In John's Gospel, we find a unique narrative of Jesus meeting a Samaritan woman at a well. He shows her deep compassion, speaking with her, honouring her, calling out her sin while calling her into the Kingdom. As a Samaritan, she represents the gentiles, the nations who are not part of the covenant community, being brought in. There is a particular line in this narrative that we will use as the focal point for this series:

"You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews."

Our theology, our understanding of who God is, is mediated through the story of God and Israel. It is through the calling of a particular people, a particular nation, that all nations are saved. It is through God's interaction with this particular and imperfect people, that He reveals himself to be the God that we know and worship and ultimately recognize in the incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is the central story that we participate in and are grafted into. You can't have Jesus, and the Church, and its sacraments, and a spiritual life, and our destiny in the Kingdom of God, without grappling with the story of God and Israel.

Jesus of Nazareth was and is a Jew. In point of fact, he was a faithful and Torah-observant Jew and first century Rabbi. If we are interested in his teachings and his example, then we must understand he was a real person who lived in a real time within a real culture. It is impossible to understand his teachings without first understanding that he lived in fulfillment of Jewish tradition, not in rejection of it. The more we come to see this, the more we can fully live out our own Orthodox faith.

To miss this, and to separate ourselves from the story of God and Israel, is to put ourselves outside of the worship of the one true God - and surely we want to be counted as those who "worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews."