The Fifth Sunday of Easter, 2 May 2021
Eldroth
“How can I understand what I am reading, unless someone guides me?” the Ethiopian traveller asked Philip. This African was a man on a journey, looking for direction. And he put Philip in the same position as you or I sometimes find ourselves when tourists pull up alongside us on the road and ask, “How do I get to such-and-such-a-place?”
Now, I think that in this case, with the question the Ethiopian asked, Philip might have justifiably given the classic reply, “Well if you want to get there, I wouldn’t start from here.”
For, if you were asked to explain the story of God, to tell the good news of Jesus, to someone who was asking to be directed towards it, I doubt you’d think of starting with these stark and terrifying words of Isaiah which the Ethiopian was reading. They seem to describe the victim of a lynching:
Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter, and like a lamb silent before its shearer, so he does not open his mouth. In his humiliation justice was denied him…. his life is taken away from the earth. [1]
“Well if you want to get there I wouldn’t start from here.”
But the thing is, this was the place the Ethiopian was at. This seeker after truth had opened the holy book, discovered these ancient words which, although they’d been written 700 years previously, felt contemporary to him. He recognised that this was the right place for him to begin. Maybe in Isaiah’s description of a humiliated outsider, he’d seen something of himself. And he wanted to know where this story would go from there. For this story felt so close to his story.
We cannot fully understand his position of course, from this distance in time and place. But from the way our own society works, we can make some confident assumptions: about the way that others in the court of the Sudanese queen would view an emasculated man (more on eunuchs in a minute); about the vulnerability of a black man travelling an unknown road through foreign territory.
The term ‘Ethiopian’ was used by the people of that time in the same way that the word ‘Black’ is used by us today. And royal courts made a practice of employing eunuchs, we’re told, ‘for the safety of the queen and other female royals’, which meant that – if you’ll excuse me talking about genitalia for a moment – they were either emasculated from birth, or they had to allow themselves to be castrated to gain their employment. [2] Like a ram lamb being led to the shed for his rubber ring. [3]
Putting it in today’s crude terms here is a black queer, a gender-bender. He was in a middling job serving wealth, but it’s quite likely that, given his characteristics, it was the only work anyone would give him, and he had to suffer for it. If so, then like Isaiah’s sheep led to slaughter he knew what humiliation was, and feeling the effects of society’s prejudices and injustices, which I’d imagine he encountered on a daily basis.
If this black traveller knew what struggle was, then by the end of his encounter with Philip on the Gaza road, he also knew deep, unrelenting joy. For in that carriage Philip took him on a mental journey which helped the Ethiopian understand the connection between Isaiah’s suffering servant and the life and witness and power of Jesus. We don’t know what Philip said, exactly, but however he explained it, this tale of how God came to earth to show how love can overcome evil marked a place of transformation on the African man’s spiritual voyage. He’d come to the crossroads and it wasn’t the Devil he found there, it was the Saviour. [4]
The story of Jesus’ last days was suffering, humiliation, and justice denied. But it ended with resurrection and the triumph of love and forgiveness over enmity and hatred. The Ethiopian eunuch recognised himself in that struggle, and wanted to share in that glory; in an instant he asked to be baptised. His words inspired one of the great African-American spirituals centuries hence: “Take me to the water,” he demanded. [5]
In light of this episode it is striking to observe that today African Christianity is flourishing, as it is in Asia and South America, that these churches’ vigorous life in Jesus’ good news is bearing great fruit. It is an often quoted statistic that the average Anglican in our world today is black, female and in her late teens or early twenties. [6] Surely this demonstrates how the power released by the story which Philip told that African seeker-after-truth, is as active and potent today as it’s ever been?
It is equally true that the established western churches, fettered to the hubristic culture of old colonial empires, are withering on the vine, energetic only for self-preservation, agnostic about the struggles of the minority peoples among us. But our story needn’t end there. Don’t you think that this exchange between Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch, so many years ago, feels contemporary in the way it speaks of justice, renewal and redemption to people in our society whose life experience is one of humiliation and injustice, those who get treated as outsiders and are searching for affirmation and hope?
There are people like that in our community, in our orbit. If only they could hear and understand this story, and the good news it offers to them. As the Ethiopian eunuch said to Philip, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” Will you and I be like Philip to them?
Notes
[1] Acts 8.32-33 quoting Isaiah 53.7-8
[2] Wikipedia: Ethiopian eunuch.
[3] Wikipedia: Elastration.
[4] “Southern folklore identifies a crossroads or graveyard as the site of having made a deal with the Devil”, Wikipedia: Cross Road Blues: Lyrics and interpretation.
[5] YouTube: “Take me to the water” performed by Nina Simone.
[6] Cathy Ross, Credo: the average Anglican is a black, female teenager. Times Online, 19 July 2008.
