Fifth Sunday of Easter, 29 April 2018
United Service at Clapham
I wonder how you feel about the Bible?
I know a lot of people who feel conflicted about it, somewhat wary of it, for having had the experience of turning to it for spiritual inspiration, or guidance, for good learning and direction, but instead finding themselves embroiled in tales of sibling rivalry, conflicts between neighbouring tribes or nations, with so much bloodletting and wholesale loss of life, and - worst of all, perhaps - finding there not a God of love and peace but a jealous, avenging God ever poised to wreak his wrath on the enemies of his people.
This is a real problem for us - for these scriptures are at the heart of our faith. So what are we to do with them? It’s a particular problem today because there are so many people in our society who would never entertain the idea of opening a Bible, because they’ve already heard about the horrors it contains.
If you, these days, hesitate to embrace the message of these scriptures, I’d like to encourage you: please don’t give up on them, instead take another look. For this collection of writings contains more than one story about God and us; these are texts in tension; scripture has a habit of subverting itself - and this act of subversion, well, we have another word for that. We call it the gospel.
The story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch illustrates this wonderfully well. For here we find a spiritual seeker, returning home from pilgrimage, and on his journey turning to the book of Isaiah for inspiration and spiritual fortification.
But we find him not comforted, but perplexed by the words he found there. He may as well have been reading the newspaper as the scriptures, for there he found 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, going the way of so many prophets? Maybe the suffering people of Israel. I suspect that more than anything the Ethiopian eunuch would have felt affinity with this despised figure, this servant in the court of the Egyptian queen, being of a different race, possibly a different colour, from those he served among; and sexually different too, would doubtless know what it meant to be ostracised, ill-treated by the insider group. You could imagine him being 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. In the name of God eunuchs were banned by law from the worshipping congregation, and denied the rights and privileges of their society. [3]
But the story of the Ethiopian eunuch’s meeting with Philip demonstrates the astonishing revelatory power of the other story scripture tells - the subversion of the gospel of the cross and resurrection. 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 he managed to move:
…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? We long to make the same move ourselves - away from the violence and exclusion of our society towards the good news of Jesus.
The Ethiopian eunuch, from his own experience, 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 that victim brought restoration to the community. ‘He was despised and rejected by others, he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities’, writes Isaiah, who continues tellingly, ‘upon him was the punishment that made us whole.’
How could the punishment of an innocent victim 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 punishing others puts 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. The bombings of Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ‘put right’ the damage of The Blitz; the terror acts of Islamist extremists today, ‘put right’ the immorality they see in western society.
This myth of a violence which redeems, urges us to punish and expel our Ethiopian eunuchs, our outsiders, those who don’t fit in here. If we sort them out, that will put things right. If we crucify them, that will make us whole again. Just one word to illustrate this for today: Windrush. [5]
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!’ - they were calling for order in their society, for things to stay as they were. And the High Priest Caiphas said, ‘It is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed’. [6]
Now the shock of the gospel, the way in which Jesus’ punishment makes us whole, is contained in this revelation: that Jesus, the suffering servant, the innocent victim, chose to ‘put things right’ not by dealing vengeance on others - although he had all the powers of heaven to hand to do so.
The subversive gospel is that 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 see the injustice in sacrificial violence, to sympathise with the victim of righteous violence. This was the beginning of humanity’s ability to see things the victim’s way. And the resurrection of Jesus broke the cycle of violence by the power of forgiveness.
On the cross Jesus asked his Father, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ [7]
‘How could I have done that?...’ - the question tormented the world of Jesus, and Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch, as it torments the world today. ‘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, shamed by the abuses he took part in there. [8]. The Enola Gay pilot Robert Lewis wrote to his parents after dropping the bomb on Hiroshima, “My God, what have we done?” [9]
Trying to make sense of what they’d done to him, the persecutors of Isaiah’s suffering servant 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 [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. Jesus’ prayer places God outside this world of violence and opens the door into a world of forgiveness. For he is a forgiving victim, a loving victim, whose cross and resurrection break the cycle of violence forever.
As an outsider the Ethiopian eunuch would have readily identified with Jesus, the victimised outsider. And as Philip explained the story of Jesus to him, the Ethiopian eunuch’s heart opened to 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 Philip moved the Ethiopian 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. 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 naïveté; 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 the testimonies of those suffering servants who, through it all, are able to forgive: we hear the voice of Jesus.
Notes
[1] This is reworking of a sermon Acts 8: Turning slaughter to salvation preached in Somerset in 2015 and Devon in 2012.
[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] Preached at the time of the debate over Commonwealth immigration, crystallised in the plight of ‘the Windrush generation’ of UK Commonwealth citizens having their residence rights removed.
[6] John 11.50.
[7] Luke 23:34. “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?…’” Brian Mullen, quoted in Bailie, p.48
[8] Michael Keller, Torture Central.
[9] 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.]
[10] Isaiah 53.10.
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