the Risen Christ Himself. On the road to Gaza after Ascension and Pentecost it is one of the Apostles. They enter into conversation about the meaning of certain key passages in the scriptures, which are understood as referring to and fulfilled in Christ. In both cases understanding the word is crucial and in both cases it leads on to a sacramental action. At Emmaus it is a supper after the pattern of the Last Supper; on the Gaza road it is a baptism after the pattern of the baptism of Jesus. It is this pattern, which meant so much to St Luke, which underlay the development of liturgy in the early church and which still constitutes the basic shape of our morning service today, a service of word and sacrament. And both word and sacrament are empty vessels unless they are filled with faith based on the self-identification of the participants with Christ in His cross and passion, His death and resurrection, whereby He dwells in us and we in Him.
Forty years ago I was working in Ethiopia and I had the good fortune to be in Addis Ababa for Timkat, the Feast of the Epiphany. The Emperor Haile Selassie was still on the throne, together with the Queen of England the only anointed Christian prince in Christendom. Processions from every parish, carrying arks and banners and rivalling one another in splendour, converged from all directions upon a central pond. The Emperor and the Patriarch stepped down into the water together and poured water over each other. Then every one joined in with music and dancing and great rejoicing. The meaning of these ceremonies had been given by the words, which had preceded them, when the story of the Ethiopian eunuch was read as their own story and as the story of the nation.
This is how the life of faith is sustained and transmitted through the centuries, indeed the millennia, by word and sacrament, by the conversion of individuals and of whole peoples, by the continual telling and retelling and re-enactment of significant episodes in history. The story of the Ethiopian eunuch was significant for him, it became significant for his people, but above all it is a contribution to the whole of worldwide Christendom. In it the individual, the national and the universal all come together in balance and in fullness. May God bless and accept our ecumenical and multi-national offering of word and sacrament today for the salvation of our souls and for the enrichment of his universal church.
Amen
