What is a eunuch doing in the church? What is a eunuch anyway? Eunuchs were common enough in the ancient world. Jesus was confident that his hearers knew what a eunuch was (read Matthew 19:12). In Acts 8, the disciple Philip encounters a eunuch reading a passage of Scripture in Isaiah and explains it to him and then at his request baptizes him into the church of Jesus Christ! In her fascinating book, Sex Differences in Christian Theology, Megan DiFranza includes a study of eunuchs in the Bible and the culture of the time. Eunuchs could serve in some types of official positions but they were routinely despised. They were seen as "not normal", inferior males. Due to their lack of sexual organs, either naturally or involuntarily castrated, they were the "epitome of other". To Jews their identity as other, or outsider, prohibited Temple worship. Jesus, however, turned this thinking upside down with his (a Jewish teacher!) positive evaluation of them in the context of his teaching on marriage. This group of people who were commonly seen as sexually different, not really male or female, and morally suspect were given a new identity by Jesus and welcomed into the church by Philip who was led by the Holy Spirit!
This was at a time when the power structures of the ancient world were built on a chain of gendered being. As DiFranza says elite men were at the top, women were at the bottom and eunuchs and effeminate men were somewhere in the middle. Jesus challenged this powerful system when he said that those who renounced marriage for the sake of the kingdom would no longer be defined by traditional gender markers. Their primary identity would be a non gendered one (DiFranza, p105). "In calling his disciples to learn from eunuchs Jesus was calling them to learn from those whose gender identity was not secure, to learn that gender identity is not the central value in the kingdom of heaven." (DiFranza, 105)
As our congregations are roiled by questions of sexual identity and gender issues today, DiFranza's book deserves a close reading.
