Philip and the Traveller on the Gaza Road

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Full script

Imagine a road in the middle of the day, in a country where the ground is the colour of old bread. The road runs straight, and it is empty, and it is very quiet. There are low hills in the distance, hazy with heat, and some scrubby bushes, and a few stones that look as if they have been lying here since the beginning of the world. There is one sound. It is the slow creak of wheels, very far off and coming nearer, and over the creak of the wheels, a man's voice, reading aloud to himself, in a language that is not the language of this country.

We will come to the voice. But first, let us light the lamp and settle down, because it is a long road, and a very short story.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story comes from the Acts of the Apostles, chapter eight, which Christians of both traditions read as Scripture, and we will tell it as it is told there. A few small things, the weather, the dust, the servants, and the quiet conversations, are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original, and we will say at the end which parts those were. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

Let us begin with the man who is going to be walking, because he is the one the story starts with. His name is Philip.

You may know a different Philip. There is Philip the apostle, one of the twelve, who appears in John's gospel and says to Nathanael, come and see. The Philip of tonight is not that man, though they have the same name, and it is easy to mix them up, and people have been doing it for a very long time. Tonight's Philip is called Philip the deacon, and sometimes Philip the evangelist, which means a bringer of good news. We meet him a little earlier in the Acts of the Apostles, in the sixth chapter, and the way he gets into the story is worth hearing, because it is a very ordinary, practical beginning.

In the early days, in Jerusalem, the community of Jesus's followers was growing quickly. There were a great many people, and a good part of what they did together was to share what they had, and in particular to see that the widows were fed. And there was a complaint. The widows who spoke Greek, Luke says, were being overlooked in the daily distribution, while the widows who spoke the language of the country were being looked after. It was not that anyone meant any harm. It was only that a growing family finds that some people slip through the gaps.

The twelve apostles heard about it, and they did a sensible thing. They called everyone together and said that they could not give up preaching to wait at tables, so the community should choose seven men of good reputation, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, to take charge of this work. And the whole group liked the idea, and they chose seven, and the apostles prayed over them and laid their hands on them. The seven all have Greek names, which suggests that the community picked people from the very group that had felt overlooked. That is a lovely detail, and we think it is true to the text, though Luke does not say so in so many words.

The second name on the list is Philip.

So that is how Philip begins. He is a man whose first job in the story is making sure that the widows get their dinner. We think that is a good way to begin. It means that when we meet him on the road today, we are meeting a man who has already spent time on quiet, careful, unglamorous work, and who has learned to notice who is being left out.

Things in Jerusalem did not stay calm. Soon after the seven were chosen, one of them, Stephen, was arrested and killed, and a great persecution broke out against the followers of Jesus in the city, and many of them scattered into the countryside. Luke says that those who were scattered went about telling the good news. And Philip, the deacon, went north, to a city in Samaria. There he proclaimed the Messiah. Luke says there was great joy in that city, and people paid close attention to what he said, and many were healed and set free from troubles.

It was a good and busy time. Luke tells us that the apostles in Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God, and sent Peter and John to see, and the story goes on. Philip is, at this point, doing very well. He is busy, he is needed, there are crowds who want to hear him, and a whole city has opened its doors. If you were Philip, you would have every reason to think that you were in the right place, doing the right thing, and that you should keep doing it.

And that is exactly the moment, Luke says, when the angel of the Lord speaks to him.

Here are the words, as Luke gives them. An angel of the Lord said to Philip, Rise and go toward the south, to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza. This is a desert road.

Stop and think about that for a moment, because it is a strange instruction. It is not a very exciting one. There is no crowd on that road. There is no city at the end of it that is waiting to hear. The angel does not say, go and speak to such-and-such a person, and does not say what will happen there. It says only: rise, go south, to the road that runs down from Jerusalem to Gaza. And, in case there is any doubt, this is a desert road.

