A meditation inspired by Acts 8:26–40, one of the Revised Common Lectionary readings for the fifth Sunday of Easter, May 2, 2021; the first in a series called Scripture Shorts
On a global scale bodies–especially poor, dark, despised bodies–are forced through the winepress and consumed by totalizing dynamics of domination. The memory of these dead invokes dangerous memories, which protest our forgetfulness of human others, our forgetfulness of what it means to enflesh freedom in our time and place. But there is one who does not forget–Jesus of Nazareth, who is the Christ of God. He does not forget poor, dark, and despised bodies. For these, for all, for us, he gave his body in fidelity to the basileia tou theou, the reign of God, which opposes the reign of sin. Jesus of Nazareth is the paradigm of enfleshing freedom; he is freedom enfleshed.
~ M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being [1]
Prophetic words are hard to hear, let alone accept. They shine floodlights on canyons of injustice and waves of violence that societies have caused. And they often do it loudly, fiercely, defiantly. Receiving a prophet’s message requires a community to open up enough to notice harms happening in their midst, let go of false stories they may tell themselves about themselves, and work to change inequitable, wounding ways of doing things and organizing social life. And all that takes vulnerability and hope, companions that can be hard to come by in unjust orders.
So what prompts these two characters in Acts 8 to dwell in a gut-wrenching, even terrifying, portion of the prophet Isaiah together in the wilderness? How on earth do they reach a place in the conversation about this figure in Isaiah who suffers an excruciating, unjust end where they encounter good news? How can they possibly respond by volunteering to unite their lives to one who looks just like the figure in Isaiah, when signing up to follow that one could very well mean ending up where he did too?
The move from Isaiah 53 to baptism in this story captivates me. For Christians on this side of Acts who have been trained to understand Jesus as the triumphant victor over suffering, injustice, and death and to perceive following him as a life-giving way, this Acts scene can seem like a suffering-servant-turned-savior success story. Jesus’s resurrection closed the chapter on unjust suffering for everyone. Now all of us can enjoy the good without the bad. Right?
Except Acts is not that kind of story, and followers of Jesus in Acts don’t attain pain-free, injustice-free life. If we rush as fast as possible from the depths of Isaiah 53 to glorious life eternal, I think we risk missing the power of this crucial moment between the deacon, the eunuch, the prophet, the Christ, the wilderness, and the water. In fact, I think we risk missing the message altogether.
The prophet’s words that have gripped the eunuch insist, “Say Their Name.” [2] The prophet refuses to let the “justice . . . denied” (Acts 8:33) wipe this one from the face of the earth and from the memories of the living (Isaiah 53:8). What has happened to this one must not be forgotten or erased. The prophet makes sure that this one’s story is told and brings the stories of victim-blaming or perpetrator-justifying to an end.
I imagine Philip echoing the prophet’s protest when he says “Jesus.” Philip insists on saying Jesus’s name after an empire marshalled its machinery to wipe him from the face of the earth. He tells Jesus’s story after the empire sought to turn Jesus’s body into its own victim-blaming campaign through crucifixion. [3] When Philip describes how Jesus was raised from the dead, I imagine his words amplifying God’s resounding protest to the violent, unjust death Jesus endured, just as Peter’s preaching has since Pentecost in Acts.
I think the good news spoken and heard in this wilderness conversation was the telling of protest stories, not success stories. When Philip starts with the prophet’s poetry to tell Jesus’s story, he connects Isaiah’s protest to God’s incarnate protest, never to be silenced again. In Jesus, God’s voice joins the voices of those who cry out against injustice, violence, and death-dealing forces, refusing to let them cry out alone in the wilderness. [4]
And in this place too demanding and depleted to support life, the protest stories weaving together are like cool streams cascading through hot, arid land. Where every inch of the landscape would suggest such words cannot mean or accomplish anything, they surge. They turn dusty desert into baptismal shores. They create a watery highway right next to the wilderness road for thirsty, wilderness-exiled people to meet a thirsty, wilderness-exiled God and hear this God say their names. [5]
Philip and the eunuch whose name the narrator does not provide could have discussed any number of other scriptures that day in the wilderness. They could have relished the joyful words of a hymn in the Psalms or even the “comfort” part of Isaiah just a few chapters earlier (Isaiah 40:1ff). But they took their time with this sacred text in this deserted place. They heard good news and found fresh water. Their own protest stories became part of God’s protest story. In a world that may have deemed each of their stories as not worth telling—socially, politically, ethnically, sexually—Philip and the eunuch raised their voices with the prophet and encountered a God who knows their stories by heart and who will keep crying out with them, wherever they go, for justice. [6]
References
1. M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010), 53.
2. The source for this phrase is the “#SayHerName” campaign by the African American Policy Forum, https://www.aapf.org/sayhername.
3. This idea is drawn from New Testament scholar Joel Marcus’s description of how Jesus’s crucifixion was a shaming mechanism of the Roman Empire intended to inflict a punishment that fit the so-called crime of rising up against imperial power. See Joel Marcus, “Crucifixion as Parodic Exaltation,” Journal of Biblical Literature 125, no. 1 (2006): 73-87.
4. An allusion to the voice in Isaiah 40:3, 6. I am also drawing upon liberation theology traditions of interpreting Jesus’s crucifixion, suffering, and death in solidarity with all who have suffered or died under oppression, including James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree, Wonhee Anne Joh’s Heart of the Cross: A Postcolonial Christology, and Copeland’s Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race and Being, among others.
5. Allusions to Isaiah 35 and 55.
6. Theological and Africana Studies scholar Willie Jennings provides a helpful outline of the multiple ways that Philip and the eunuch bore marks of difference and marginalization in the context of the first-century Greco-Roman geopolitical landscape in his commentary on Acts. He notes that both were diasporic Jews and highlights the intersections of the eunuch’s Ethiopian, black, enslaved, and non-binary sexual identity and elevated, yet subordinate, social position as the queen’s court official. See Willie James Jennings, Acts (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2017), 64-66, 81-84.
Scripture quotations are from The New Revised Standard Version.
Featured image of “Sand” is by Wolfgang Hasselmann on the Unsplash website, https://www.unsplash.com.
