Hello and welcome to Thursday’s podcast. I hope you have enjoyed listening in through this week and that they are a helpful tool to meet with Jesus. And special mention goes to those new worship tracks at the end of these recordings. If Michael Bublé did some worship tracks they would not sound as good as those – well done to the worship team at STC and everyone involved. They are top quality.

REFLECTION:

Today we start chapter 4 in John’s gospel. Jesus meeting a woman at the well. She is a Samaritan woman. Part of understanding this passage is to understand some of the background at play here. I’ll not be able to mention everything in this short thought but let me share some headlines with us of things that help this conversation come alive – because what I really want us to remember today is that God’s love is for everyone, even the outsider.

We heard earlier in the week that we are SO loved.

Yesterday we touched on how his love defines us before other people’s love and praise.

Today is building on how that love is for everyone.

Ok, what comes to mind when I think of the word Samaritan is the amazing charity that gives emotional support to people all over the UK. Or the story of the good Samaritan. But those two examples alone do not let us into the tension that is here in the Bible story today.

Let me read v7,8,9 so we can hear the words in the Bible.

When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?”  (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)

The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.)

The reason they did not get along – we are told so in the Bible – this was because they had broken away as a new religious movement earlier in Israel’s history. When the Assyrian Empire defeated Israel they captured some of the men and imported some of the women and in a sense created a new ethnic group called the Samaritans. They were not allowed to worship in the temple of Jerusalem so they took the Torah (that is Israel’s religious text) and edited out all reference to Jerusalem and established their own temple up North. As you can imagine, over the years there was this growing dislike, in part it was racial tension – they were part of the oppressive system that had caused so much pain in their history. In part it was spiritual tension as they edited the word of God – especially where and how he can be worshipped. The Samaritans didn’t like the Jews because they felt excluded and mistreated. Over the years they fiercely avoided each other.

Into that story Jesus begins to talk to this woman, which would not ordinarily happen in public. On top of this, if we go back to verse 6 (I’ve not yet read verse 6 to us), but it tells us she came by herself to draw water in the middle of the day. She did not come in the morning with the other women, when it was cooler, and when you really needed the water (which was early in the day). All the commentators I’ve read say the fact that she came by herself in the middle of the day was because she was a moral and social outcast because of the kind of life she was living.

But Jesus reaches right through all those barriers: the racial barrier, the difference in ideas about God, the gender and moral barriers – could have all become obstacles that stopped these two people ever meeting and he respectfully engages her in a conversation about her life. This is not something she expected. In verse 9 she sounds so surprised. She says, “You’re a Jew, and I’m a Samaritan woman, how can you ask me for a drink…” how can you even be talking to me?”

And so to her surprise Jesus begins to ask about her life, and respond to her questions.