First Reading
Acts 8:26–40
Now an angel of the Lord said to Philip, “Rise and go toward the south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” This is a desert place. And he rose and went. And there was an Ethiopian, a eunuch, a court official of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, who was in charge of all her treasure. He had come to Jerusalem to worship and was returning, seated in his chariot, and he was reading the prophet Isaiah. And the Spirit said to Philip, “Go over and join this chariot.” So Philip ran to him and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet and asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?” And he said, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he invited Philip to come up and sit with him. Now the passage of the Scripture that he was reading was this:
“Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter
and like a lamb before its shearer is silent,
so he opens not his mouth.
In his humiliation justice was denied him.
Who can describe his generation?
For his life is taken away from the earth.”
And the eunuch said to Philip, “About whom, I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?” Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with this Scripture he told him the good news about Jesus. And as they were going along the road they came to some water, and the eunuch said, “See, here is water! What prevents me from being baptized?” And he commanded the chariot to stop, and they both went down into the water, Philip and the eunuch, and he baptized him. And when they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord carried Philip away, and the eunuch saw him no more, and went on his way rejoicing. But Philip found himself at Azotus, and as he passed through he preached the gospel to all the towns until he came to Caesarea. (ESV)
Second Reading
1 John 4:7–21
Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.
By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother. (ESV)
Gospel Text
John 15:1–8
“I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. Every branch in me that does not bear fruit he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit. Already you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you. Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide in me he is thrown away like a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned. If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples. (ESV)
Comments and Questions for Discussion
First Reading
Our reading this week is very familiar – Philip’s encounter with the Ethiopian eunuch. I wasn’t sure I could find anything interesting to say about it until I started reading. It turns out that scholars have given a good deal of thought to certain questions concerning our reading, such as: Was the eunuch a eunuch physically or is this a way of referring to his station as a servant of the Queen? Was the eunuch a Gentile or a Jew (or something in between)? What was Luke’s purpose in including this story and placing in where he did?
The first question, “Was the eunuch a physical eunuch?” I haven’t read all the articles of course, but they were summarized in other material that I read and I come down on the side of “Yes.” The largest reasons for this are 1) the word translated “court official” (dunastes) is used almost interchangeably in the Septuagint for both eunuchs and high court persons. To name this man as both would have sounded redundant in that time. 2) males serving female rulers were often physical eunuchs.
The question of his religious identity is less clear than I’d thought. I have always assumed he was Gentile, but Luke’s choice to place this story before the story of Cornelius calls that into question. Peter’s visit to Cornelius and his baptism of the centurion and his whole family is a marked turning point in Luke’s narrative of the spread of the Gospel. (We read a bit from the Cornelius story next week.) Why would he put the conversion of another Gentile before it? Could it be that the Ethiopian was a Jew?
A few things argue against that. The strongest, in my estimation, is that Deuteronomy clearly says that no eunuch can be a real Jew. (“No one whose testicles are crushed or whose male organ is cut off shall enter the assembly of the LORD.” Deut. 23:1) Some have suggested that perhaps Luke thought of him as Jewish because of the promise to eunuchs in Isaiah,
Let not the foreigner who has joined himself to the LORD say,
“The LORD will surely separate me from his people”;
and let not the eunuch say,
“Behold, I am a dry tree.”
For thus says the LORD:
“To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths,
who choose the things that please me
and hold fast my covenant,
I will give in my house and within my walls
a monument and a name
better than sons and daughters;
I will give them an everlasting name
that shall not be cut off. (Isaiah 56:3–5, ESV)
That the Ethiopian is reading from a chapter so close to chapter 56 (the passage he asks Philip about it from Isaiah 54) seems to strengthen that, but it still seems a stretch.
Finally, it comes back to the eunuch being a kind of “near-Jew.” He has come to worship in Jerusalem, he owns (!) a scroll of the prophet Isaiah. He clearly worships the God of the Israelites, but he cannot be fully a Jew.
This has led some commentators to suggest that he’s a kind of introduction to the conversion of Cornelius (which is so important in Acts that the story is retold again twice). This idea doesn’t work either, because he is no closer to being Jewish than Cornelius is. Cornelius is commended (by the angel!) for his good works toward God’s people and his faithfulness. He is as near a Jew as he could be, and he could actually become one.
Because Cornelius has the choice to become Jewish, his inclusion by Peter without that decision is far more momentous for the story. It raises many more questions for Christians than that of the eunuch.
That brings me to what I came to understand as Luke’s purpose for including this story. Since the eunuch could not have become Jewish, his place of origin takes center stage instead. He comes from “the end of the world.” Ethiopia was the farthest known country south of the Roman empire. It really was “the end of the earth” to them, and this makes this story an anticipation of the fulfillment of Jesus’ prophecy in Acts 1:8, “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”
So our reading this week is about the spread of the Gospel geographically, not theologically. That spread comes in the next story, the one about Cornelius.
