Sourton, Bratton Clovelly, Easter 5, 6/5/2012
Travellers often take something to read with them. On Captain Scott’s doomed expedition to the South Pole, Scott and others in the party carried with them personal copies of the Book of Common Prayer. Scott, said to be an agnostic, nevertheless led the reading of Morning Prayer each day on the expedition; Scott’s closest confidant and devout Anglican Edward Wilson carried a Prayer Book which was a gift from his wife, and his last letter to her ended, ‘Your little testament and prayer book will be in my hand or in my breast pocket when the end comes’. [1]
Presumably the troubled explorers regarded the reading of the scriptures and liturgies as a necessary source of strength and encouragement as they travelled. And we can imagine that the Ethiopian eunuch described in the book of Acts, a court official returning home from pilgrimage, had turned to the book of Isaiah for inspiration and spiritual fortification on his journey.
But the Ethiopian found himself not comforted, but perplexed, by the prophet’s text. For the man found himself reading, not words of devotional inspiration, but a description of a brutal act of mob violence - the humiliation and slaying of an innocent man. We have come to call these texts the ‘suffering servant’ passages. The Ethiopian may as well have been a modern day traveller reading newspaper reports of a lynching in one of our cities, or yesterday’s news of the gruesome slaughter of at least 23 people in the Mexican city of Nuevo Laredo, on the US border. [2]
You can imagine the Ethiopian eunuch’s confusion with this passage. Who was the suffering servant? An individual whose godliness Isaiah had recognised and whose mistreatment he had witnessed? Perhaps the prophet himself, whose fate was commemorated by sympathetic followers? Maybe the people of Israel. The Ethiopian eunuch would have felt some affinity with this despised figure, but would have been as perplexed by the biblical text as are many modern readers of the bible. [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.
When has one sentence summarized so much! [says the writer Gil Bailie]. From the grim story of persecution in Isaiah to the Gospel in one sentence. From its effect on the Ethiopian, we are made aware of the shock which Philip's interpretation delivered. As a result of this shock, there on the desert road from Jerusalem to Gaza, the Ethiopian insisted on being formally admitted into the Christian fellowship. [4]
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 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 share the good news of Jesus with others - in a violent world.
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 the torment of the victim brought restoration to the community. On the one hand Isaiah writes, ‘He was despised and rejected by others’, and on the other hand the prophet says, ‘He was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole.’
In feeling the tension in the suffering servant story the Ethiopian eunuch might have been a contemporary man, opening his newspaper to find stories of righteous crowds making common cause by uniting against culprits or adversaries which have been chosen more or less at random. Rioters smashing the shops of neighbours, for instance; punishing the shopkeepers to gain a sense of satisfaction and wholeness for themselves. There is clearly a wrongness in such actions. But for those involved there is a strong sense that their 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. It equally applies to nations ‘putting things right’ by dealing violence on others. Since the bombing of the civilians of Dresden and the wholesale destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, questions about the myth of redemptive violence and its hold on us have risen to the surface and simmered. Might these questions lead us to a revelation of the good news of Jesus Christ?
Reading the story of the suffering servant the Ethiopian eunuch had his eyes opened to the myth of redemptive violence; even as he simultaneously saw the injustice in it. That was the beginning of the opening up of the gospel to him.
Because 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 affirm their group identity by executing him. 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.
The crucifixion of Jesus helps us to see in scripture, as the Ethiopian saw for the first time, a critique of the myth of redemptive violence. 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.
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 centers 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 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. [6]. ‘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.
The Ethiopian eunuch would have keenly identified with Jesus, the victimised outsider. For eunuchs were outsiders - unusual and different and in the name of God disallowed by law from admission to the assembly of the LORD (Deuteronomy 23:1). Banned from the congregation and the rights and privileges of that society. Having had that sort of righteous violence done to him, the Ethiopian would have keenly embraced the astonishing revelation of the crucifixion - that the power of such violence has been overcome by the power of forgiving love; that the cycle of the world’s violence has been broken by the One who broke the chains of death; that the suffering servants 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.
Notes
[1] John Scrivener, Editorial - A Tale of Two Prayer Books, Faith and Worship, 70, Easter 2012, p.4. Download here.
[2] Mexico drugs: 23 bodies found in Nuevo Laredo, BBC News 4/5/2012.
[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
[5] Brian Mullen, quoted in Bailie, p.48
[6] See www.torturecentral.com.
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