A Name That Shall Not Be Cut Off

<p>The road from Jerusalem down to Gaza runs through open country, and somewhere on it, in the heat of the day, there is a chariot with a man inside reading aloud to himself (Acts 8:26–28). He is the treasurer of the queen of Ethiopia; he keeps the accounts of a kingdom. He has come a very long way to worship, and he is going home no less hungry than he came.</p> <p>There is a reason for the hunger, and it is not one he can fix with money. A man like him is shut out of the assembly of the LORD by the law itself (Deuteronomy 23:1). He has traveled all that way to a house he could not fully enter. He can buy anything, including the scroll in his lap, which would have cost more than most men earned in a year. What he cannot buy is a son, or a name that outlasts him. Everything he owns ends when he does.</p> <p>And the scroll in his lap is open at the strangest poem in the Old Testament, centuries old already in his hands: a man led away without a word, "like a lamb before its shearer is silent, so he opens not his mouth," humiliated, denied justice, his life "taken away from the earth" (Acts 8:32–33). Read the line he has just said out loud, then look again at the man saying it: "Who can describe his generation?" Here is a sufferer with no descendants, being read by a man with no descendants. Whether or not he could have told you why, the poem had found him.</p> <p>So he asks the question the whole Old Testament had been waiting for somebody to ask out loud: "About whom, I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?" (Acts 8:34).</p> <p>It is a fair question, and the oldest answer is a serious one: the sufferer is Israel herself, whom Isaiah calls "my servant" (Isaiah 41:8), led away and humiliated in exile. But this servant suffers for wrongs that are not his own, and Israel went into exile for her own; this servant is silent, and Israel never was. He is Israel's calling finally kept — what the nation was always meant to be. The eunuch knows the lines are about a person. He does not yet know the person has a name.</p> <p>Philip, sent to that road and told to go up and join the chariot, runs — a grown man running alongside a moving chariot in the heat — and gives him the name: "beginning with this Scripture he told him the good news about Jesus" (Acts 8:35). The silent sufferer is Christ, the Lamb of Isaiah's poem, silent before the shearers, silent before Pilate, opening not his mouth while the whole sentence fell on him. And the wounds were never his to answer for: "he was wounded for our transgressions" (Isaiah 53:5).</p> <p>It is what the risen Jesus had already done for two heartbroken travelers on another road, when, beginning with Moses, he opened the Scriptures and showed them that the whole story was about himself. That is what happens when a person is converted: the cross stops being a text we are reading and becomes a price that was paid for us.¹</p> <p>But there is more on that scroll than he has reached. A few columns further on, the same prophet turns and speaks directly to men like him: "Let not the eunuch say, 'Behold, I am a dry tree.'" To such men God promises, in his own house and within his walls, "a monument and a name better than sons and daughters... an everlasting name that shall not be cut off" (Isaiah 56:3–5). The Servant was cut off so that the dry tree would not be. The man was holding the answer to his own life, a few columns down the page.</p> <p>Then they came upon water in the desert, and he said, "See, here is water! What prevents me from being baptized?" (Acts 8:36). Consider who is asking. This is a man whose whole life has been a list of what prevents — a wall, a law, a body, a border. He asks it one more time, and this time the answer is nothing. Nothing prevents him. He goes down into the water a dry tree and comes up with an everlasting name, and then Luke simply lets him go: he "went on his way rejoicing" (Acts 8:39). Philip never sees him again. The rejoicing goes home to Africa without him.</p> <p>We come to the same page carrying our own dryness — whatever it is in us that will not outlive us, the part of our life we are quietly certain has no future. Left to ourselves the poem stays a poem about "someone." But the Guide has drawn near: the risen Christ, by his Spirit and his Word. When the scroll opens, the sufferer has a face, and the face is turned toward us.</p> <p>He found the seeker nobody had gone looking for. He crossed the last mile himself. And with his silence he bought a place in his Father's house for the shut-out, so that a stranger a thousand miles from the temple could be saved and never stop singing. The water was already there beside the road.</p>