Where’s Jesus? We can answer that in a couple of ways this week. Where he is geographically is important, and where this week’s story about the Samaritan woman and “living water” falls is important.
John notes that Jesus had to go through Samaria to get back north (where he lived) after being in Jerusalem (where he was celebrating the Passover). This could be a commentary on geography: the shortest, safest route between the south and the north was through this central patch of land called Samaria. If you look at a map of ancient Palestine, there’s no reason to avoid it. Unless, that is, you know something about ancient Palestine. There was some pretty profound enmity between Jewish people and Samaritan people, which most of us are familiar with from the story of the Good Samaritan in Luke. For one thing, “southerners” (the area called Judah, where Samaria is) and “northerners” (the area called Israel, where Jesus’ hometown of Nazareth is) had not been inviting one another to parties for some time before both regions were torn apart by war and exile. When the dust had settled from both the Assyrian and Babylonian invasions and deportations, and the new, triumphant Persian king allowed Jewish people to go back to Israel and Judea, things did not always go smoothly between them and the people who had remained in the land – which appears to have included the Samaritans. The returnees began to rebuild the temple and reestablish Jerusalem as the center of worship, but the Samaritans weren’t interested. They didn’t really have any breakthrough ideas about God’s presence in the world and among us that kept them from getting excited about the new temple. Rather, they had other notions about where the appropriate center of cultic activity was, and ended up building their own temple on Mt. Gerazim, north of Jerusalem. During a brief period of Jewish rule in-between Greek and Roman occupation of the land, the temple at Gerazim was destroyed.
When I think about Samaritans in the Bible, I’m quick to apply the label “insiders and outsiders” and assume that because we are reading along with Jesus’ largely Jewish audience, Samaritans always teach us a lesson about his attitude toward marginalized people. That’s not entirely wrong, since from within any one of these two groups the other group would have been considered to be irritating, unimportant, even threatening. If you know the other side of the story, though – not just how Jesus’ contemporaries felt about Samaritans, but how suspicious of Jewish people the Samaritans were – you realize that Jesus is doing something bigger and more complicated than reaching out to a person who is unlike him. He is diving into enemy territory, taking on centuries of discord that has recently focused itself around the very important question of how to worship the one God that both Samaritans and Jews claim to know. Jesus is sitting beside a well that could be in the middle of the Balkans, or the Middle East, or Chiapas, holding a summit with the other side … only it’s not a head-of-state or a rabbi with whom he is speaking. It’s a woman.
Which evokes the second answer to the question, “Where’s Jesus?” Think about his most recent conversation: last week Jesus spoke with Nicodemus about being born again. Jesus was in Jerusalem, discussing serious matters with an influential leader in the Jewish Sanhedrin (like a supreme court). From the center of power with a powerful man, Jesus arrives in a center of conflict with a legally, socially powerless person (the Samaritan woman seems to have had some power to influence or persuade once she runs to tell her neighbors about the Messiah).
Back to John’s phrase, then, “he had to go through Samaria” (John 4:4, my emphasis). What do you think: a matter of geographical expediency only, or a trip that tells us something about who he is and what he’s here to do?
(Danielle Thompson)
