Sermon text: Acts 8:26-40; Isaiah 52:13-53:12
Philip first appears in Acts 6 as one of the seven men chosen to oversee food distribution in the early Jerusalem church—widely considered the first deacons, selected specifically for being “full of the Holy Spirit and wisdom.” He resurfaces after Stephen’s martyrdom in Acts 7, when persecution scattered believers out of Jerusalem. Rather than retreating, Philip went to Samaria and became the first to preach the gospel outside Israel’s Jewish population—a significant step, given the deep animosity between Jews and Samaritans dating back to the Assyrian conquest of the northern kingdom centuries earlier.
From there, an angel directs Philip toward a desert road heading south from Jerusalem to Gaza, where he encounters an Ethiopian court official—a eunuch serving as treasurer under Kandake, the queen of a kingdom in the region of ancient Kush (roughly modern southern Egypt/northern Sudan, not the country known as Ethiopia today). As a eunuch, this man could never fully convert to Judaism despite his devotion, since circumcision was required and physically impossible for him—a reminder that religious systems built around strict boundary-keeping have always had a way of excluding people that grace does not.
The man is riding home in his chariot, reading Isaiah aloud (the standard practice for reading unpunctuated ancient text), specifically the passage now known as Isaiah 53. Philip’s question—”Do you understand what you are reading?”—becomes the hinge of the whole encounter. Knowing the words and grasping their meaning are not the same thing, and this passage remains one of the most avoided texts in Jewish tradition today, likely because its description of a suffering, rejected servant doesn’t fit neatly into readings that cast Israel itself as the servant.
Isaiah 53, read alongside its introduction in chapter 52, lays out a portrait that early Christians immediately recognized as messianic: a servant who would be highly exalted despite being marred and rejected (52:13-15), who bore humanity’s grief though despised and unacknowledged (53:1-6), who suffered willingly and silently like a lamb led to slaughter (53:7-9), and whose suffering was not a failure of God’s plan but the plan itself—”it pleased the Lord to bruise him,” so that through his suffering many would be justified (53:10-12). Philip walks the eunuch through this, showing him that the passage points to Jesus.
The eunuch’s response is immediate: seeing water along the road, he asks what would prevent his baptism. Philip’s answer is essentially the whole gospel in miniature—belief first, baptism as its outward sign, not the mechanism of salvation itself. The eunuch declares his belief that Jesus is the Son of God, is baptized, and Philip is immediately taken away by the Spirit, never to be seen by him again. The eunuch continues on “rejoicing,” while Philip resurfaces evangelizing town after town, eventually settling in Caesarea, where Paul later encounters him years afterward.
What stands out is how this story reflects the Spirit’s pattern of pushing the early church past its own boundaries—first to Samaritans, then to this Ethiopian official who had been excluded by the very religious system he devoted himself to. The gospel didn’t wait for permission from the establishment; it moved toward whoever was ready to receive it, regardless of ethnicity, nationality, or social status. The passage leaves a personal question hanging: in any given moment, a person might be playing either role—the one sent to explain, or the one still asking, “what does this mean?”