Palestinians | Wayfarer

And because of [Jesus’] words many more became believers.
John 4:41 (NIV)

For the past four months, since the heinous events of October 7, 2023, the headlines have been dominated by the intense conflict between the terrorists of Hamas and Israel. We have seen heated and sometimes violent demonstrations around the world. We have witnessed the impassioned feelings on both sides of the conflict. What many fail to understand is that the conflict between people groups in this region can be traced back thousands of years. They were as real for people in Jesus’ day as they are today.

In the first three chapters of John’s version of Jesus’ story, he has made a point of the “signs,” or miracles, that Jesus performed. He went on to describe the religious leaders for whom no “sign” was good enough as they demanded a bigger, better, more magnificent miracle, while the crowds who saw Jesus’ miracles/signs at the Temple during the Passover festival believed because of them.

For the largely Jewish audience that John was addressing when he wrote his account, today’s chapter takes a shocking twist. Jesus leaves the region near Jerusalem and heads back north to His home region of Galilee. To get from one to the other in a straight line, Jesus had to travel through a region called Samaria. This was an issue.

The people in the Samaritan region were Jews who hundreds of years before Jesus had intermarried with non-Jewish inhabitants during the time when the northern kingdom had been taken into exile by Assyria. To Jesus’ people, the Samaritans were half-breeds (or mud-bloods if you’re into the whole Harry Potter nomenclature). Good Jews would walk miles out of their way to avoid walking through Samaria. I can’t help but think about the delineations drawn today between Israel and Palestinian regions and the antipathy between them. Jesus was like a Jew walking into and through Gaza or the West Bank.

Jesus not only leads His disciples directly through Samaria, but He strikes up a conversation with a Samaritan woman. It was socially unacceptable for a Jewish man of Jesus’ day to speak to any woman in public. Jesus strikes up a conversation with a Samaritan woman. If Jesus was playing poker with the cultural rules of His day, His conversation with the Samaritan woman was Him going “all in.”

I find it fascinating that John shares this episode so early in his version of Jesus’ story. John’s audience was well aware that the Jesus movement had torn down traditional social and cultural distinctions between men and women, Jews and non-Jews, along with slaves and slave owners. In writing about Jesus’ conversation with the Samaritan woman, their two-day stay with the Samaritans there, and the Samaritans’ belief in Jesus, John was providing his readers with the reason that Jesus’ followers were so revolutionary in crossing such entrenched social mores. It’s what Jesus did Himself, and the example Jesus commanded them to follow.

As I meditated on this in the quiet this morning, I couldn’t fail to notice one small detail that I find of profound importance. John has already established how important Jesus’ “signs” and miracles were in leading His Jewish audience to believe in Him. When it came to the Samaritan woman and her people, there were no miracles worked. There was no “sign.” Instead, John specifically states that these socially unacceptable half-breed deplorables believed Jesus simply at His word.

I’m reminded this morning that as much as the world has changed since Jesus’ two-day stay in Samaria, the human condition hasn’t changed. People groups still hate one another with generationally perpetuated hard hearts and homicidal intensity. Individuals still seek “signs” from God as a prerequisite to belief. I find in the despised Samaritans an example I hope I emulate every day on this chapter-a-day journey: Simply taking Jesus at His word without the need for any other signs.

I couldn’t help but think of the episode John will share in the final chapters of his account. The risen Jesus invites Thomas to touch His wounds and verify that it was really Him. After Thomas proclaims his belief, Jesus responds “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

God, make me less like Doubting Thomas and more like the Samaritans.

If you know anyone who might be encouraged by today’s post, please share.

Solomon conscripted the descendants of all these peoples remaining in the land—whom the Israelites could not exterminate—to serve as slave labor, as it is to this day. But Solomon did not make slaves of any of the Israelites; they were his fighting men, his government officials, his officers, his captains, and the commanders of his chariots and charioteers. 1 Kings 9:21-22 (NIV)

I find it fascinating that throughout history almost every tribe, nation, and people on this earth have practiced some form of racial or tribal differentiation, dominance, and inequity. The systemic system of conscripted slavery described during Solomon’s reign is not unlike what the Israelites themselves experienced in Egypt, and what they would someday experience again with the occupations of Assyria and Babylon. What goes around comes around.

I sometimes hear people speak as if the world is getting better all the time, and that humanity is moving towards peace, harmony, and universal political correctness. Then I watch the evening news. Beheadings, genocide, mass graves, tribal conflict, racial discrimination, and religious intolerance are commonplace. We are all guilty.

Next to the major problems of the world that get pushed to the home screen of my phone on a constant basis, I sometimes feel small and insignificant living in my little Iowa hometown. I hear Humphrey Bogart’s voice in my head from Casablanca as Rick says to Laszlow: “The problems of the world are not in my department.”

And yet, they are in my department. I affect the people and world around me in my sphere of influence. I can recognize and fight the prejudices in my own thoughts, words, relationships, and actions. Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan was about the reality that the “neighbor” in His command to “love your neighbor as yourself” was not just your homogenous tribal group but also the person who is your tribal, racial, social and political enemy. The Jews and Samaritans hated each other the same way the Jews and Palestinians hate each other today. THAT was the whole point of the story.

This morning I wake up far from home amidst a culture very different from my own. I can choose to hold these people, who are very different from me, at arm’s length. Or, I can fight my natural inclinations and choose to understand them, listen to them, feel for them, and love them as I love the quirky white people of my Dutch American heritage back home.