We should say something about that last sentence, because it is a little puzzling, and Luke leaves it a little puzzling. In Greek, the words might mean that the road itself is a desert road, empty and dry, or they might mean that Gaza, the town at the end of it, was a deserted place. There were two towns called Gaza in those years, an older one that had been destroyed in a war long before, and a newer one built near it, and some readers have thought Luke meant the old, ruined one. We do not need to settle it. For tonight it is enough that the road is quiet, and that the angel says so.

And what does Philip do? Here is the line in Luke, and it is one of the shortest and best in the whole book. And he rose and went.

That is all. He does not ask what for. He does not say, but I'm needed here, there is a city full of people, and I am only just getting started. Luke does not tell us whether he sighed, or whether he had friends who thought he was mad. He only says that he got up, and went.

Now, it is not a short walk. From the city in Samaria where Philip was working, down to the road that runs south-west from Jerusalem toward the coast, is something like a hundred kilometres, which is about sixty miles, though we are guessing at the exact place, and so Luke does not give us the distance. It is several days on foot, over hills, in the dry weather. Imagine that. A man leaves a busy, joyful city where he is wanted, and sets out on foot, for days, to an empty road, because he has been told to, and with no idea at all of why.

We might imagine some of what he thought about on the way. We do not know it, and we are making it up, so please listen with that in mind. We might imagine that he thought about the widows of Jerusalem, and the bread he had once counted out, and how long ago that seemed. We might imagine that he thought: well, if there is nobody on the road, then perhaps I am to be there for the sake of the road itself. And we might imagine that, being a practical man, he took a water skin and a little bread and a cloak, and that he walked at the pace of a man who has decided not to worry.

The road, when he reaches it, is just what the angel said. It is long and dry and very straight. The sun comes down on it from straight overhead. A lizard watches him from a stone. A little wind moves the dust about, and the dust settles again. There is nobody. He stands on the road, and he waits, and he does not know what for.

And now the sound begins, very far off. A creak of wheels. The slow clop of animals, not hurrying. And, as it comes closer, something else, which at first he does not make out, and then does. It is the sound of a person reading aloud.

Here is who it is. Luke says: And behold, an Ethiopian, a eunuch, a court official of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, who was in charge of all her treasure, had come to Jerusalem to worship, and was returning, seated in his chariot, and he was reading the prophet Isaiah.

There is a great deal packed into that one sentence, and it is worth taking apart slowly, because Luke has put in nearly everything we need.

First, Ethiopian. In the time of the Acts of the Apostles, that word did not mean what it means on a map today, though there is a link, and the people of modern Ethiopia are among the most devoted keepers of this very story. The Greek word means something like people of burnt faces, and it was used by Greek writers for the dark-skinned peoples who lived south of Egypt, up the river Nile. The country this man came from is the kingdom that the Egyptians called Kush, which in some older English Bibles is called Cush, and which today we would find in the north of Sudan and the south of Egypt. It had a very old and rich civilisation. It had its own capital at a city called Meroë, with tall, steep-sided pyramids, which are still standing, and iron-working, and long traditions of royal power. It was a long way from Jerusalem. It was, for a person in Jerusalem, almost the far end of the world.

Second, Candace. That is not a person's name. It is a title. The kings of Kush had a custom that we do not find in many places: the queen mother, or sometimes a ruling queen, had a title which in her own language sounded something like Kandake, and the Greeks and Romans heard it as Candace. So when Luke says Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, he is naming an office, as if we said the Pharaoh, or the Queen of England. And this man works for her. He is, Luke says, in charge of all her treasure. He is a treasurer, a minister of finance. He is a person who is trusted with a great deal.

Third, a eunuch. In many royal courts of the ancient world, men who had been made eunuchs were trusted with high offices in the royal household, partly because it was thought that they would not found a rival dynasty. We say this gently, and plainly: it is the reason the word is there, and it matters for the story, because of what the Law and the prophets say about people in his situation. We will come back to that later.

