Fifth Sunday of Easter, 3 May 2015, Sparkford
Travellers often take something to read with them. If the Ethiopian eunuch described in the book of Acts was a travelling now, he may well have been reading a newspaper, joyous today with the news of the birth of a new princess, but otherwise sadly full of reports of the gruesome slaughter of hundreds of Nigerians in Damasak, or of the murder of 30 Ethiopian Christians in Libya. [1]
But Luke, the author of Acts, tells us that the Ethiopian eunuch, a court official returning home from pilgrimage, had turned to the book of Isaiah for inspiration and spiritual fortification on his journey.
However the Ethiopian eunuch may as well have been reading the newspaper as the scriptures, for he found himself not comforted, but perplexed by the words he found there. Not words of devotional inspiration, but a description of a brutal act of mob violence - the humiliation and slaying of an innocent man. The Ethiopian eunuch was reading one of Isaiah’s texts about the ‘suffering servant’:
‘He was oppressed, and he was afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth;
like a lamb that is led to the slaughter,
and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.
By a perversion of justice he was taken away…’ [2]
You can imagine the Ethiopian eunuch’s questions about this passage. Who was this suffering servant? An individual whose godliness Isaiah had recognised and whose mistreatment he had witnessed? Perhaps Isaiah himself, whose fate was here being commemorated by sympathetic followers? Maybe the people of Israel. The Ethiopian eunuch may have felt some affinity with this despised figure, but would have been as perplexed by the biblical text as many of we are, trying to make sense of the bible through modern eyes. [3]
But the story of the Ethiopian eunuch’s meeting with Philip demonstrates how those closest in historical time to the crucifixion experienced its astonishing revelatory power. We don’t know exactly what Philip said in answer to the Ethiopian’s questions about the text. All we know is that starting with this scripture, Philip proclaimed to the Ethiopian the good news about Jesus. And that in just one sentence he summarised so much!
From the grim story of persecution in Isaiah to the essence of the Gospel in just one sentence. We can tell by the effect it had on the Ethiopian, what a shock Philip's explanation delivered. As a result of this shock, there and then on the desert road from Jerusalem to Gaza, the Ethiopian insisted on being formally admitted into the Christian fellowship. [4]
The writer Gil Bailie says that ‘Philip's insights caused the text from Isaiah to explode in the Ethiopian's [hands].’ When we appreciate the implications of this little story then we might find the Bible exploding in our hands, in much same the way. We know that since that meeting on the road from Jerusalem to Gaza, Christians have read Isaiah’s servant songs as forerunners of the story of Jesus, the Crucified One.
How can you get from a story of mob violence to the good news of Jesus in one move? It’s an important question for us as we seek to embrace the good news of Jesus and share it with others - because living as we do, in a violent world, we long to make the same move ourselves - from the stories of violence which fill our newspapers and screens, directly to the good news of Jesus.
The Ethiopian eunuch must have felt some affinity with the suffering servant in Isaiah. For he was a servant in the court of the Egyptian queen. He was a different race, possibly a different colour, from those he served among; and he was sexually different too: an Ethiopian eunuch in the Egyptian court then would translate to us today as a Polish lesbian, perhaps, or an Iranian transgendered person. Someone who would always be the butt of jokes, a source of suspicion, the one to blame when things went wrong, the first to be forced to leave when paranoia struck in the community. The Ethiopian eunuch: he’d have had it all his life, this suffering servant status.
And the Ethiopian eunuch must have felt the tension in the suffering servant story. On the one hand he would have sensed the innocence of the victim and the wrongness of his persecutors, but on the other hand he would have seen how that same tormented victim did not seek revenge but instead brought restoration to the community. On the one hand Isaiah writes, ‘He was despised and rejected by others, he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities’, and on the other hand the prophet says, ‘upon him was the punishment that made us whole.’
How could his punishment make us whole?
Well, not in the way that our violent society usually thinks about making things whole, putting things right. Our world is driven by an idolatrous idea that violent actions put things right. Violence heals - it is a common myth, the commonest myth in a violent world, even though it is usually hidden from us. Victims of violence ‘put things right’ by dealing violence on others. It was behind the Allied bombings of Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it motivates the terror acts of Islamist extremists today, this myth of redemptive violence. It is the spirit which urges us to punish and expel our outsiders, our Polish lesbians, our transgendered Iranians, our Ethiopian eunuchs. To sort them out, will put things right.
And there, at the heart of the gospel, is the cross. And on the cross is an innocent victim, put there by a crowd of people wanting to ‘put things right’ by executing him. When the crowd screamed at Pilate ‘crucify Jesus, save Barabbas!’ - it was a call to restore order to their society, to keep things as they were.
Now the shock of Philip's explanation of the gospel which convinced the Ethiopian to become a Christian; the way in which Jesus’ punishment makes us whole, is contained in this revelation: that Jesus, the suffering servant, the innocent victim, chose not to ‘put things right’ by dealing violence on others - although he had all the powers of heaven to hand to do so.
