Thursday of the Third Week of Easter
The Ethiopian eunuch that Phillip encounters at the urging of the angel of the Lord is, obviously, a big deal. The text informs us that he is “a court official of the Candace, that is, the queen of the Ethiopians.” Moreover, we are told that he is “in charge of her entire treasury,” a huge responsibility, to be sure. There he is sitting in his chariot, reading the prophet Isaiah. The angel tells Phillip to go to him, which Phillip does. And he asks the eunuch, “Do you understand what you are reading?” The eunuch’s reply is worth noting. He says, “How can I, unless someone instructs me?”
Back in the 16th century, during the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther insisted that the final authority on God’s Word was not clergy or the Church but scripture. “Sola scriptura” (scripture alone) was his phrase. In the end, Luther argued, it is the Word of God that tells us what it means to be faithful Christians. This idea was taken up with real enthusiasm at the time. And has been crucial to how many Christians (perhaps most in the US) understand their relationship to Scripture. Later, with the rise of Protestant fundamentalism, the idea became that anyone can figure out what “the plain [and obvious] meaning of any Scripture is.” It’s obvious, don’t ya know.
Or is it?
Just one brief example. The folks that Bill and I write about—Answers in Genesis who own the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter—insist that there is only one plain, literal, and faithful way to read the Creation story in Genesis. And it’s super obvious. God created the Earth (along with the rest of the universe) in six twenty-four-hour days less than 10,000 years ago. Note: if you read the genealogies in the Bible literally, the Earth can’t be older than 10,000 years. (Mainstream science, by contrast, holds that the Earth is millions if not billions of years old.)
Moreover, that story is simple and its lesson also obvious. God’s creation was good. In the course of his creation, God created Adam and, later, Eve (from Adam’s rib) and the two of them enjoyed an unfathomably good life in paradise. That was until Eve (sinner that she was) and then Adam (who failed to exercise the requisite control over his disobedient wife) broke the super simple rule that God gave them: don’t eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They did anyway. And he had to punish them. So he tossed them out of the Garden, made them mortal, and obliged them to suffer in various ways.
The lesson: God has his rules. He expects obedience. And if you don’t give it, you will pay. For eternity.
Well, that is one way to read the Creation story—oops, stories—in Genesis. Yes, it turns out that there is not one but two Creation stories in Genesis. They are back to back. In the first story, God creates Adam and Eve at the same time, and the story finishes with God resting on the seventh day. In the second story, God creates Adam first and then the animals and so forth and then, when he realizes that Adam is lonely, creates Eve from his rib. And it is in this version (not the previous one) that the whole sin scene unfolds and God kicks them out of the Garden.
As I have said in previous reflections, there are times when the Scriptures do seem painfully obvious. When Jesus says, for instance, love your enemies, that seems pretty straight forward. But the idea that it is a nothing to reconcile these two very different Creation stories (the order of Creation doesn’t even match up in these two stories) takes me back to our reading from Acts today.
The eunuch’s rhetorical question to Philip—“How can I, unless someone instructs me”—stands out as both humble and wise.
When Jesus is telling us to love our neighbor as ourself, to love our enemy, and to be peacemakers, that works as obvious, to my mind. But so much else does not. Like the eunuch, I need help reconciling stories in the Bible that seem to challenge one another. Or stories that strain credulity—like the one about Jonah spending three days in a fish or the story of the sun standing still.
The Bible is this incredibly powerful and authoritative text. It has much to teach us. And we are wise to attend to our need of instruction and the crucial importance of being choosy about from whom or where we get that instruction.
One of the reasons that I became Catholic is that I know I need help to understand what God is trying to tell us through His Word. And I know that it would be unwise to seek that help from folks who peddle interpretations of Scripture that invite easy condemnations of those so-called enemies Jesus told us to love.
The eunuch’s wisdom is wisdom for all of us. May we be forever humble before the Word of God. And may we seek the wisest counsel we can find on how to understand it. In other words, may we keep going to/watching online/reading online the powerful and insightful homilies of the very gifted pastors in our family of churches. They have much to teach me, that I know. And I want to learn. Like the eunuch.