Philip and the Eunuch

Recorded live at the indoor service the Fifth Sunday of Easter, April 21, 2023.

 

Imagine the scene: Philip has been told to go south, along the road from Samaria, to where it intersects the road from Jerusalem to the coast, to Gaza in particular. You can even see a picture of the Roman road at this spot on Wikipedia, adjacent to Highway 375, at what was Eleutheropolis and is now Bayt Jibrin.

Rather than a lone man, the Ethiopian eunuch must, given his status, have had something of a caravan. Not unlike watching a motorcade go past in Washington or New York.

He will have had a chariot driver, and I assume the chariot will have been rather magnificent, with our eunuch seated in splendour behind him.

We do not know whether the eunuch was Jewish, or just interested in Judaism. We know there were Jews in Egypt at this time, but have no record of any in what was described as Ethiopia, but is now more like where Sudan is.

We perhaps forget that there were seekers after God then, who sought to learn what they could about God, even from far away faiths or philosophies – the trade highways around the Mediterranean world were also highways for knowledge and ideas.

But then our eunuch must have been used to not quite falling into any one category. His status at the court of the Ethiopian queen must have been equally uncertain: in charge of the whole treasury, and yet by his castration outside the usual social and power structures.

And so for him, maybe not quite fitting in with the rest of the court’s religious observance, and having an interest in the God of Israel – even going on the long journey to Jerusalem to worship – fitted with the ambiguous status which he occupied in the rest of his life.

And as he travels along, he reads. Perhaps he acquired the scroll of Isaiah at great cost on his pilgrimage to Jerusalem, where pilgrims still shop for religious paraphernalia, even if that flow of pilgrims is currently no more than a trickle, and no-one could now travel along that road linking Jerusalem and Gaza.

The sound of the chariot and his train progressing coastwards is I assume a loud one. Philip stands by the road, and can somehow make out those words of the prophet’s which the eunuch is reading aloud (for it would be a few centuries before people learned how to read silently, in their head). And as the chariot wheels continue to turn, Philip manages to shout out, before the eunuch disappears on his way ‘Do you understand what you are reading?’

An impertinent question you might think. But, guided by the Spirit, Philip is confident.

The chariot slows to a halt, Philip no doubt having to jog to catch up as it does so.

The eunuch is gracious. We assume he has probably learned Greek, the lingua franca of the Mediterranean, even under the Romans, or do they speak to each other in Hebrew? ‘How can I, unless someone guides me?’ and he invites Philip in to sit beside him – this is not the kind of small racing chariot we may be familiar with from the movies! Perhaps he is offered a drink too?

Questions that have been going round in the eunuch’s head he can now ask someone. Who is this sheep I’m reading about, who was led to the slaughter and responded with silence as his life was taken away?

And so Philip unfolds the scriptures, telling the eunuch of this Jesus.

What a wonderful encounter, between two men who would never have met or spoken in the ordinary course of things.

———–

Just think, for a moment, of people whom you have had such conversations with. Whom did you approach when developing your interest in our faith, in Jesus? A parent, a friend, a stranger in a church which you had found yourself in?

Or whom have you helped, being there to accompany their wondering, their grasping questions as the person of Jesus was being made known to them by the gentle working of the Spirit?

Conversion happens in many ways: it rarely takes the form of a Damascene moment as for St Paul, or even if it does, that is often following more personal encounters over time.

Today the Faithful Innovation team are beginning a series of sessions here developing and exploring spiritual practices, beginning today with Dwelling in the Word in the library at noon, and I’m looking forward to following that work and seeing what develops.

For me it really highlights something I see in this story of the eunuch: that our salvation is worked out in community. Moments of decision may be individual ones, but our faith is a collective one, and we work it out in fear and trembling in conversation with others.

For me, working out my faith, and daring to go to church, were things I could only have done with friends and trusted guides. The same went for my coming out, a few years later, and it is no accident that for me the two felt like similar processes, because both were about who I felt myself to be in my core. But our deepest identities, while feeling very personal to us, never actually exist in isolation.

I wonder who the eunuch had spoken to about his faith, and who he felt himself to be, deep inside, carrying all his various – some ambiguous – identities, before Philip hailed him from the roadside? Others with an interest in the Hebrew God? Perhaps merchants he was buying grain or cloth from for his Queen? Perhaps teachers in the courtyard of the Temple, as Jesus had been?

Exploration of faith and identity should always lead us beyond ourselves, and if we are lucky we will find others who in love help us to explore and grow. That is the posture which we should adopt too as we seek to share our faith beyond the walls of the church: a posture of listening and openness, but also showing forth the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.

Because, as St John tells us, ‘if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.’ And it is my view that we only show that love by having an open posture, knowing that the Spirit is already working wherever we would seek to go, rather than seeing another person as just another soul for us to save.

That view of salvation speaks of fear. ‘[However] [t]here is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. We love because he first loved us. … God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.’

That word ‘abide’ is also the word at the heart of our gospel for today: we have been grafted into Jesus the True Vine: ‘Abide in me as I abide in you.’

Abide is a word that speaks of remaining and of security, just as does the metaphor of a vine.

How does that fit with the disciples’ and our mission being one that is out there on the road?

With our having no care for tomorrow?

With Philip’s wanderings, guided only by the Spirit?

Well, in that way of life, which is even open to love being present in a conversation between two strangers exploring who God is, that love of God blossoms, and the love of God abides.

In casting out fear to reach out to those who are different, and may before have seemed threatening, the love of God abides.

And all we have to do is to ‘Abide in me as I abide in you’ as Jesus puts it. ‘Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit.’

And you can tell the presence of the love of God in the conversation between Philip and the eunuch by its fruits: and those fruits come in the trust with which the eunuch responds – responds by giving the rest of his life: ‘Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptised?’

And as with their conversation, the eunuch does not now enter the water alone, but he and Philip enter it together, as the eunuch then goes down into it and begins his new life.

Philip may now be snatched away, travelling north at the coast to Caesarea, and the eunuch we imagine takes his ship back across the sea from Gaza to Egypt before then sailing down the Nile back to his homeland.

That is of course the way of things, just as I no longer see so many of those without whom my life would have taken a very different course. And yet the eunuch’s identity would now be in that community of love of which we all remain part, in which we all abide: grafted into the very person he asked about, Jesus the True Vine, just as we all are in receiving His Body and Blood together in this Eucharist.

‘God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.’

 

Image: Detail of the so-called Antioch Chalice in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. It dates to c.500–550, and is believed to be from Antioch or Kaper Koraon. Photograph (2017) by Fr. Lawrence Lew, O.P, reproduced under CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0 via Flickr.