Day 8: Jesus is a Messiah to Every Ethnicity

When Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard he was making and baptizing more disciples than John (though Jesus himself was not baptizing, but his disciples were), he left Judea and went again to Galilee. He had to travel through Samaria; so he came to a town of Samaria called Sychar near the property that Jacob had given his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, worn out from his journey, sat down at the well. It was about noon. JOHN 4:1–6, EMPHASIS MINE

WHEN I FIRST BROUGHT Missy home from Haiti, I was so gratefully discombobulated that God miraculously chose me to be her second, adoptive mom, it was all I could do not to dress us in matching outfits! And while I was in that honeymoon stage of brand-new motherhood (frankly, I’m still pretty much in the honeymoon stage and our adoption was finalized nine years ago!), I subconsciously assumed others recognized this tiny, big-brown-eyed daughter of mine as a tangible kiss from God too. I can still remember one afternoon, not too long after Missy came home, when we were walking hand-in-hand down the sidewalk of Main Street in Franklin, Tennessee, which is a small, postcard-worthy Southern town near our home. I noticed an elderly gentleman who was walking toward us and seemed to be looking at us with a big grin on his face. I squeezed Missy’s hand, straightened my shoulders, put a little more pep in my step, and smiled back at him, thinking: Yep, somehow that man knows this kid right here is a flat-out miracle, baby!

Unfortunately, my visual acuity is decreasing as my age increases and I wasn’t wearing glasses that day; as the gap between us narrowed, I realized he wasn’t grinning—he was grimacing. Then, as he was passing by, he glared at me for a long moment, hissed in a low, menacing voice, “That’s disgusting,” and spit right in front of our feet. Evidently, that grumpy old man was so blinded by the fact that Missy is a beautiful Haitian child and I’m a middle-aged pale lady that he missed the miracle. Sometimes I forget that we live less than an hour from where the Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1865 and there are still folks who are vehemently opposed to multi-ethnic families. Sadly, his heart was so shriveled by racism that he couldn’t appreciate how God had healed this precious little girl whom doctors in Port-au-Prince predicted wouldn’t live to see her third birthday, and had restored unto me decades that had been devoured by locusts when He allowed me to become a late-in-life parent.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve resonated with outliers and outcasts like the Samaritans in the Bible, but it wasn’t until I had the undeserved blessing of becoming Missy’s second mom that I realized they’re part of my spiritual family tree—although my ancient ancestors had to deal with much more painful prejudice than a little spittle from a spiteful octogenarian.

In order to understand the bigotry Samaritans faced and the reason for the rift between them and their Jewish neighbors, you have to go all the way back to the 900s BC and the reign of King Solomon, who was the third king of Israel and who was also an ancient “player” with hundreds of foreign wives who competed fiercely with each other for his heart and his wallet. Therefore, most of his kids weren’t what you’d call close siblings. So, when Solomon died, the baton pass to a clear heir was bungled, and his son Rehoboam was such a horrible leader that the nation of Israel ended up splitting into two kingdoms: the Southern Kingdom (also called Judah, which retained the crown jewel of Jerusalem) and the Northern Kingdom (which retained the name Israel). Two hundred years later, in 721 BC, the Northern Kingdom of Israel fell to a warring people group called the Assyrians. Most of the people of Israel were led off to Assyria as captives, but some remained in the land and intermarried with foreigners planted there by the Assyrians. Some scholars say that was Assyria’s way of further subjugating the Jews by diluting their bloodlines, and this half-Jewish, half-Gentile people group became known as the Samaritans.

The first time Samaritans appear in the Bible’s narrative is the books of Ezra and Nehemiah (400s BC), when the Israelites returned to Jerusalem from the Babylonian captivity and were called to rebuild the walls around Jerusalem. The Samaritans, who’d moved into the area while the Israelites were in captivity, opposed the renewal project and tried to sabotage Nehemiah’s rebuilding efforts. However, Nehemiah was not a contractor to be trifled with (Neh. 6:8–9)! This turf war began a centuries-long feud between Jews and Samaritans—the Samaritans now known not only as half-breeds, but as traitors, too.

The Samaritans went on to establish their own temple on Mount Gerizim (which the woman at the well talks about later in John 4) and only adhered to Torah—the first five books of the Old Testament—instead of all the Hebrew Scriptures. They also declared the Jewish priesthood illegitimate and established their own version. Between their familial alliances with Assyrians, forsaking the rebuilding of Jerusalem’s wall, cherry-picking the Hebrew Bible, and instituting their own leaders instead of following the rules appointed in the Law, the bottom line is that the Samaritans desecrated everything an Orthodox Jew held sacred. By the time of Jesus’s earthly ministry, Jewish resentment toward Samaritans ran so deep that they publicly cursed them in synagogues and prayed for Jehovah to exclude them from eternal life.

With that context in mind, it becomes clear that when John 4 portrays Jesus as having to pass through Samaria, it isn’t a random geographical footnote. In fact, this seemingly innocuous detail probably provoked some of his first-century audience the way the sight of Missy and I holding hands and all but skipping down the sidewalk of a small, Southern town provoked that hateful, old saliva-slinger. Because when John described our Creator-Redeemer as having to enter a territory that Orthodox Jews would have scrupulously avoided even if it meant traveling many miles out of the way, He was underscoring the culture-challenging, prejudice-pummeling, implausibly inclusive grace of our Savior. Don’t forget, as the second person of the Trinity, Jesus is perfectly omniscient—all-knowing. Which means He knew exactly who He’d encounter at the well during the scorching heat of that particular Middle Eastern day. He was more than familiar with every excruciating detail of how that Samaritan woman had been kicked to the curb by five husbands, as well as being ostracized by the “upstanding” members of ancient society. He was compelled to go to Samaria because He is the Great Physician and broken hearts are His specialty, no matter what lovely hue of skin envelops it. To both Jew and Gentile, Hebrew or Samaritan—or any ethnicity in the world today—He offers himself as Messiah for all who believe, and He can heal anyone’s past, self-righteous prude and traitor alike!

• READ REVELATION 21:1–4 (NIV). In the Greek language this passage was originally penned in, the word people in verse 3 is actually “peoples” (some Bible translations still render it singular), and it illustrates that people groups will still maintain their nationality/ethnicity in heaven! Why do you think some people of faith still practice racial prejudice when the story of Scripture reveals it’s not remotely biblically defensible?
• DO YOU have a lot of friends who don’t look like you, talk like you, or think like you? On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being nervous as a cat and 10 being grateful and content, how comfortable are you worshipping in a racially diverse church?