Tale of Ethiopian eunuch is one of radical inclusivity
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Tale of Ethiopian eunuch is one of radical inclusivity
Author of Acts shows that absolutely anyone was invited to join the early Christian movement
My typical source for Sunday morning inspiration comes from attending church with family and friends from my neighborhood, but yesterday it came from an unexpected place: an article in the Washington Post.
The article told the story of small-town Baptist pastor in Georgia whose mission was to welcome, in the words of a sign outside his church, “the tired, the poor, and huddled masses.” And in that church, parishioners find themselves welcomed and loved for who they are — whoever they are. Later this month, the pastor will be baptizing those who wish to be baptized but who have been denied baptism by other churches. “We have the easiest job on the planet as Christians if we want to accept it,” he explained to the Post. “That is simply to love everybody.”
Coincidentally, as I read the Post article, I was pondering the approach I would take to this article, the newest in my twice-monthly essay on selections from the Bible, which this week would cover Acts 6-9. One of the accounts in that selection is the conversion story of the Ethiopian eunuch, who, according to a disputed tradition, was the first known Gentile convert to Christianity.
And the connection between the Post story and the story in Acts was obvious: Both proclaim the idea that the gospel is for all people, including those we might not expect.
The story, found beginning in Acts 8:26, starts with Philip, one of the earliest disciples of Jesus, being told by an angel to travel on the desert road from Jerusalem to Gaza. Along the road he encountered a man. We don’t know his name, but we’re told he was an Ethiopian, a eunuch who was in charge of the treasury of Candace, the queen of Ethiopia. He was returning home after a trip to Jerusalem, where he had gone to worship.
Eunuchs were men who had been castrated for a variety of reasons, one of them being, as apparently was the case here, to allow them to work closely with female royalty because they could be trusted not to have sexual relations. Sometimes the word was used to refer to men who could be trusted not because they had been physically altered, but because they weren’t sexually attracted to women. We don’t know which meaning applies to this Ethiopian, but he certainly was someone outside the sexual norm. Sexual orientation wasn’t a social construct at the time, and I don’t want to overstate the case, but it is no stretch to suggest that if LGTBQ had been recognized as a category in that era, he would have fit well within that group.
And something else about the eunuch makes him noteworthy: Racial categories based on skin color weren’t understood as they are today, but by being from Ethiopia the eunuch almost certainly had dark skin. In the part of the world he was visiting, he would have been instantly recognized as an outsider.
As the story goes, the eunuch was reading from the prophet Isaiah in the Hebrew Bible. This suggests he may have been a Jewish convert or had a Jewish ancestor somewhere, but we don’t know for certain. And that explains why there has been debate over whether the eunuch or Cornelius, a centurion whose story is told later in Acts, was the Bible’s first Gentile convert.
Philip took the eunuch’s questions about Isaiah as a cue to tell him about Jesus. While we know almost nothing about the life story of the eunuch, a question he asks Philip gives us a clue. As they came upon a body of water, the eunuch said to Philip: “Behold, here is water. What is keeping me from being baptized?” This suggests that at some time in his past, he had been denied religious rites of some sort, perhaps baptism, perhaps entry into the Jerusalem temple. (Under Jewish law, castrated men weren’t permitted in the temple. It is also possible that he may have been denied entry because of suspicions related to him being associated with foreign royalty.)
Philip baptized the eunuch without questioning and then, the account says, was snatched away by the Spirit, leaving behind a eunuch rejoicing over his spiritual fortune.
In his choice of details of details, the author of Acts makes clear that it wasn’t happenstance that led Philips to the eunuch: The author is telling us that taking the story of Jesus to the unexpected, to someone who didn’t fit the mold of the already faithful, was a divine imperative.
The story of the eunuch immediately precedes the story of Saul, the persecutor of Christians who became known as Paul and a key organizer of the nascent Christian religion. With these two stories alone, the book of Acts makes clear that there is nothing about a person’s way or being or personal being that can make a person unwelcome to respond to the Good News.
This commentary on Acts 8:26-40 is a part of our Bible for Modern-day Saints series, published to roughly coincide with the schedule of the Come, Follow Me curriculum of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Views expressed are solely those of the author. Biblical quotations are adapted from the World English Bible, which is in the public domain.