Easter 5: The wilderness road

 

Easter 5 2024

Acts 8.26-end, John 15.1-8

 

‘This is a wilderness road’. That little detail in our first reading is in brackets in English translations, apparently an aside, and yet, as things in brackets often are, it’s an aside that we’re meant to notice, something that will help us make sense of the whole story.

 

‘This is a wilderness road’.. It was literally true. Sadly, we have probably all become familiar with the landscape this story takes place in – the road from Jerusalem to Gaza - that flat, parched, bleached landscape of endless sun-baked plains, through which refugees and Israeli troops have moved over the last six months.

 

But I don’t think the author of the book of Acts was just concerned to describe the setting. The point about wildernesses is that they are wild places, uninhabitable, dangerous. There’s no support if you get into trouble. You might find yourself alone and vulnerable. You might get lost. You might even die. And this man whom he meets sounds as if he feels out in the wilderness in more than just the geographical sense.

 

He is in a wilderness spiritually too, confused and uncertain. He’s described as an Ethiopian. He could be of Jewish descent – there were Jewish communities scattered all around the ancient world - but he is probably just one of the many people who were interested in Jewish faith and felt an affinity to it. He is described as being a “court official of the Queen of Ethiopia, in charge of her entire treasury”. He is a wealthy, powerful man. But he is also a eunuch. He may have been a castrated slave or captive. There may have been an accident or illness which left him infertile. Or he may have been born with some intersex condition, but the result was that he was unable to have children. Eunuchs were a popular choice for powerful offices like this in the ancient world. If a man had no children, and no possibility of having any, it was thought that he would be more loyal and less tempted to cheat his employer in order to build up an inheritance for them.

 

But this man would have discovered a problem when he reached the Temple in Jerusalem, because  there were strict rules, set out in the Hebrew Scriptures, about who could and could not enter the Temple and take part in the worship, and being a eunuch, along with a whole range of other disabilities and illnesses, would have ruled him out. It was all to do with a belief that anyone coming into the presence of God in the Temple had to be perfect, unblemished – that applied to the sacrifices that were offered, but also to the people too.

 

It sounds as if this must have been his first trip to Jerusalem, maybe the trip of a lifetime, otherwise he would have known this beforehand. Perhaps he had had to ask special permission to go from his boss, the Ethiopian Queen. Presumably he had made the trip in good faith, and it was an enormous commitment. It was over 2000 miles – a huge trek up through Egypt - but when he got to the end, he would have been rejected, or at the very least, treated as unwelcome, unwanted, unclean, left in no doubt that he shouldn’t have been there. No wonder he’s confused. Does God want his worship or not? It’s not as if he could do anything about his condition. He didn’t choose it. It wasn’t his fault. But it doesn’t feel like that to him as he sits in his chariot, puzzling over the Hebrew Scriptures, reading from the book of Isaiah.

 

He wouldn’t, of course, have had what we know as the Bible – there wasn’t a one volume collection of writings at this stage, either for Jews or Christians. People would only have had scrolls of single books, and maybe just one of those. So it’s possible that Isaiah was all the Scripture he knew. If it was, we can see where his confusion comes from, because Isaiah’s words, written for his people at a time of national catastrophe, were meant to reassure them that despite the exile in Babylon they were living through, despite the apparent failure of the nation of Israel, God still loved them. His prophecies included a number of sections now often now often called the “Suffering Servant Songs”, describing a figure who was “despised and afflicted, a man of sorrows and acquainted with infirmity”, someone who had “no form or majesty that we should look at him” someone “from whom others hide their faces. The verses which the Ethiopian was quoting are part of this passage, from Isaiah 53. “In his humiliation, justice was denied him…His life is taken away from the earth”.

 

Scholars were, and still are, divided on what, or who, was in Isaiah’s mind at the time – a future Messiah? A current figure? Or maybe this was the personification of Israel itself, disgraced and humiliated.  But, whoever he is, Isaiah describes a man who was broken and who apparently has no future. “His life is taken away from the earth.” It’s easy to see the Ethiopian eunuch recognising himself, someone with no children to carry on his line. Yet Isaiah also describes this Suffering Servant  “the righteous one”, one whom God welcomes, honours and uses.

 

I think we are meant to assume that it’s this passage, this idea ,which has appealed to the Ethiopian, and drawn him to make this long trek. Here at last, there seemed to be a God who would welcome even him, but when he got to Jerusalem, he found that those who claimed to follow that God didn’t.

 

“Explain it to me!” he asks Philip. So Philip, in the right place at the right time, by the guidance of the Spirit, does. He tells the Ethiopian “the good news about Jesus”,  that there is one who has just recently lived out the truth of this passage, welcoming those who were humiliated and broken, allowing himself to be humiliated and broken on the cross, and yet God has honoured him, against all expectations, raising him from death.

 

And suddenly in that dry, barren wilderness they come to an oasis. Water in the desert, life in the midst of death. And the Ethiopian says “what is there to stop me being baptised?” Nothing, is the answer. There was plenty to stop him worshipping in the Temple – hundreds of years of deep-rooted prejudice – but there is nothing to stop him getting down into this water and being welcomed into the community of those who follow Jesus, a disfigured, disgraced man who had been raised from the dead in the ultimate affirmation of God’s favour.

 

It’s a story from a world in many ways very different from our own, and yet it speaks loudly and clearly still today, because we still live in a world which often judges by very narrow standards – physical appearance, health, wealth, intellectual ability, social recognition, the ability to fit in. We still live in a world where people with disabilities, people who’ve fallen on hard times, people whose lives don’t fit the tidy moulds we like to squash them in and who have no hope of winning in the rat race are looked down on and judged.

 

But the good news about Jesus is the same as it was when Philip told it to that Ethiopian eunuch. Jesus knows about broken bodies and spirit – his own were broken on the cross. We don’t need to be perfect – physically or spiritually - to come to him. Everyone is welcome to “abide in him”, to be grafted into the vine, not be left out in the wilderness, playing a vital part in the life of the whole, bearing fruit, making a difference, blessing the world.

 

Amen