Fourth, he had come to Jerusalem to worship. This is the part that is easy to read past. A man who is a foreigner, from a far country, with a demanding job, has made a journey of many weeks, perhaps a thousand miles or more, to worship the God of Israel at the Temple. We do not know whether he was a convert to the faith of Israel, or one of the people called God-fearers, who admired Israel's faith and worship without becoming fully a part of it. Luke does not say. What Luke tells us is that he has made the journey, and he has made it for the right reason.

And fifth, and best, he is going home, and he is reading. Think about that. This is a rich, busy official in a covered carriage, on a long, hot, dull road, and he has brought with him a scroll of the prophet Isaiah. Possibly he bought it in Jerusalem. Possibly he copied some of it. In a world where a book was a very costly thing, here is someone who has spent real money to take the words of the prophet home with him, and who has chosen to read them on the road rather than to sleep.

We should say a word about the chariot, since it is such a lovely word. Luke's Greek word is a general one for a wheeled vehicle, and it is not the sort of racing chariot you may have in mind from films, with a man standing up holding the reins. A man of his rank, travelling a long way with a baggage train, would more likely have had something like a covered wagon or carriage, pulled by animals, with a driver, and probably with servants walking or riding alongside. It would have been slow. It would have creaked. And a man sitting in it, with a driver to do the work, would have had a lot of quiet time to himself, which is exactly what he is using.

Notice also that he is reading aloud. That seems strange to us, because we mostly read in silence, but in the ancient world reading aloud was the usual thing. It was how you took in a text. You murmured it, or said it out loud, and the words went through your ears as well as your eyes. That is how Philip hears him, from the side of the road, a long way before he can see what the man is reading.

And here is the thing that happens next. Luke writes: And the Spirit said to Philip, Go up and join this chariot.

Now, Philip has been standing on the road for some time, and the carriage is coming, and he has seen it. It is grand. It is not the sort of thing that a poor man on foot would normally walk up to. There are servants. There is a driver. An ordinary man might hang back, might smile politely and step off the road to let it pass. But the Spirit says: go up, and join it.

And again, Luke gives us a line of a few words. So Philip ran to him.

He ran. Not walked, ran. We love that. Philip has walked for days, and has now been given his instruction, and he runs. We do not know why. Perhaps he was glad. Perhaps he was afraid he would miss the carriage. Perhaps, after the long wait, he was simply relieved. But Luke tells us that he ran, and so he runs alongside the carriage, a little out of breath, and he hears what the man is reading.

What he hears is Isaiah. Luke says that Philip heard him reading Isaiah the prophet, and he asked a plain question. He said: Do you understand what you are reading?

We can imagine the scene. A dusty stranger, out of breath, jogging beside a royal carriage, calling up to a government minister. It is a rather comic picture. It could have gone very badly. The minister might have told the driver to go on. The servants might have shooed the stranger away. But what he says in reply is one of the most honest answers anyone gives in the whole Bible. He says: How can I, unless someone guides me?

Think how remarkable that is. He is a person of rank. He is clever, since he runs a treasury. He is rich enough to own a scroll. And he says, simply, I do not understand this, and I need someone to explain it. He does not pretend. He does not take offence. He is willing to be helped.

And then he does something warm. Luke says: And he invited Philip to come up and sit with him.

So the carriage stops, or slows, and the dusty man climbs up and sits beside the minister, and the driver clicks his tongue, and the wheels begin to creak again. The two of them are side by side on a bench, with a scroll across the knees of one of them, on a quiet road in the heat of the day.

And here is the passage the man had been reading. Luke gives us the words, and they are from the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, in the Greek form that Luke's readers used. They go like this:

Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter, and like a lamb before its shearer is silent, so he opens not his mouth. In his humiliation justice was denied him. Who can describe his generation? For his life is taken up from the earth.

