Does God ever change his mind about what he wants? Or is it we who change our minds, about what we think God wants? Today’s reading from Acts 8.26-40 gives us food for thought. In this reading, the apostle Philip encounters, and soon baptizes, an Ethopian eunuch. Let’s start with a reflection attributed to to the Rev. Michael Russell of All Saints, Point Loma, California:
I was shocked, shocked! to read Acts this morning and realize that Philip took unilateral action to include the outcast eunuch. Who in the world authorized him to circumvent Deut. 23 which excludes men with genital disfigurement?
Did he check with the rest of the Apostles? Was there a Council? Was there 30 years of discussion?
Nope, there was water nearby and so, violating the scriptures, and without an authorized liturgy for the purification of the permanently outcast, he just Baptized the eunuch.
(Hat tip to the Rev. Susan Russell [no relation])
If we accept the views of liberal activist Ched Myers in A House For All Peoples? (Soujourner magazine, April 2006), Philip didn’t violate “the Scriptures” at all, because the Deuteronomic exclusion of eunuchs was overruled by Third Isaiah. Recall that the Ethiopian eunuch was reading the suffering-servant prophecy in Second Isaiah, chapter 53. Just a couple of chapters later comes chapter 56, verses 2-8, which Myers says establishes a new standard for who will or will not be admitted to the house of the LORD:
3 Let no foreigner who has bound himself to the LORD say,
“The LORD will surely exclude me from his people.”
And let not any eunuch complain,
“I am only a dry tree.”4 For this is what the LORD says:
“To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths,
who choose what pleases me
and hold fast to my covenant-
5 to them I will give within my temple and its walls
a memorial and a name
better than sons and daughters;
I will give them an everlasting name
that will not be cut off.
6 And foreigners who bind themselves to the LORD
to serve him,
to love the name of the LORD,
and to worship him,
all who keep the Sabbath without desecrating it
and who hold fast to my covenant-
7 these I will bring to my holy mountain
and give them joy in my house of prayer.
Their burnt offerings and sacrifices
will be accepted on my altar;
for my house will be called
a house of prayer for all nations.”8 The Sovereign LORD declares—
he who gathers the exiles [1] of Israel:
“I will gather still others to them
besides those already gathered.”[1] Thus in NIV; in other major translations: outcasts
We could argue that verses 3-5 admit only a monument to the eunuch’s name to the house of the LORD, not the eunuch himself. Even so, Fr. Russell’s question remains a pointed one: If Deut. 23 still required that the eunuch be treated as an outcast, why was Philip having anything to do with him?
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