Second Reading
Did you know that the word for love used here (agape) and it’s verbal form (agapao) were weak, tepid kinds of love in Greco-Roman literature? I didn’t. In the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, the translators used these words to translate God’s love for humankind. Then Christians took it up to describe the love of God shown on the Cross and this new meaning, a self-giving, sacrificial love took hold. (Usually, when Greeks and Romans wrote about divine beings loving, they used eros.) Just counting the uses of the verb, I found that of the uses of agapao in the New Testament, nearly half of them come in the Gospel of letters of John (47 out of 110). Small wonder that John is called “the Apostle of love.” 17 of those 47 occur in this short, four chapter letter, First John.
Our reading for this Sunday starts off, “Beloved, let us love one another.” But in Greek it reads even more strongly, “Agapetoi, agapomen allelous.” The repetition of “agap…” and the alliteration, using “a” to start all three words makes a really powerful phrase. I can easily imagine that becoming something that was commonly repeated. What’s more, that middle word, agapomen, is in the subjunctive mood. The mood of possibility. The way we translate it, it sounds almost like a command, but when we read this in the context of the rest of this chapter, it becomes clear that “loving one another” is made possible by the truth that we are beloved. So I might venture to translate this, “Since we are beloved, we may now love one another.”
I have written earlier about the split that John’s congregation had suffered. Wrong teaching (Jesus is not the Christ) and wrong behavior/ethics (Hating one’s sibling) are two things that characterize those who have “gone out” from John’s congregation. For John those two markers are only two of three, the third is “love.” It becomes clear as we read our portion of the letter appointed for this week that while the markers of right belief and right action are important, love is the source of both the other two.
This is not a “command” to love, but an exposition on the power and the centrality of love in the community, power to bind and to heal, love that flows from the Father and, indwelling the hearts of believers, changes them, changes us, changes everything.
To me this love is consuming fire. It bleaches away my desires for anything but what God desires, my love for anything that is not rooted in God’s love for the same. It is dangerous, wonderful, beautiful beyond imagining. I long for it and I run from it all at once.
And I’m babbling in the face of it. I should probably stop now before I make an idiot of myself.
Gospel Text
Before I comment on the text itself assigned for this week from John 15, I’d like to take note of its place in the larger farewell discourse(s) in these closing chapters.
The first thing to note is that it interrupts the flow of the discourse that began in chapter 14. John 14:31c concludes, “Rise, let us go from here.” John 18:1 begins, “When Jesus had spoken these words, he went out with his disciples across the brook Kidron, where there was a garden, which he and his disciples entered.” Chapters 15, 16, and 17 are clearly other discourses (or perhaps one other discourse) interpolated into the original text. Scholars differ as to why and how this came to be, but none support the idea that this was the way it was originally written.
Once we admit that this is the case, new questions arise. “Who wrote these new sections?” “Why was it inserted after the other was written?”
Here are my answers, with special attention to the portion of John 15 we have for this week (and next – it concludes this first interpolated discourse).
First, I do see more than one discourse added here, not just one long one, but in the end, that doesn’t matter that much to me.
Second, I also think that they all come from the same author, the author of the Fourth Gospel (the Beloved Disciple) and the Johannine Epistles.
Why they were added then becomes clearer (at least for me) when we remember the conflict that beset John’s community as evidenced in 1, 2, and 3 John (especially 1 John). Juxtaposed as it is with this week’s reading from 1 John, the parallels between being a branch “in the vine” in order to bear fruit and being one who draws on the love of God in order to love others fairly jumps off the page.
The parallel becomes even clearer when we get to the portion of chapter 15 set for next week, but I’ll save that for then. Mean time, we now have a perfectly clear motive for interrupting the narrative of the farewell discourse and journey to the garden. John has added this teaching on the vine and branches for the same reason that Johannine letters were written, to help define what it means to be a part of the community, and what sets one outside it.
Was this teaching on vine and branches original to Jesus? Personally, I think so. Could John have included it elsewhere? Yes. But placing it here, at the climax of the whole Gospel, speaks to the weight that John wanted this teaching to have, given the split that has assailed his community of believers.
I have a general idea that this divide revolves around the idea of having been “put out of the synagogue” that pops up earlier in John (aposynagogos) and also in chapter 17. There is good reason to understand 1 John 2:22 to mean that the “liar” denies that “the Christ is Jesus.”
Who is the liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, he who denies the Father and the Son. (1 John 2:22, ESV)
In other words, the question being asked is “Who is the Christ,” more than “Who is Jesus.” (This is indicated by the absence of an article with the name “Jesus.” Usually the subject nominative, even if it’s a name, would have that article. As “Christ” has the article, Jesus then can be read as the predicate nominative. And no, I don’t know all that Greek, I read it.) This would fit with the conflict with Jews who maintained that the Messiah, the Christ, was not Jesus, and who put Johannine believers “out of the synagogue. But really, that’s all conjecture at this point. I haven’t studied it carefully enough to have any certainty at all.