Those are hard, strange lines. They are about someone who is led away and does not protest, who is treated unjustly, and who seems to have no one to speak for him, and whose life is cut off. They come from a part of Isaiah that people have read in different ways for a very long time. You can see why a man would stop at them. You can see why he would read them over and over, going slowly, like a person feeling their way along a wall in the dark.

And he asks Philip the question that any of us might ask. He says: About whom, I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?

That is a very good question. Notice that it is not a clever question, or a trap. It is the kind of thing you ask when you really want to know. He has been reading the words, and the words have got hold of him, and he cannot just go on to the next line without finding out who they are about.

Now, here is a place where we have to be careful, because there is a great deal we might want to say and Luke has said very little. What does Luke tell us Philip did? He says: Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with this Scripture he told him the good news about Jesus.

That is the whole of it. Philip began with the very passage that the man was reading, and from there he told him about Jesus. We are not told what he said. We are not given a speech. We do not know how long it took, or which other parts of the Scriptures he used, or what questions the man asked, or whether they laughed, or whether the man went quiet. Luke, who tells us so much about so many things, has chosen to tell us that Philip began where the man already was, and spoke of Jesus, and that is all.

We think it would be wrong to fill that in with long invented speeches, and we will not. But it is all right to notice what Luke does tell us, which is the starting point. Philip did not begin by correcting him. He did not begin with an argument, or a list of things the man ought to believe. He began with the page that the man had open on his knees. He began, as the best teachers do, with the question that was already there.

So, on they go. The carriage creaks along the road, and the sun begins slowly to come down the sky, and the hills in the distance change their colour. We can imagine that the servants, walking alongside, glance up now and then at the strange conversation going on above them. We can imagine that the driver, sitting up in front, has stopped paying attention to the road, and is listening, too. But all of that is our imagining, and what Luke gives us next is this.

As they were going along the road, they came to some water.

Water, on a desert road. We should pause on that, because it is a bit of a surprise, and Luke leaves it as a bit of a surprise. We do not know where it was. There is no river between Jerusalem and Gaza that runs all year, but there are wadis, the dry valleys that fill with water in the rains, and there are springs, and pools, and wells. Old tradition has pointed to several places, and none of them can be proved. We do not name one. We say only what Luke says: they came to some water.

And the minister of the treasury of the queen of Kush says to the man beside him the most beautiful words in the story. He says: See, here is water! What prevents me from being baptized?

Everything in the story has been moving toward that sentence, though neither of them could have known it when the day began. Here is a man who has travelled a thousand miles to worship, and has spent his money on a scroll, and has been reading it by himself in a carriage, and has been willing to say, I do not understand. And now, in the middle of a road that the angel called a desert, he sees water, and he asks what is in the way.

Now we need to tell you something about that question, and it is the thing we promised to come back to. What prevents me? It is not an idle question for him. In the books of the Law, in Deuteronomy, there is a verse that says that a man whose body has been damaged in the way a eunuch's has may not enter the assembly of the Lord. It was understood in different ways, and different people lived by it in different ways, but it hung over men in his situation. And at the same time, in the same prophet Isaiah whose scroll is on his knees, in the fifty-sixth chapter, there is another promise. It says that the eunuch should not say, I am a dry tree. It says that to the eunuchs who keep God's days and hold to his covenant, God will give, in his house and within his walls, a monument and a name better than sons and daughters, an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.

We want to be clear, as we always try to be, about what we are doing. Luke does not make this connection. He does not mention Deuteronomy, and he does not quote Isaiah fifty-six. What he tells us is the man's own question, what prevents me. Readers over many centuries have heard the old verse and the old promise behind it, and have felt that the question has something in it of the whole history of a person being kept at the edge of the door. We offer that as a way of hearing the story, and not as something the story says. But it is a way of hearing that many have found true.

And what is the answer? Luke tells us in one plain line. And he commanded the chariot to stand still.

