An African Reader on the Road

There is a man in the book of Acts who has no name, yet his story has travelled further than most kings. He was an Ethiopian. He was a court official, the keeper of the treasury of the Kandake, the queen of the Kushites. He was a man of power, trusted with a kingdom's wealth, riding home in a chariot down a desert road. And he was a man cut off, a eunuch, the kind of man the old law had kept at the edges of the assembly. Powerful and wounded. Trusted and excluded. A reader, searching for something he could not yet name.

He had gone all the way to Jerusalem to worship. Think of that journey. Hundreds of miles by chariot and caravan, the heat, the dust, the long days, all to draw near to the God of Israel in the holy city. And we are not told that anyone there welcomed him in. He had come a long way to worship, and now he was going home. But he carried something with him. A scroll. The scroll of the prophet Isaiah. And as the chariot rolled along the road that ran down towards Gaza, he was reading it aloud, reaching for words that seemed to reach back for him.

Now come close to the road. A man named Philip is walking there, sent by the Spirit, told simply to go and to join himself to that chariot. He hears the African official reading aloud from the prophet. And the words on the man's lips are these. Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter, and like a lamb silent before its shearer, so he opened not his mouth. In his humiliation justice was denied him.

Philip runs alongside and asks one honest question. Do you understand what you are reading? And the answer is the heart of the whole scene. How can I, the man says, unless someone guides me? Then he does something striking. He invites the stranger up into his chariot. A treasurer of Ethiopia, making room beside him for a man on foot. About whom is the prophet speaking, he asks. Himself, or someone else?

And there, in a moving chariot on a dusty road, Philip opens his mouth and begins from that very passage of Isaiah, and tells him the good news of Jesus. The silent lamb. The one who was humiliated, who opened not his mouth. The one whose suffering was for him, this reader, this foreigner, this man so long kept at the edges. The Scriptures he had carried all the way from Ethiopia were not closed to him. They were about a Saviour who had come for the ones outside the gate.

They came to some water along the road. And the man said the words that ring like a bell across the centuries. Look, here is water. What is to prevent me from being baptised? What indeed. Nothing now. He ordered the chariot to stop. They went down into the water together, the evangelist and the African official, and Philip baptised him. And when they came up, the Spirit caught Philip away, and the man saw him no more. But he went on his way rejoicing.

Pull back now and see what that joyful chariot was carrying. Here, near the very beginning of the church, an African is not a project to be reached but a reader receiving the word, and carrying it home down the road to Africa. Ethiopian Christians have long remembered him as one of their own, an early seed of a faith that took deep root in that land and endures there to this day. The Scriptures do not trace every link of that long story for us. But they tell us this much, and it is enough. The gospel went south that day, in the hands of a man whose name we never learned, who went on his way rejoicing.