The following material was written by the Rev. John Shearman (jlss@sympatico.ca) of the United Church of Canada. John has structured his offerings so that the first portion can be used as a bulletin insert, while the second portion provides a more in depth 'introduction to the scripture'.
INTRODUCTION TO THE SCRIPTURE
Sixth Sunday of Easter (B)
ACTS 8:26-40. This passage tells how the gospel became a missionary faith
outside of Judaism. A eunuch who was a Gentile believer in Israel's God
would have been excluded from every Jewish congregation because he could not
have any male heirs, "sons of the covenant."
The story is told as part of the main theme of Acts: To trace the expansion
of the early church under the leadership of the apostles from Jerusalem to
the Gentile nations of the world, especially to Rome, the capital city of the
empire.
PSALM 22:25-31. This psalm begins with a cry of dereliction repeated by
Jesus on the cross. It ends with a hymn of praise and trust in the God who
rules over all nations.
1 JOHN 4:7-21. Perhaps the finest definition of God is given here: "God is
love." Like partners in a dance, we are invited to love each other as God
loves us.
No one has seen God, but as we love one another we allow the world to catch a
glimpse of God's true nature. In fact, God's love is somehow incomplete
until we feature that love in our lives.
JOHN 15:1-8. The allegory of the vine and the branches offers insight into
the way the early Christian community saw the redemptive relationship between
God, Jesus and the faithful.
John stretches the image most picturesquely. The solid trunk of the vine
emerging from the ground grows long, tender branches on which the fruit is
produced. Without those branches, newly grown each year, the vine cannot
produce. Cut off from the root, the branches are useful only as kindling for
a fire. This was a common source of firewood in ancient times.
God is described as the vine grower who cares for both the vine and the
branches. Part of that caring involves rigorous pruning so that the vine
continues to produce good fruit. This is exactly what has happened to Israel
and to the church through the ages.
************
ACTS 8:26-40. This passage tells how the gospel became a missionary faith
outside of Judaism. The story is told as part of the main theme of Acts: To
trace the expansion of the early church under the leadership of the apostles
from Jerusalem to the Gentile nations of the world, especially to Rome, the
capital city of the empire.
First, the gospel goes into the Judean hinterland on the road from Jerusalem
to the borders of Egypt. Gaza, the city where Philip had been bidden to go,
lay on the Mediterranean coast. Today it is the crowded refuge for two
generations of Palestinians displaced from their lands by the Jewish War of
Independence in 1948. In many respects it is an urban wilderness, just as the
road to Gaza in the 1st century CE lay through the Judean wilderness.
The Ethiopian eunuch was a proselyte and a believer in Israel's God, but
probably not yet a circumcised Jew, unless he was from that group of
Ethiopian Jews who have survived to this day. As early as the 6th century BCE
a colony of Jews had settled on the Elephantine Island in that part of the
Nile River near where the Assuan Dam now stands at what was formerly the
first cataract on the river. The Elephantine Papyri discovered in 1906
revealed a syncretist form of Yahwist worship existing among these people.
Trading as far up river as Nubia, as Ethiopia was then known, would have been
a likely enterprise for such a colony. Jew or Gentile, he would have been
excluded from every Jewish congregation because he could not have any male
heirs, "sons of the covenant" (Leviticus 22:24; Deuteronomy 23:1).
On the other hand, Isaiah 56:3-5 prophesied that in the messianic age,
eunuchs would rank before the unfaithful of Israel. Wisdom of Solomon 3:14
also praised the law-abiding eunuch. Although it is not clear whether this
was a hyperbole, Matthew 19:12 recommends that some followers of Christ
voluntarily give up their reproductive powers to better serve the cause of
the kingdom. This eunuch served the Queen of Ethiopia in a high political
office. It was not unusual for such men to receive such appointments where
their sterility would not threaten either their mistress or the harems of
their masters. (Esther 3:2; Daniel 1:3; Jeremiah 38:7) This man would have
enjoyed particularly great responsibilities, trust and power as the monarch's
treasurer (vs. 27).