Imagine it. The great man, the treasurer, gives an order to his driver, and the carriage halts. The creaking stops. The servants stop walking. The dust settles. And in the sudden quiet, on the edge of a stretch of water in the middle of a dry land, two men climb down. Luke says: And they both went down into the water, Philip and the eunuch, and he baptized him.

There is a note we need to add here, and we want to add it honestly. In some Bibles, between the question and the answer, there is another verse, verse thirty-seven, in which Philip says that if the man believes with all his heart, he may, and the man answers, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. That verse is found in the Bibles that the Orthodox Church uses and in many old translations, but it is missing from the oldest manuscripts that we have, and so most modern Catholic translations leave it out, or put it in a note. We have not included it. It is not that anyone thinks the faith it states is wrong, because it is the faith of both traditions. It is only that it is not clear that Luke himself wrote it, and so we have kept to what is clear.

Luke does not describe the baptism. He says only that they went down into the water, both of them, and that Philip baptized him. We can imagine the water was cool, and the sky was wide, and the servants stood on the bank with their hands at their sides. We can imagine, if we like, that the driver stood watching, and that the animals dipped their heads to drink, because they had been walking a long time. None of that is in Luke. What is in Luke is the next line, and it is the oddest and most wonderful one in the story.

And when they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord carried Philip away, and the eunuch saw him no more.

So the man comes up out of the water, wet, and perhaps blinking in the sun, and turns to say something to the friend who has just baptized him, and Philip is not there. He is gone. Luke tells us it was the Spirit of the Lord who took him away. We are not told how, and we shall not guess. What we are told is that the man saw him no more.

It is worth asking what that must have been like. He has met someone, quite suddenly, in the middle of the day, and has been told the best news of his life, and has asked, and has been baptized. And then there is a long, bare stretch of empty road, and the friend who explained everything has vanished. A person might think, afterwards, that it was a dream. He might think so, except that he is wet, and his scroll is still on the bench, and the servants are standing there, and they saw it, too.

And here is what Luke says that he did. Not that he stood and wept. Not that he went back to Jerusalem to look for Philip, or called out his name. Luke says: And he went on his way rejoicing.

That is the line. It is, we think, one of the best endings to a story that anyone has written. The thing he had wanted to understand was understood. The thing he had asked about was given. The friend who helped him had gone, and he did not need him to stay. He got back into his carriage, and the driver clicked to the animals, and the wheels creaked on. And all the long way to the south, to the great river and the pyramids of his own country, he was glad.

And Philip? Luke has one more line for him. He says: But Philip found himself at Azotus.

Azotus was the old Philistine city of Ashdod, on the coast, perhaps thirty miles to the north-west. It is a funny little line. Philip has been carried off, and he has no idea where he is, and then he looks around and sees a city, and he knows it. And then, being Philip, he does not sit down to wonder about it. Luke says that he went on proclaiming the good news to all the towns, from Azotus up the coast, until he came to Caesarea.

So the man who was told to go to a desert road, where there was nobody, and who ran to a carriage when the Spirit said so, spends the rest of this chapter doing exactly what he did at the beginning. He goes from town to town, telling people about Jesus, one town after another, up the long coast of the sea.

Let us slow down now, because it is late and the lamp is low, and the road is quiet.

We do not hear of the treasurer again in the Scriptures. Luke does not tell us his name, or what he did when he reached home. Later writers have said a good deal. Some early Christian authors wrote that he went back to his own country and spoke about what he had heard, and Ethiopian Christians have a very ancient and cherished tradition that he carried the faith home, so that their church traces its beginning in part to this meeting on the road. That tradition is dear to them, and we honour it, but we are careful to say that it is a tradition, and that it comes from later writers and later memory, and not from Luke. What we know is what Luke gives us, which is that a man went home rejoicing. What he did with the joy, we are not told.

