Here’s a question to ask ourselves as we move deeper into the season of Easter: what difference does the resurrection make in the way we live and practice our faith? Is the world of the empty tomb substantially different from the world that came before it, or is Easter a mountaintop experience we briefly enjoy but then leave behind to return to “real” life in the valley? For this fifth Sunday of Easter, the lectionary gives us the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch. As young adult, adult, and early in my ministry, I experienced this story from Acts as a one-way teaching moment, that is, as the story of one person (Philip) sharing with another person (the eunuch), Good News. What I took from hearing and writing those sermons was this, faith was a compelling argument, a means to bring another “along”.
What I cherish about it now is the two-way learning it depicts. In my view, Philip is also a student, and what he learns from the eunuch has a great deal to tell us about the life of faith, post-Easter. In his Spirit-led encounter with the Ethiopian official, Philip learns that the resurrection of Jesus changes everything. Everything he knows about insiders and outsiders. The eunuch isn’t the only person in the story who undergoes a conversion; the Spirit leads Philip to experience a conversion as well.
The story begins with “the angel of the Lord” directing Philip to a certain "wilderness road" that leads away from Jerusalem. There, on the geographical margins, Philip finds the Ethiopian eunuch, a man who occupies many margins. He is a man interested enough in Israel’s God to make a pilgrimage from Ethiopia to Jerusalem, but according to Hebrew law, he is not free to practice his faith in the Temple (Deuteronomy 23:1). It’s possible that he is a Jew, but in Philip’s eyes, he is a foreigner, a Black man from Africa. He is a man of rank and privilege, a royal official in charge of his queen’s treasury, but he is also a powerless outsider — a man who doesn’t fit into the social and sexual paradigms of his time and place. He is wealthy enough to possess a scroll of Isaiah, and literate enough to read it, but he lacks the knowledge, context, and experience to understand what he’s reading.
In other words, the unnamed eunuch occupies an in-between space, a space of reversal and surprise that stubbornly resists our tidy categories of belonging and non-belonging. What kind of person, after all, earnestly seeks after a God whose laws prohibit his bodily presence in the Temple? What kind of wealthy, high-ranking official humbly asks a stranger on the road for help with his spiritual life? What kind of long-rejected religious outcast sees a body of water and stops in his tracks because he recognizes first — before Philip, the supposed Christian “expert” — that God is issuing him a gorgeous, unconditional, and irresistible invitation?
The Ethiopian eunuch hears the good news of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection, and decides to become a follower of Christ. That is true and it is wonderful. But consider for a moment the amazing question he asks Philip in return: “Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?” Sit with this for a while as a real question — as a zinger of a question. Ponder it as a dilemma Philip must grapple with as strenuously and as seriously as the eunuch grapples with the life-altering implications of the Gospel.
“What is to prevent me?” What is to prevent me from belonging to the family of God? What is to prevent me from being welcomed as Christ’s own? What is to prevent me from full participation in the risen life and community of Jesus? What is to prevent me from breaking down the entrenched barriers, fences, walls, and obstacles that have kept me at an agonizing arm’s length from the God I yearn for? What is to prevent me from becoming, not merely a hearer of the Good News, but an integral part of the Good News of resurrection?
I listened carefully on two successive Wednesday nights here at Bethany to Tamsin’s story. Kathleen, their mom, talked about how socially awkward her child was, yet how at home they were in the Lutheran church on Sunday morning. Later, when Tamsin began to explore their identity, church once again began to feel like home. But would the church be open to this relationship? Often, when God calls those who may be unfamiliar to our tidy categories, we hesitate to offer the welcome we are called to extend. It is usually the one who is identified as “other” who needs to take the initiative, ask, “what is to prevent me…?”
Notice in this Bible story that it is the eunuch who commands the chariot to stop so that he and Philip can make their way to the water. Philip doesn't say a word; he merely obeys the prompting of the man who knows without a doubt that he belongs, that the God he has worshipped from a distance for so long is now doing a new and earth-shattering thing.
In his beautiful commentary on the book of Acts, theologian Willie James Jennings describes the story of the eunuch this way: “Faith found the water. Faith will always find the water.” The question is not about the wideness of God’s embrace. The question is not about God’s capacity or readiness to lead his beloved ones to baptism. As this story makes abundantly clear, the Spirit will do what the Spirit will do. The only question that remains is whether we’ll participate in the joyful post-resurrection work of God or not. Look, here is water! What is to prevent us from stepping in?
The author tells us not once but five times that the Ethiopian was a eunuch. So what exactly is a eunuch? According to the most current scholarship, in the first century a eunuch is one of two things. A eunuch could have been a man who had been castrated. This particular Ethiopian could have been a castrated male, or he could have been a male who wasn’t like most males. According to the scholars, men who showed a preference for other men or displayed little or no interest in women, or who were in anyway effeminate, in the first century these men were called eunuchs.
At this particular time in history, eunuchs had three major roles in society. Because it was either physically impossible for them to father children, or because of their preferences highly unlikely that they would father children, eunuchs were often employed as military officers, domestic servants, or treasury officers. Without children of their own to worry about eunuchs were also free to be domestic servants and because of their lack of interest eunuchs would be safe to employ around women. As they were unlikely to father children, rulers could trust that eunuchs wouldn’t seek hereditary power so they were often entrusted with positions in the treasury because they wouldn’t need to amass wealth to pass on to their children.
Eunuchs we’re popular employees with queens, who didn’t want anybody casting aspersions on any of their offspring. Now, while rulers entrusted eunuchs with certain key positions, they were pretty much shunned by the rest of society. They were outcasts. According to our story, this Ethiopian eunuch had come to Jerusalem to worship and was returning home. Now the Bible is very clear on the subject of eunuchs and worship. According to the Book of Deuteronomy, which contains the law as it was laid out by Moses, eunuchs were forbidden to worship in the house of God.
The passage the Ethiopian eunuch was reading was about the Suffering Servant of God, who was “cut off” from the people of God. It was no accident he was reading this. Surely, he was trying to figure out why he himself was being cut off from the people of God because if he was reading this passage, he likely also read the neighboring passages where God promised to bless all those who had been excluded and cut off because they were different. In Isaiah 56:2-6 God declares: “eunuchs who keep the Sabbath and follow the covenant will have an everlasting name and blessing, better even than sons and daughters, an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.” Philip shared the Good News of Jesus with the Ethiopian eunuch. This Suffering Servant the eunuch was reading about was someone he could identify with. This was a Messiah who had been cut off, just like him.
Jesus was much like the Ethiopian eunuch, someone who did not, does not, fit easily into any of our tidy categories. He appears in the Gospels, in the most unlikely places, like the wilderness road. But he also appears, in resurrection stories, on the Emmaus Road. He appears as a stranger, as the other, with the other. We, especially the church, look for Jesus to look like us, be like us. But God’s love, God’s house, has “many rooms”, space for all. And what is so amazing to me is this, those whom we have “cut off” still seem keen to “come in”. “What is to prevent me?” Nothing.
“Faith found the water. Faith will always find the water.” Amen.