The Last Scapegoat (Acts 8:26-39)

Singled Out?

Abdullah came to Richmond as a refugee from Somalia. His father had been shot in the leg by an enemy militiaman as a warning of what would happen to him and his family if they did not leave. So they left, spent years in a refugee camp in Ethiopia, and were very fortunate to receive welcome into our nation as refugees.

Abdullah was around my age, tall, lanky, with the darkest of skin and a toothy grin. I remember meeting him as the new member of my soccer team. There was an air of intrigue around him. Here was someone who had probably played soccer longer than any of us, and in very different conditions. Sure enough, he was an excellent player, a magician with the soccer ball at his feet.

I remember our first game. He had an opportunity to score but saw me out of the corner of his eye and passed the ball instead. I scored as a result, and when I went to thank him, I saw his toothy grin. After the game, he gave me a goodwill offering to seal our friendship: a piece of gum. A little later, he gave me a scrapbook made with pictures from soccer magazines he’d picked up along the way.

Abdullah had a deft and deceptive touch on the ball, which flummoxed defenders and often resulted in him being fouled. His skinny legs would be hacked by frustrated opponents who couldn’t keep up with his tricks. On occasion, when the referee didn’t call a foul and allowed play to continue, Abdullah would retaliate in kind. Then the referee would blow the whistle and sometimes give Abdullah a yellow card, or even on a few occasions, a red card (which meant he was ejected from the game). Now, I know I speak with a pair of biased eyes, but it seemed to me like Abdullah was dealt a cruel hand. The calls against him often seemed not only incommensurate with the deed but also unfair on account of the rough treatment he had first received that had gone unpunished.

Sometimes…sometimes it felt as though there were deeper forces at play than simply the ref calling things as he saw them. Sometimes it felt as though Abdullah were being singled out, made into a sort of lightning rod for the pent-up frustrations of a heated soccer match. Why did the bubbling up of aggravation so often find catharsis in a foul called against Abdullah? Was it his skin? Was it his obvious foreignness or the name we shouted at him that evoked the Islamophobia of the time? Was it his almost presumptuous skill, his making others to look like fools?

The Ethiopian Eunuch’s “Worship” Experience

In our scripture today, God nudges Philip into the wilderness, which is to say, that uninhabited land not yet brought under the rule of any civilization, not yet bearing the flag of this people or that people, that land where God so often meets and transforms biblical characters, like Hagar and Ishmael and Moses and the Israelites and Elijah and Jesus, and so on. It is fair to ask who is transformed more in today’s scripture: the traveler on the road or Philip.

The traveler on the road is an Ethiopian eunuch returning home from a visit to worship at the temple in Jerusalem. I wonder what the Ethiopian eunuch was feeling as he reflected on his experience. As a foreigner, he likely would have only been able to enter the outermost court, known as the “court of the gentiles.” He would have felt his second-class status, as he was excluded from the joy of worship inside the temple where sacrifices were made and prayers were prayed. But as a eunuch, he may have been barred from the temple altogether, on the basis of a law in Deuteronomy that forbids anyone with damaged or altered genitals to enter the temple (Deut 23:1). In this case, the word “worship” becomes almost ironic, an oxymoron, salt in the wound. How could a person worship who could not even enter the temple?

If the Ethiopian eunuch is feeling marginalized or excluded, I wonder what he thinks as he reads in Isaiah about a man who is unjustly put to death, a man often referred to by readers as “the suffering servant”: “Like a sheep he was led to slaughter… . In his humiliation justice was denied him” (Acts 8:32-33; cf. Isa 53:7-8). I imagine that the eunuch identifies in some way with this suffering servant. He knows what it is like to be rejected. He knows what it is like to feel humiliated. So when Philip approaches him and shows familiarity with the scripture he is reading, the Ethiopian eunuch asks him, “Who is this about?” (cf. Acts 8:34). He wants to know more about this guy with whom he feels a special connection. Maybe there’s more he can learn about himself.

The Crucified God

Today is the third Sunday after Easter, and I cannot help but notice that there is a common thread weaving its way through all the scriptures we have read so far. It is, perhaps surprisingly, a thread of suffering. We might call this thread the “crucified God,” because each story identifies God with the victim who suffers.

On the first Sunday after Easter, we heard the travelers on the road to Emmaus lamenting how the cross ended their dreams; they cannot conceive of a crucified God. But then we heard the stranger overturning their interpretation by explaining how in fact the suffering of the cross was necessary for a loving God and how a crucified God explains all the scriptures. On the second Sunday after Easter, we saw Stephen suffer unto his death in the same pattern as the crucified Christ; he forgave the mob who killed him and entrusted his spirit to God. Today, we hear the Ethiopian eunuch reading an ancient prophecy of a man who suffers unjustly, a prophecy that Christians would claim to be a vision of the crucified God.