But we do know that something grew. The kingdom of Kush, and the lands to the south, and the highlands of what we call Ethiopia, did in time become Christian countries. Whether the first seed was sown on the Gaza road, or whether the seed came in many ways, only God knows. It is a happy thing to imagine that the one began the other. We may imagine it, and say plainly that we are imagining it.

And Philip's story goes on, too. We meet him again, many years later, near the end of the Acts of the Apostles. Paul, on his last journey toward Jerusalem, stops at Caesarea, the very city where Philip's travels ended, and Luke says that they stayed in the house of Philip the evangelist, one of the seven. And Luke adds a small, warm detail. He says that Philip had four unmarried daughters who prophesied.

So the man who began by serving at tables, and went down a desert road, ended as a householder in a coastal town, with a house full of daughters, and with guests like Paul coming to stay. It is a good life. We like to think that after all the running and walking and wandering, he got to sit down at last in a house of his own, and that the guests who came through it were fed.

That is why Philip the deacon, in the Catholic and Orthodox churches, is remembered as a saint. He is remembered as the one who got up when he was told to, and ran when he was told to, and began with the page that the other man was holding. He is remembered as a man who looked after the widows, and then looked after the traveller, and who understood, perhaps better than most, that the one thing you can do for another person is to sit down beside them and open the book.

Now, as we always do, we should say a little about what is Scripture, and what is not, and what we made up.

What is Scripture, and told straight, is this. Philip, one of the seven chosen to serve, had been preaching in Samaria. An angel of the Lord told him to rise and go south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza, which is a desert road. He rose and went. There he saw an Ethiopian, a eunuch, a court official of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, in charge of all her treasure, who had come to Jerusalem to worship and was returning, seated in his chariot, reading the prophet Isaiah. The Spirit told Philip to go up and join the chariot. Philip ran, heard him reading, and asked if he understood. The man said, how can I, unless someone guides me, and invited Philip to sit with him. The passage was from Isaiah fifty-three, the sheep led to the slaughter. The man asked whether the prophet spoke of himself or of someone else. Philip began with that Scripture and told him the good news of Jesus. They came to some water, and the man said, see, here is water, what prevents me from being baptized. He ordered the chariot to stop, and both went down into the water, and Philip baptized him. When they came up, the Spirit of the Lord carried Philip away, the man saw him no more, and he went on his way rejoicing. Philip was found at Azotus and proclaimed the good news in all the towns until he came to Caesarea.

There are a few things we did not claim. We did not say where on the road it happened, or where the water was, since Luke does not say and old traditions point to several places. We did not give the man a name, because Luke does not, though some later writers have supplied one, and we have not relied on them. We did not say what Philip told him, because Luke does not. We left out verse thirty-seven, for the reason we gave. And we treated the later tradition that the official brought the faith to his own land as a tradition, with respect, and no more.

What we invented are the colour of the ground, the lizard, the dust, the servants and the driver, the idea that the animals drank at the water, the thoughts we gave Philip on his walk, and the details of how the scroll might have been bought. None of these are in Luke, and none of them change a word of what Luke says. We also put in the thoughts about Deuteronomy and Isaiah fifty-six as a reading that many have found helpful, and we said that it is a reading, and not what Luke says.

If you are lying in the dark tonight, and there is something in your life that you have been reading over and over without understanding, you might remember the man in the carriage. He was not ashamed to say that he did not understand. He did not need to have it all worked out before he opened the book. He only needed to be willing to say, how can I, unless someone guides me.

And you might remember that someone came. Out of the empty road, across the heat, with no warning at all, a person was sent to sit beside him. If there is a page you cannot read tonight, you may be quite sure that you are not as alone on the road as you feel.

That is the story of Philip and the traveller on the Gaza road for tonight. Philip the deacon is remembered by both the Catholic and the Orthodox churches, and if you would like to keep his day, do check your own church's calendar. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day. And now, in the words of the psalm that the churches have sung for ages, your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path. May you rest well, may you wake gladly, and may you go on your way rejoicing. Goodnight, and God bless.

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