Sermon about How to read the Bible by Kenneth Padley for the Fifth Sunday of Easter 2nd May 2021 based on Philip and the Ethiopian in Acts 8.26-40 and John 15.1-8.
‘Do you understand what you are reading?’ asked Philip.
‘How can I, unless someone guides me?’ replied the eunuch.
Lord give us guidance as we reflect on today’s readings, asking that you would open your word to our hearts, and our hearts to your word. Amen.
Our set texts today come from the Gospel of John and the Acts of the Apostle, two biblical books from which we hear a lot during this season of Easter. We get a lot of John because of its elevated christology – its emphasis that Jesus was raised not just by God but because he is God. And we hear a lot from Acts because it records how the first Christians took the Easter message of the risen Jesus around the known world.
Thus, this morning we heard from John chapter 15 about the proximity of Jesus to God the Father, like a vine to the vine-grower. The vine has branches, and the branches bear fruit. And this in turn is the mission of the Church – which takes us neatly to the Acts of the Apostles.
Today’s reading from Acts chapter 8 reflects a pivotal moment when Christian faith left Jerusalem for the first time. In Acts 8.1 we learn that there was a significant diaspora of believers fleeing the holy city after the death of St Stephen, the first Christian martyr. Meanwhile, at the same time, there were Jews coming into Jerusalem on pilgrimage and who were encountering the Christian version of their faith, a Judaism which claimed God’s anointed saviour, the Messiah, to be a recently executed carpenter from an obscure northern village. Improbable though it sounds, the claim must have stuck with some of them because, in time, pilgrims carried this infectious new variant Judaism, back to their homelands.
One such super spreader was a reproductively-challenged civil servant from East Africa. Shortly after commencing his return journey from Jerusalem, the Ethiopian eunuch was met by the Apostle Philip. In the ensuing encounter, Philip’s Eastertide effervescence gave the eunuch new insight into his inherited faith, and in particular into what he was reading from the prophet Isaiah.
‘Do you understand what you are reading?’ asked Philip.
‘How can I, unless someone guides me?’ replied the eunuch.
This plea of the eunuch challenges us to think about the way in which we read the Bible – which of course presumes that we do read the Bible. Tony Hurle the former Vicar of St Paul’s church in Fleetville once told me that he enjoyed embarrassing his congregation by asking whether they have read the Bible in their homes during the previous week. Far be it from me to put anyone in such an uncomfortable position, I just note my confidence that we are, umm, on the same page.
‘Do you understand what you are reading?’ asked Philip.
‘How can I, unless someone guides me?’
We have no Apostle to hop up into our chariot, so what methods and principles should we adopt as we grapple with the meaning of Scripture? This is a massive question, a matter of hermeneutics, the question of how we read what we read from the Bible.
I once saw a poster for a conference which ambitiously claimed to “defend the spirit of Anglicanism”. To this end, the conference organisers had enlisted an Archbishop as headline speaker and their poster included a helpful picture of Anglicanism as a three-legged stool, each leg labelled in turn ‘scripture’, ‘tradition’ and ‘reason’. It is a common trope that the Church of England grounds its authority on the combined wisdom of scripture, tradition and reason. Alas, this seating arrangement would not have been recognised when the Church of England was established. Had you invited an English divine in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I to depict their authority about God in the form of a seat, you would not have received a picture of a stool with three legs. Rather, they would have drawn a single block, the solid, one-legged stump of Scripture.
Reformation theologians argue that the Bible is self-interpreting, self-reinforcing, and that God’s Holy Spirit guides the Church through our continuous act of reading, into a deeper understanding of what the Bible means. Reformation divines were not so naïve as to deny that people disagreed about the Bible – they were constantly falling out among themselves; but they were largely united in the principle at least that the Bible contains everything necessary for salvation and so is, ultimately, self-interpreting.
It is just such an act of Biblical self-interpretation that we see in the encounter between Philip and the eunuch. Admittedly. their conversation was not a dialogue between one holy book and another because the Christian New Testament had yet to be committed to a written form. Nonetheless, Philip poured out the living gospel from his heart, that which he knew of the risen Jesus. This good news opened the eyes of the eunuch about the contents of his scroll of Isaiah. Only with time would the oral gospel which Philip shared with the eunuch coalesce into the written gospel in the complete Christian Scriptures as we know them today.
In sharing the good news about Jesus with the eunuch, Philip gave the Ethiopian a prism through which he could understand the Hebrew Scriptures, what Christians call the Old Testament. Exactly the same principle should inform our reading of the Bible today. As Christians, we read the Old Testament through the lens of the New. We interpret the whole story from the perspective of the final chapters, the life and mission of Jesus, our crucified, risen and ascended Lord.
‘Do you understand what you are reading?’
‘How can I, unless someone guides me?’
To say that our authority under God is a single stump rather than a three-legged stool is not to deny the usefulness of ancillary aids to reading the Bible. All mainstream Reformation thinkers commended tools which might help people better understand Scripture. Whether marginal notes, longer commentaries or listening to sermons, they approved of many devices so long as they correctly conveyed the true meaning of the original text. So, as you reflect on the eunuch’s question for your own context, ‘How can I understand, unless someone guides me?’, I commend any tools which help us break open the word of God. Traditionally, people used resources such as daily notes from the Bible Reading Fellowship. Support like this is now largely online. Do check out the BRF website and similar tools such as the Scripture Union ‘Word Live’ series or the Church of England’s Daily Bible reflections App.
‘Do you understand what you are reading?’
‘How can I, unless someone guides me?’
This exchange is not just challenge to our inner life with God, as if you and I sit in the place of the eunuch. It is also an exhortation to evangelism as if you and I sit in the place of Philip. Philip’s role in the conversation was to explain how Jesus was relevant to what the eunuch read from the Hebrew Bible. The challenge for Christians today is to convey the significance of both Testaments (Old and New) to a world that is perpetually distracted by things that are less important. We’re not going to come up with all the practical answers to this in a paragraph, but let me briefly encourage you to reimagine the task. If people are to discover why the Bible, the best-selling yet most-misunderstood book of all time, is unlike any other, I suggest that they should not try to fit the Bible into their hectic lives, but rather discover that their lives are given purpose within the story of the Bible.
The Bible is one book and it tells one story, the love of God in making and saving the world. This is not a story that can “become part of our lives”. But human lives can (and do) find place, true and liberated, within the narrative of Scripture. We need to look down the telescope from the right end. That’s what happened to the eunuch. He found not a place for God in his story, but his place in God’s story, and so he was baptized, and went on his way rejoicing. Amen.