If a crucified God seems at first like a stumbling block to faith, it soon enough becomes the gateway to faith. Something about the story of the crucified God opens eyes and changes hearts. In today’s scripture, the Ethiopian eunuch moves from bewilderment about this suffering individual to a wholehearted desire to follow him—all in the space of a single sentence. We don’t know what exactly Philip says to him, but I can only imagine the Ethiopian eunuch’s surprise and wonderment when he discovers that this man who suffered unjustly was, in fact, God in the flesh. How he must have suddenly felt not alone but affirmed, known, seen, embraced, included. Part of me wonders, also, if Philip had taken the scroll from the Ethiopian and guided him forward just three chapters, from Isaiah 53 to Isaiah 56, where Isaiah prophesies:

    Do not let the foreigner joined to the Lord say,
    “The Lord will surely separate me from his people”;
    And do not let the eunuch say,
    “I am just a dry tree.”
    For thus says the Lord:
    …
    I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off (Isa 56:3-5).

Scapegoats: Peace Through Violence

Theologian and anthropologist Rene Girard explains that the power of the cross consists in humanity seeing an innocent man suffer. Girard observes that the predominant way of achieving peace in our world is through an act of violence. More specifically, a community identifies a scapegoat—an individual or a minority group who are different—and then the community attributes to this scapegoat blame for all the problems and anxieties and fears that plague the community. We see this on the playground, where a child who looks different gets bullied. We see this in families, where a dog or child or partner is abused for all that’s going wrong. We see this in nations, as when Jewish people were vilified in Germany, or Muslims in Bosnia, or the Tutsi in Rwanda. We see this all over the place. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say, we see it in other times and places, but not always in our own. In our own, what we usually see is an “us” and a “them,” and we perceive injustices against “us” but rarely (if ever) against “them.” Our thinking is locked firmly within the scapegoat mindset, where life would just be better if “they” were gone or kept out or made more like “us.” While we might not think in terms of violence, that is always the end of scapegoat thinking. Force may be necessary to achieve peace for “us.”

But what happens in Jesus Christ is we see someone refuse this scapegoat thinking. We see someone who says outlandish things like, “Love your enemies” and “pray for those who persecute you” and “when someone strikes you, turn the other cheek.” We see a man who ends up like the prophetic vision of Isaiah, a lamb who chooses to suffer violence rather than sponsor it. And slowly it dawns on us that, although this man’s way of life throws a wrench in the way our world works, he is not the problem. He is innocent. The cross therefore opens our eyes to see the perversion of our scapegoating, to see the horrors of violence that we inflict on each other, to see that we are the mob and no matter what another person has said or done our violence against them is never pure or justified. It is part of this scapegoating that keeps us locked in a never-ending cycle of violence.

The cross is a divine spoke that gets driven into the wheels of our violent world, wheels that turn one violent revolution after another. The cross is a sacrifice to end all other sacrifices. No longer shall individuals be treated as less than human, written off as an unredeemable “them,” “cut off” from God and the rest of us (cf. Isa 56:5).

No More Scapegoats

In this sense, the gospel that Ethiopian eunuch heard perhaps went something like this, “Jesus was the scapegoat to end scapegoating. He is with you and knows what you have suffered, and he is leading us out of that suffering into a new creation.”

I’m mindful that the discourse in our world often centers on identity conflicts. There are many people who hold grievances, rightly so, based on the ways the people who think or look like they do have suffered. The difficulty is holding all of these grievances together at once, in tension with one another. But I think that is what Christ does on the cross. He does not take one side alone, but rather takes all sides at once, showing us the way forward, showing us what Paul called “one new humanity in place of two” (Eph 2:15).

In light of all this, my opening illustration might seem rather trivial. But to revisit it briefly, I might recognize that in my feeling a sense of injustice for my friend Abdullah, I was simultaneously beginning to vilify the referee, to make him the new scapegoat, the problem. Why couldn’t he see what he was doing, unfairly picking on the kid who looked and played differently? And so the cycle of violence continued quietly in me.

While on the cross, the crucified God holds us all in his arms and says, “No more.”

Prayer

God who makes peace
Through the cross:
Inspire us today
With the same joy
That overtakes the Ethiopian eunuch
…
Inspire us
To know that you are with us,
All of us, no matter what,
No matter how far off or outside we might feel;
Inspire us to desire the connection
Of living in your family,
To desire the brotherhood and sisterhood
Of strangers and enemies.
In Christ, the lamb that was slain and is seated on the throne: Amen.