Acts 8 provokes questions upon which the church still ruminates, as it listens to the Spirit: what will it mean for the gospel to be good news for all people, particularly those in pain? And how does what the gospel is – Jesus, crucified, dead, and risen again – inform what evangelism does? How does a suffering servant, a man full of sorrows and acquainted with grief, we’re told (Isaiah 53:3), become good news for us?
In Acts 1:8 Jesus told his followers that they would be his Spirit-led “witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” By the time Acts 8:26 rolls around, they have been in all those places except one: the ends of the earth, wherever that is. Well it turns out that the “ends of the earth” isn’t too far. In fact, it’s surprisingly and uncomfortably close – it’s a foreign, excluded, and traumatized neighbor that we encounter on the road. Evangelism “to the ends of the earth” involves the solidarity of our pain connecting us with other’s pain and the healing power of God’s pain in kinship with all of us.
Who is our evangelist, Philip? Remember that Jesus uniquely commissioned the twelve apostles (Acts 1:5, 8). They were supposed to be devoted to preaching and prayer. So much so, that when a dispute arose over how to distribute food to an excluded minority in the church, they handed it off to others (Acts 6:2-4). Philip was one of those “others,” a waiter, a food server, one of those marginalized Greek-speaking Jews who were being mistreated by others.
Believers who have dialed into Jesus’ upside-down kingdom, the place where the servants rule and the Spirit works, should know to keep an eye on marginal waiters - the excluded (Philip was both). They should not be taken off guard when Acts unfolds with the surprising storyline: it wasn’t the Apostles initially who went and preached to Samaria and the whole world. It was Philip - a marginalized, soon -to-be traumatized waiter who brought the good news of God’s love “to the ends of the earth.”
In Acts 8 Philip is sent far from the controversies of food distribution, to bring the gospel to Samaria (Acts 8:4-25). But what sends Philip? It’s important to remember that what fuels his sending is the trauma and fear of violence and death. In Acts 8:1-4 we read:
On that day a great persecution broke out against the church in Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria. 2 Godly men buried Stephen and mourned deeply for him. 3 But Saul began to destroy the church. Going from house to house, he dragged off both men and women and put them in prison.4 Those who had been scattered preached the word wherever they went.
This is painful and scary stuff. But here’s the irony. God seems to believe that the gospel is often best heard from “those who have been scattered.” Why? Because somehow the impetus for kinship, for the church, isn’t winning the lottery, isn’t a similar job, upbringing, class, what kind of house you have, or raising 2.5 kids, but found in the bonding effect of our own shared experiences of pain. And that is most true for Christians because our message is that God became fully human, sharing our pain, and dying on a cross as the deepest expression of God’s love. The cross was God’s voluntary acceptance of undeserved suffering as an act of total solidarity with the pain of the world so that we might experience the undeserved, ever-giving love of God. If you want to bear the good news of the gospel you must embrace your pain knowing that God exists even there and that God has made a way by entering into the pain of us all. And everyone is in pain. We must never imagine that we can speak about the triumph of the resurrection without the trauma of the cross. If we fall back on a triumphalist gospel without a sense of our own trauma or its trauma, we will never go to people in pain who truly need good news. Don’t ever be afraid to speak of your own pain. Pain is often how we are sent. Pain ordains Philip and the Spirit now sends him to someone else – the Ethiopian, court official, literate, powerful, don’t forget rich, eunuch, who is also in pain.
This fascinating, multifaceted, powerful figure is foremost defined by his pain, being a eunuch, and it is this sexual characteristic that is most expressed in the story. He is first introduced as “a man, an Ethiopian eunuch.” Leading with “man”—anēr/“male” is Luke being prophetically ironic: by social definition, a eunuch is no-man, neither male nor female. Though enjoying advantages befitting his high economic and political status (he rides in a chariot, owns a scroll, is educated, literate, with political power), his involuntary condition brought upon him at a young age through violence marks him as both a victim and outsider– which is why, after his fuller introduction, the narrative ONLY identifies him as “the eunuch” (ho eunouchos, 8:34, 36, 38, 39). Can you remember that?
