Going through Samaria: Encountering the Other

The first time I attended an LGBTQ Pride parade in Boston I was enthralled and terrified. My evangelical upbringing had prepared me only to fear, not to befriend Pride celebrations. I met up at the Boylston T stop with my non-profit co-workers. To begin with, I had no idea how to dress for the occasion. One of our friends had on knee-length leather boots, bright tights, and a rainbow T-shirt to match her painted face. I wore ripped jeans and a “No War” T-shirt. Wrong social movement—go figure.

That was nothing compared to the cultural shock I was about to experience. When I was fourteen years old, I signed an evangelical pledge of virginity until marriage, but there I was on the crowded street, dance music pulsing while drag queens on parade floats handed out free condoms. After the parade, the party moved to the Boston Common. Lesbian singers sang Indigo Girls anthems, same-sex couples made out all around me, and Pride flags flew everywhere.

I had a great deal of fun, but it was also challenging. It was challenging because in that cross-cultural moment, I came face-to-face with a lifetime accumulation of my heterosexist lack of awareness. My entire conservative Christian upbringing shaped me to act and believe unconsciously that gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people were not full human beings. That made LGBTQ folks “other” to me because when straight is declared the God-given norm, queer becomes the sinful deviation—and so it wasn’t until that Pride parade that I encountered my Bible-ordained heterosexism.

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

Jesus Goes Through, Not Around

Jesus doesn’t have to go through Samaria. Everyone else went around. Even Matthew’s gospel says that Jesus commanded his disciples to avoid Samaria. Sure, it took longer, but it was worth the effort to preclude the ritual contamination caused by bumping into those dreaded, unclean Samaritans.

Jews and Samaritans had good reason to bypass each other: in the seventh century, the Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom of Israel—which included Samaria. Over the years, the Samaritans in the North started doing things differently from their cousins in the South. Worship practices and cultural expressions diverged. Divisions set in. Turf was staked. Scholar Allen Callahan writes in his masterful book A Love Supreme that in the fourth century, a Samaritan leader built a temple on Mount Gerizim to rival the temple in Jerusalem. Callahan also tells us that in the second century, a Jerusalem leader named John Hyrcanus became fed up with this rivalry, crossed over into Samaria, and burned their temple to the ground.

So when we read in John 4:4 that Jesus “had to go through Samaria,” it’s not quite right. Jews typically avoided Samaritans at all costs—and vice versa. Jesus doesn’t have to lead his Jewish followers into enemy territory. He chooses to.

John’s Jesus doesn’t go around Samaria; he goes through it. Once he does, the walls that kept Samaritans and Jews at odds with each other start to break down. Jesus sits at Jacob’s well and talks with an unnamed woman, even though male rabbis and women don’t talk, even though he knows she has a history of five failed marriages and a sixth relationship that is on the rocks. When Jesus asks her for a drink of water, she is understandably shocked. The cultic purity codes forbade anything so scandalous as an up-and-coming rabbi sipping from a common cup with a Samaritan woman. “Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans,” John explains in verse 9.

Breaking Down Walls

Yet, despite Jesus’ powerful example of going through Samaria—going into the heart and home of the “other”—we live in a world of polarization and avoidance of what is different or unknown. Much of this division today is hateful and extreme, such as conservative Christian racism against immigrants. But it’s not only “their” problem. It’s a problem for each of us. It’s even the gospel writer John’s problem, who builds his narrative based on dualities of light and dark, good and evil, heaven above and earth below—and you can guess which category his fellow-Jewish opponents fit into.

Ancient and modern, we structure our lives in ways that reinforce our assumptions and protect us from having to see other people as full human beings. We all have long-held, unacknowledged strategies of avoiding the discomfort of contact with people not like us. For example: when folks in my small but elite college town claim that the cultural and intellectual heritage makes us better than people in other nearby towns, we are going around Samaria, not through it. When folks who live in houses judge row houses or mobile homes—or even worse, criminalize homelessness—we are avoiding Samaria. Whenever we justify our own status quo at the expense of what is different or uncomfortable, we are going around Samaria.

John’s Jesus heralds a spiritual unity beyond the differences of race, gender and religion. He says that neither the temple in Mount Gerizim nor the temple in Jerusalem can fully house God. Instead, a time is coming when “true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth” (John 4:23). In this new age described by Jesus, the history of Jewish-Samaritan grievances becomes irrelevant. Worship location no longer matters. Age-old barriers no longer keep them apart. The wounds of the past are past.

The poet Robert Frost wrote, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” I think we could say: “Something there is in Jesus that breaks down walls.” Something there is in Jesus that crosses boundaries, that welcomes the Samaritan “other,” and that enacts peace for those who have been long divided.

This is not easy. This transformation takes time. It can be vulnerable to encounter what is different; it can be destabilizing to be challenged by the unfamiliar. It can be enthralling or terrifying, like the once-evangelical me standing on Boylston Street for my first Pride Parade. Yet it’s precisely this path of change that Jesus bids us to walk.

I’m on one last vacation with family before the school year begins. This is a sermon from the archives.