Once again, it is the Spirit who directs the apostolic mission in sending
Philip to intercept the eunuch's chariot. To his surprise, perhaps, Philip
found the man reading the book of Isaiah, probably in Greek. The quotation is
from the LXX (vs. 32-33). Philip's question as to whether he understood what
he was reading may only state the need to interpret that text from the
author's Christological stance. That was the crucial aspect of the passage
from Isaiah 53:7-8 and a key element of the early apostolic kerygma.
The point of the story comes in the eunuch's baptism after hearing Philip's
proclamation of the gospel. There is no confession of faith or expression of
repentance; just a question of being baptized, possibly at the seashore. This
emphasized the action of the Spirit rather than the faith response of the
individual concerned, a phenomenon that occurs again in 10:44. The sudden
removal of Philip from the scene and reappearance at Azotus (another name for
Ashdod) several miles to the north of Gaza (vs. 40) reiterates the point.
Philip then proceeded to conduct a missionary tour further up the coast as
far as Caesarea, the centre of the Roman establishment in Palestine.
PSALM 22:25-31. This psalm begins with a cry of dereliction repeated by
Jesus on the cross. It ends with a hymn of praise and trust in the God who
rules over all nations. There is good reason to believe that the two parts of
the psalm (vss. 1-21 and 22-31) existed separately before being combined in
the final edition of the Psalter. This amalgamation may have served a
liturgical purpose for the use of anyone who came to the temple to offer
thanksgiving for relief from some great affliction (vss. 25-26).
The hymn reaches its climax in the universalism of vss. 27-31, for which the
psalmist finds ample basis in his own experience. It might be easy to imagine
imagined a hint of resurrection in vs. 29, but the Hebrew is so uncertain
that several different English translations do not make clear exactly what is
meant. The New English Bible makes it into a rhetorical question: "How can
those buried in the earth bow down to him; how can those who go down to the
grave bow before him?" This reading leads directly to the response: "But I
shall live for his sake, my posterity shall serve him."
1 JOHN 4:7-21. The noun *agapé* (love) and various tenses of the verb
*agapeiv* (to love) appear no less than 33 times in this brief letter, 19 of
them in this passage alone. Those to whom the letter was addressed are twice
called "Beloved." What we have, then, is perhaps the finest definition of God
and what it means "to abide in God's love" and to have God's love abide in
us. Yet the passage does say a good deal more than just repeat the words
over and over again. Like partners in a dance, we are invited to love each
other as God loves us.
In some respects, the passage is a midrash on the saying attributed to Jesus
about being born again of the Spirit in John 3:1-21. It also contains the
full gospel message in different words than those to which we may accustomed
from the Synoptics and the Pauline corpus. The incarnation (vs. 9), the
atonement (vs. 10), the gift of the Spirit (vs. 13), the apostolic witness
(vs. 14), the response of confession in faith (vs. 15); the growth in grace
toward perfection (vs. 16), and the judgment (vs. 17) - all the basic
elements of the apostolic kerygma are there.
This passage reveals a more contemplative, philosophical and abstract
vocabulary attuned to an audience of fairly educated Greeks. It emphasizes
both the transcendence and the immanence of God. The world and its
inhabitants remain distinct and separate from God, yet an identity with God
is nonetheless created through the love of God living in us. The separation
is bridged by the Son sent "to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins." The
Hebrew sacrificial tradition stand behind the mission of the Son manifesting
the love of God for God's people, but there is something here above and
beyond that tradition.
*Agapé* is not the only NT word for love, but as William Barclay declared,
"it was the only word capable of being filled with the content it
required.... This *agapé ,* this Christian love, is not merely an emotional
experience which comes to us unbidden and unsought; it is a deliberate
principle of mind, and a deliberate conquest and achievement of the will. It
is in fact the power to love the unlovable, to love people we do not like.
Christianity does not ask us to love our enemies and to love men at large in
the same way that we love our nearest and dearest and those who are closest
to us; that would be at one and the same time impossible and wrong. But it
does demand that we should have at all times a certain attitude of mind and a
certain direction of will towards all men, no matter who they are."(*New
Testament Words.* Westminster Press, 1974. 20-21)
No one has seen God, John goes on to say, but as we love one another we allow
the world to catch a glimpse of God's true nature. In fact, amazing as it
may seem, God's love is somehow incomplete until we manifest that love in our
lives (vs. 12).