Whatever benefits he has in the Queen of Ethiopia’s court, he suffers widespread stigmatization in Gentile and Jewish society as a permanently mutilated figure unable to procreate—in short, a threatening sexual anomaly. More importantly, he religiously remains “cut off” by Scripture from full participation in the covenant community, according to Deuteronomy 23:1 and Leviticus 21:16-23. Because he was a eunuch, he could not worship with others. He would not have been able to enter the temple nor eat any sacrifices that he had sponsored. Culturally he would have been considered a bad omen if you crossed his path. In fact, calling any man a eunuch was considered an insult. Imagine that for a moment – his un-chosen status was used as a slur. His wealth and power couldn’t stop that or help him belong. No money or power can heal that trauma only a traumatized savior.
In our story, the eunuch is reading Isaiah 53:7-8 which becomes a springboard for Philip telling the eunuch about the good news of Jesus (Acts 8:32-35). It’s an odd text for good news. But the eunuch is not just reading it randomly when Philip arrives. He’s reading a text that connects with his pain.
“About who,” he asks Philip, “does the prophet say this, about himself or someone else?” Despite his wealth and prestige, he wonders if it doesn’t include himself: as one led to the slaughter of castration and humiliated, as one who whose life will be taken away from the earth because he incapable of generating descendants who will tell his story. And that place of trauma, for Philip, is the place to tell the story of Jesus who understands pain and trauma. “Yes,” Philip must have said, “he suffered for us on our behalf. This text IS about the you and is about God.” Friends, the gospel, and God’s own practice of delivering good news, is about God validating and acknowledging our pain and offering love by sharing it. Jesus reveals who God is and what love is through his voluntary willingness to compassionately share our pain in order to heal it and make us whole.
This Jesus, God’s Son and Messiah, suffered in sympathetic solidarity with all victims of violence and stigmatization, like Isaiah’s slaughtered lamb—and the Ethiopian eunuch. And the best news is that “his life which was taken away from the earth in injustice” (Isaiah 53:8, Acts 8:33) but ended in resurrection and exaltation by God, thus opening the household of God for all sufferers—including eunuchs, foreigners, and “outcasts.” C.S. Lewis speaking about friendship captures the power of this solidarity by stating that friendship occurs when one says to another: "What? You too? I thought I was the only one." God’s love and friendship are cemented through co-suffering love.
And yet, the trauma lingers in our story and the Ethiopian eunuch offers one more test, by asking one more painful question. After believing this good news, he wants to know – Will I belong? “Look, here is water!” He cries. And then, “What can stand in the way of my being baptized?” That phrase in vs. 36 “stand in the way” is one word in the Greek - koluo [hinders, denies, restrains, punishes]. Why would he imagine that something might hinder him? And Philip could’ve said, “Well, for starters, the Bible tells me so.” He could have rightly quoted Deuteronomy 23:1 or Leviticus 21:16-23 in context and hindered the work of God. So not only does the gospel only make sense when we acknowledge our pain, others pain and God’s pain. The Bible will only make gospel sense, be read as good news, when we read it as God’s story of pain so that we all might healed and belong. We read it as God’s desire to suffer our pain and exclusion to bring about our salvation. Though he doesn’t quote, Philip must have known that in Isaiah 56, a few chapters later, the prophet will challenge Deuteronomy 23:1, and tell of a future salvation that will include “eunuchs” making the extraordinary claim that they will be given a name “better than sons and daughters” (Isaiah 56:5). Because of the suffering of Jesus Christ, the suffering of others, and his own suffering– Philip understood that one scripture was no longer true, no longer to be followed, and that another text was to take its place. He came to this conclusion not because he was awfully clever but because he had come to experience a God in Jesus Christ who is always, even in suffering, with us and for us, forever. Christianity knows of no healing, no salvation, no wholeness without sharing pain and offering belonging. This was a God who suffered our pain so that we might know and find acceptance for ourselves, kinship with others, and kinship with God. Amen.
