Perspective: What Matters Most

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What Matters Most

Love never fails.  As for prophecies, they will be brought to an end.  As for tongues, they will stop.  As for knowledge, it will be brought to an end...  Now faith, hope, and love remain - these three things - and the greatest of these is love.

1 Corinthians 13:8, 13 (CEB)

You invite us in
Doesn't matter who we've been
Your arms are open wide
Pulling us to Your side

From "You Invite Me In" by Meredith Andrews

In the Acts of the Apostles, we read that, one day, a man named Philip is instructed by an angel of God to go to a highway that leads west from Jerusalem.¹  On the highway he spots a chariot, which the Holy Spirit instructs him to approach.  In the chariot is a man from Ethiopia who serves as an official in the queen's court.  As a believer in the God of Israel, he has been in Jerusalem worshiping God, and, while he was there, he obtained a copy of the Book of Isaiah.  At that moment, he is reading a passage that is sometimes called the Song of the Suffering Servant.²

As Philip approaches the man from Ethiopia and listens as he reads, he asks him if he knows what he is reading.  At the man's invitation, Philip boards the chariot.  The Ethiopian, who has been reading about someone who was led like a sheep to the slaughter, humiliated, and denied justice, asks Philip whom the prophet is describing.  Philip then tells him about Jesus, who was put on trial by the religious and political authorities, unjustly sentenced to die by a humiliating crucifixion, and resurrected from the dead by God.

Profoundly moved by the Gospel story, the man from Ethiopia wants to dedicate his life to following Jesus.  Seeing some water in the distance, he orders his drivers to stop the chariot and says to Philip, "Look, here is water!  What is to prevent me from being baptized?"

That is a good question.

What could prevent this man from being baptized?

What indeed?

What if I told you that the Bible could prohibit this man from being baptized?

As a man who serves the queen of Ethiopia, the man in the chariot is a eunuch.  In other words, his genitals have been removed.  The Book of Deuteronomy, which is one of the books of the Law, clearly states that "no one whose testicles are crushed or whose penis is cut off shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord."³  According to Scripture, this man is straight out of luck.

And yet, despite this biblical prohibition, God has clearly led Philip to this man and to this moment.  Philip, who surely knows what his Scriptures say about eunuchs, says nothing about the fact that the man has been castrated.  At most, he says, "If you believe with all your heart, you may [be baptized]," to which the Ethiopian says, "I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God."⁴  The two disembark the chariot, and Philip baptizes the man from Ethiopia.

By and large, the Church has always affirmed the authority of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament in matters of faith.  That said, what do we do when, like Philip, we believe that God is calling us to do something that, on the surface, seems contrary to the Scriptures we affirm?

A friend of mine who was once facing such a dilemma considered which apology she would rather owe to God, assuming that whatever choice she made turned out to be wrong.  She considered whether she would rather apologize for doing what she wrongly believed God was calling her to do or apologize for not doing what God really was calling her to do.  If Philip had followed such a thought process he would have considered whether he would rather apologize to God for wrongly welcoming the man from Ethiopia into the assembly of God that is the Church or apologize to God for turning the man away from a life of following in the footsteps of Christ.

When facing such dilemmas, we need to remember what matters most.  St. Paul writes that "the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'"⁵  St. James refers to this summarizing commandment as the "royal law," as it is the law taught to us by our King, namely Jesus.⁶  Jesus himself names this commandment as one of the greatest commandments, second only to the command to love God with all one's heart, soul, and mind.⁷  "On these two commandments," He says, "hang all the law and the prophets."⁸

Adam Hamilton recently suggested that, when we are unsure of what we should do, we should ask ourselves, "What is the most loving thing I can do in this particular situation?"⁹  For Philip, the most loving thing he could do when he encountered the man from Ethiopia was to welcome him into the community of faith and into a life as a disciple of Christ.  If he erred, he erred on the side of love and inclusion.  Nearly two thousand years later, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church still looks to the Ethiopian eunuch, who could never father children, as a spiritual ancestor.

Life is more complex than we want to admit, and our decisions are more difficult than we want them to be.  Simply knowing which Bible verses to quote in any given situation does not get us out of the hard work of discerning what God is calling us to do.  As Christians, we look not only to the Bible for answers but also to Christ Himself, who taught us that we are called to love our neighbors and showed us what it means to love our neighbors through His life and even through His death.


Notes:

1. A majority of this perspective is based on Acts 8:26-39.  Quotations are taken from the New Revised Standard Version.
2. Isaiah 52:13-53:12
3. Deuteronomy 23:1 (NRSV)
4. Note that this part of the story is found as a footnote in many Bibles, as it does not appear in the oldest manuscripts of the Acts of the Apostles.
5. Galatians 5:14 (NRSV)
6. James 2:8
7. Matthew 22:37-39
8. Matthew 22:40 (NRSV)
9. Adam Hamilton.  "Testify to Love."  Church of the Resurrection, 10/04/2020.

The Baptism of the Eunuch was painted by Rembrandt in 1626.