Samaria was an area of Ancient Israel located between Judea and Galilee. It was smack dab in the middle of Israel, and you could not travel from Judea to Galilee, or vise versa, without traveling through Sameria. In first century, Israel, this posed a problem for the Jewish people because they despised the Samaritans. The Northern kingdom of Israel was captured in 722 b.c. and those Jewish people became captives of the Assyrians. Because of this, the Assyrians took these women as wives and the Samaritans were born. Because of this “inbreeding” the “pure” Jewish people hated them for their impurity.
Because of this, when the Jews needed to travel, they would take a two-day journey around Sameria. Imagine your hate being so strong that you travel two days out of your way to avoid interacting with them? I’m reminded of the prophet Jonah when God told him to go preach to the Ninevites. The ran as far away from them in the opposite direction as was physically possible. The story is a familiar one, God sent a whale to swallow Jonah and spit him up on the shore of Nineveh and the reluctant preacher carried out the will of God and the city was saved.
The interesting thing about Jonah’s hatred is that it went so deep that he didn’t want to see his enemies saved. He knew that God was a God of mercy, a God that forgives sin, the God that shows compassion on his people, and turns his wrath away from those that repent. Jonah didn’t want to go to the Ninevites because he didn’t want to see them saved because he didn’t feel they deserved mercy. In Jonah’s defense, the Ninevites were guilty of horrific crimes against humanity. One of their favorite things to do is to skin people alive and leave them in the desert to bake in the hot sun, not something a moral society would consider good. Jonah afforded men about the same way the Jews avoided Samaria.
The avoidance of Samaria was something completely disregarded by Jesus Christ. In John chapter four, instead of going around Samaria, we are told that he had to go through Samaria. As we saw in our sermon on Sunday, he did this because he had a divine encounter set with a very unlikely person. That person was a sinful woman of Samaria, someone he shouldn’t have even been having a conversation with, but someone that deserved the compassion that Jesus had to offer. In his conversation with her he offers her living water, the waters of salvation that washes us clean from our sin. This is everybody’s deepest desire, whether they realize it or not. It was Blaise Pascal that said that we have a God shaped hole inside of us, and our souls will never find rest until it rests in Jesus Christ. That whole can only be filled by the very God that created us and the world around us.
My question for us today, do you have a “Samaria” in your life? Is there a place, or are there people that you avoid? Sometimes we don’t realize who those people are or where they live until we sit down and think about our own personal prejudices. Jesus demonstrated that the compassion of God should extend to everybody including our enemies, for those that we consider our enemies. The gift of Jesus Christ is the greatest gift God ever gave to mankind, and as believers in Jesus Christ we would be irresponsible if we did not share that with anyone, and everyone that needs to hear it. My encouragement for all of us today, myself included, is to pray that God will show you where your Samaria is and create divine encounters for you to introduce people to the mercy and compassion of Jesus Christ.