WRONG PLACE

It sounds odd to say that Jesus was in the wrong place. It sounds as if He headed down a dark side street and stumbled into a group of unsavory hooligans. But when I say that Jesus was in the wrong place in John 4, I simply mean that this narrative puts Jesus in a place where no good and respectable Jew would ever want to find himself—Samaria.

At first glance we might shrug our shoulders and wonder what this has to do with Jesus being in the wrong place. It won’t mean much until we understand the scope of the animosity between the Jews and the Samaritans. 

The reason for the bigotry between the Jews and the Samaritans can be traced to the time following the fall of the northern kingdom—around 722 B.C.  It was then that the Jews who had not been deported by the Assyrians began to intermarry with imported Assyrian settlers. The sons and daughters of these parents soon began to intermingle elements of Jewish worship with pagan worship practices, forming a mongrel religious system within Palestine. 

When the Jews from the southern kingdom returned from captivity in Babylon to resume temple worship under the law, more than 150 years had passed. The religious corruption of the Samaritans had solidified into a full-blown cultish system. The returning Jews found this Samaritan corruption reprehensible and began treating the Samaritans as worse than Gentiles. As the centuries passed, the hatred between the Jews and the Samaritans only increased until, by the time of Jesus, Jews considered the Samaritans heretical half-breeds who were worse than dogs.

Because hatred and prejudice had been so thoroughly ingrained in them from generation to generation, good and pious Jews living in the northern region known as Galilee commonly took a longer route around Samaria to Jerusalem for festivals or worship. One reason was for ritualistic cleanness. The Jews were not permitted to have any contact with anything “unclean” and still participate in festivals and temple worship. Since contact with a Samaritan would render them unclean, they would avoid it if at all possible.

            It is into this ethnically, socially, and religiously tense setting that the text tells us, “But He (Jesus) needed to go through Samaria.” Why? Why did Jesus need to go through Samaria? Because He needed to preach in this village. He needed to meet this woman. He needed to teach His disciples something important about the harvest. He needed to go through Samaria because it was the only way to minister to a group of the people whom He had come into the world to save. In the process, He taught His disciples—and us—how to do the same kind of ministry.