In this passage John struggled to describe the essence of Christian
spirituality. It can only come about as we live by the Spirit of God's love
that abides in us and so overcome with love all that is lacking in us and the
fear of punishment (vss. 16-18). Again and again John reiterates that this is
a love which is derived from God . "We love because he first loved us" (vs.
19). But it must result in love for others; if not, it fails to achieve it
goal of manifesting the love of God or of loving God as we have been
commanded. In all of this, John appears to reflect the gospel as Jesus taught
it with the beautiful metaphor of the vine and the branches and his parting
commandment to the disciples in John 15:1-17.
The number of preachable texts in this reading is almost overwhelming. They
can be approached from almost any angle - from the most personal and
evangelical to the most justice-oriented, not that those are polar opposites.
What is more, one could return to the passage many times over and still find
rich ore to mine. One can imagine John's audience spending hour after hour
discussing among themselves just what it might mean to their relationships as
a Christian community and with the hostile world in which they were living.
If, as many scholars believe, John wrote to a very conflicted congregation
struggling against an influential heresy, it must have had an astonishing
effect on whatever they had been fighting about. Those who claimed to love
God, but had nothing but hatred for their fellow members of the community, or
feared what might happen if they relinquished their hold on arrogant
intellectual positions, could only have felt a deep sense of conviction that
they were cutting themselves off from the God they professed to love. The
antidote to their divisions was the love they had received from God and now
must show toward their brothers and sisters in Christ.
JOHN 15:1-8. If the former passage from 1 John 4:7-21 was not a midrash on
John 3:1-21, then it must have been a similar reflection on this passage from
John 15. The allegory of the vine and the branches offers insight into the
way the early Christian community saw the redemptive relationship between
God, Jesus and the faithful.
John stretches the image of the grapevine most picturesquely. There is no
reason not to assume that he is repeating at least a remembered pericope if
not the actual words from the teaching of Jesus. Vineyards were plentiful,
particularly on the rugged hills of Galilee. Next to olives, the growing of
grapes for wine and raisins was the most important agricultural crop in
ancient Palestine. Unlike modern vineyard with the vines growing upright in
long, straight rows designed for mechanical picking, the vines were allowed
to grow along the ground with the bunches of grapes raised on small, forked
stakes. At times the vines were allowed to grow up a nearby tree providing
shade from the hot sun (1 Kings 4:25; Ezek. 19:11). The solid trunk of the
vine emerging from the ground grew long, tender branches on which the fruit
was produced. Without those branches, newly grown each year, the vine could
not produce fruit. Cut off from the root, the branches are useful only as
kindling for a fire. This was a common source of firewood for cooking in
ancient times.
In this metaphor, God is described as the vine grower who cares for both the
vine and the branches. Part of that caring requires rigorous pruning so
that the vine continues to produce good fruit. This is exactly what has
happened to Israel and to the church through the ages. This metaphor depicts
how when sustained by provident grace, the disciples of Christ would do much
to extend God's love to the world. But if the Christian community was severed
from God, the source of its life, as occurs in the pruning process, nothing
spiritually productive would develop.
There is one very troubling, conditional statement in vs. 7 which may result
in much doubt. Is it an extravagant hyperbole, like so many other statements
attributed to Jesus? Is not the offer, "ask whatever you wish" more a trap
for literalist gullibility? Or should we not pay more attention to the
results thereby produced, as John quotes Jesus saying further: an effective
prayer life (vs.7); glorification of God in the life - or death - of the
believer (vs. 8); and the indwelling joy of the doing God's will (vs. 11)?
These are fruits of a calm, spiritual nature, not the instantaneous profits
of hysterical religiosity. Even Jesus himself did not receive the answer he
wished for in his most fervent prayers in the Garden of Gethsemane. He did
receive something of far more value: the courage to trust that God would
accomplish God's mission of salvation through his innocent, sacrificial
death.
copyright - Comments by Rev. John Shearman and page by Richard J. Fairchild, 2006
please acknowledge the appropriate author if citing these resources.
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