Instead Jesus ‘put things right’ by opening the eyes of the world to the reality of the myth of redemptive violence - and its emptiness. The crucifixion of Jesus invited people of the Ethiopian’s generation, to be the first people in history to sympathise with the victim of righteous violence, to begin to see things the victim’s way, to see the injustice in sacrificial violence. And the resurrection of Jesus broke the cycle of violence by the power of forgiveness.
Psychologists working on the behaviour of people in groups show that ‘groups tend to focus on whatever is unusual or different... A group’s attention centres on the rare thing, the outsider.’ They victimise the lone victim. But as early as the next morning those who have taken part in an act of violence against a lone victim will wake up and say, ‘How could I have done that?...’ [5]
‘How could I have done that?...’ - that question torments the world today, as it tormented the world of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch. ‘How could we have done that?...’ asked Michael Keller after a year he spent as a guard in Abu Ghraib, the United States' Iraqi prisoner of war camp: his book Torture Central details many of the abuses of the military there, and his shamed response to them. [6]. ‘How could we have done that? - dropped the atomic bomb?' asked the bomb's designer Robert Oppenheimer and Robert Lewis, a pilot of the Enola Gay, wrote to his parents afterwards asking, 'My God what have we done?'. [7]
‘How could we have done that?...’ It is echoed in the words of Jesus to his Father on the cross, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do’ (Luke 23:34).
The persecutors of Isaiah’s suffering servant did not know what they did, and so they claimed that their victimisation of the innocent was for a higher cause: ‘It was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain,’ they said (Isaiah 53.10). How many wars have been fought with similar justification. How much torture has been committed in the name of God; how many murderers have justified their actions saying, ‘God told me to do it’.
‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do’ - cuts through all of that.
‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do’ - places God outside this world of violence and opens the door into a world of forgiveness.
‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do’ - these are the words of a forgiving victim, a loving victim, whose cross and resurrection broke the cycle of violence forever.
As an outsider the Ethiopian eunuch would have keenly identified with Jesus, the victimised outsider. For eunuchs were outsiders - because they were unusual and different, in the name of God they were banned from by law from admission to the congregation, ‘the assembly of the LORD’, and denied the rights and privileges of their society (Deuteronomy 23:1). A victim of that sort of righteous aggression, the Ethiopian eunuch might have responded as so many other victims do - with aggressive acts of retaliation, subterfuge, protest: responding to violence with yet more violence.
But in that revelation, as Philip explained the story of Jesus to him, the Ethiopian eunuch instead keenly embraced the astonishing revelation of the crucifixion - that the cycle of the world’s violence has been broken by the One who broke the chains of death; that the power of the world’s violence has been overcome by the power of forgiving love.
That’s how the Ethiopian got from a story of mob violence to the good news of Jesus in one move. That’s the good news of Jesus which invites us to make the same move ourselves - from the stories of violence which fill our newspapers and screens, directly to the good news of Jesus. If we react to those who are our enemies in a forgiving spirit, if we connect with those who are outsiders to us in loving grace, then a whole new world explodes into life for us. This is not naivete; this is the Gospel Truth.
And here’s one final brief insight from this story - that the suffering ones of this world hold the key to its salvation, that the intelligence of the victim is the greatest and purest and most saving intelligence of all. When we stand with the oppressed and the afflicted ones: we stand with Jesus. When we listen to those suffering servants who, through it all, are able to forgive: we listen to Jesus.
Notes
This is reworking of a sermon of the same title preached in Devon in 2012.
[1] Royal baby: William and Kate present daughter to the world, BBC, 2 May 2015; Hundreds found dead as details of fresh attack by Boko Haram emerge in Nigeria, Guardian, 28 April 2015; Gerald Butt, Welby fears for future after murder of Ethiopians, Church Times, 24 Apr 2015.
[2] Isaiah 53:6-8.
[3] This section and substantial amounts of this sermon are based on Chapter 3, “The Ceremony of Innocence is Drowned”, in Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled, Humanity at the Crossroads.
[4] Bailie, p.43, altered
[5] Brian Mullen, quoted in Bailie, p.48
[6] Michael Keller, Torture Central.
[7] Robert Oppenheimer, developer of the atomic bombs with which the Americans destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August 1945, Oppenheimer met President Truman for the first time on October 25, 1945, and told him, “Mr. President, I feel I have blood on my hands.” Peter J. Kuznick, A Tragic Life: Oppenheimer and the Bomb, Arms Control Association, 1 July 2005; Pilot Robert Lewis was one of 12 men aboard the plane that dropped a bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, killing 140,000 people. A note he wrote in a log book reveals his heavy heart and the regret he felt immediately after. “Just how many Japs did we kill?” he wrote in a letter addressed to “Mom and Dad” because there was no official record of the bombing at the time. He followed with “My God what have we done?” The note Enola Gay pilot Robert Lewis wrote after dropping bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, www.news.com.au, April 30, 2015. [For integrity this story should be balanced by reports of others of the crew of the Enola Gay, including the pilot, who years after have ‘no regrets’ for their actions on that occasion, see eg Studs Terkel, 'One hell of a big bang’, Guardian, 6 August 2002.]
Comments