If we want to see what love looks like, we have to look at how Jesus treats the people whom everyone else disapproves of being with. This time, we are going for the double whammy of a woman who wasn’t even a Jew but one of the Samaritans, their hated enemy.
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler! Welcome to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel, where I usually post slightly longer versions. All Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the CSB (Christian Standard Bible), tweaked a little or a lot to make the context and the content more understandable for kids.
This week’s lesson on the love of Jesus was requested by a parent who wanted to know how to teach her kids about the Samaritan woman who spoke with Jesus in John 4. It’s a great story to learn about the love of Jesus and also about the assumptions people make about Bible characters without any proof to back it up, and how we can learn to really believe that the Bible says things that it doesn’t. There is so much context here to talk about—the region of Samaria and its really messed up history, the Samaritans and who they were and where they came from, the Samaritan Bible, rules for Jewish men dealing with Samaritan women, wells, marriage, divorce, death, and family life. But all this will lead us someplace even better than all that—we are going to see how Jesus behaves when He is with foreigners, women, and enemies. And we’ll also see how His disciples deal with them. Last week they were bullying kids, what will they do in this story? First of all, let’s read the beginning of the story:
Once the Pharisees figured out that Jesus was getting and baptizing more disciples than His cousin John the Baptist, who was respected as a great prophet, news came to Jesus about it and He decided to leave Judea, in the south of Israel, and to go back north to Galilee, where He had lived almost all His life. Now, even though His cousin John was baptizing people, Jesus wasn’t doing it Himself because He had His disciples doing it instead. To get to Galilee, they had to travel through the region of Samaria, where the Samaritans lived, and they came to the town of Sychar. Sychar was in the near the land that Jacob, the grandson of Abraham, gave to his son Joseph. So, the well there was called Jacob’s well and Jesus was so tired and thirsty from all the walking that He sat down beside the well to rest. It was about noon, so it would have been very warm outside.
A Samaritan woman from the town came alone to get water from the well. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” He didn’t make it an order, because the word He used made it clear that He was asking for a gift of water, something that it would be generous of her to give Him since she would have to do all the work to get it because He couldn’t do it Himself. His disciples had gone into the town to buy food, and so Jesus was all alone when the woman came to get the water she needed for her household. Well, the woman was shocked, “Whoa, I am confused here. You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan and so how can you ask me for a drink?” And she was right to be confused because Jews and Samaritans hated each other for a lot of different reasons. Jesus replied, “If you knew the gift that God has for people, and if you knew who is asking you for a gift of water, you would be the one asking for a drink and He would give you living water, not just well water.
“Sir,” said the Samaritan woman, “you don’t even have a bucket to lower down into the well, and the well is deep. So where do you get this ‘living water’? You aren’t greater than our father Jacob, Abraham’s grandson, are you? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, and so did his sons and all their critters.” Jesus replied, “Absolutely everyone who drinks the water out of this well here is going to get thirsty again. But I have water to give people that will be like a fresh spring of water, bubbling up out of the ground forever and ever—only it will do that inside them so that they will live forever.” “Sir,” the Samaritan woman said to him, “give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty anymore and come all the way out here to draw water.” And when she said “Give me,” it wasn’t a command either, she said it just like Jesus did when He asked her for a drink, because she was asking for a gift of something she couldn’t get for herself. “Go call your husband,” Jesus said to her, “and come back here.” “I don’t have a husband,” she replied. “You’re right and were telling the truth when you said, ‘I don’t have a husband,’ Jesus nodded. “In fact, you have had five husbands and the man you are with now isn’t your husband.”
“Sir,” the surprised Samaritan woman replied, “I see that you’re a prophet, so here is a question for you. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, Mt Gerizim, but you Jews say that the place to worship is in Jerusalem on Mt Zion.” Jesus told her, “Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you won’t worship the Father on this mountain or in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship but according to your traditions written in your Torah. We Jews worship according to the Torah of Moses, which had to be preserved because salvation comes from the Jewish people. But a time is coming, and is actually already here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father correctly inside and outside, by the power of the Spirit and according to the truth. Yes, the Father wants such people to worship Him like that, without arguing about mountains. God is spirit, and the people who worship him must worship in Spirit and in truth.” The Samaritan woman said to him, “I know that the Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ in Greek). “When he comes, he will explain everything to us.” Jesus told her, “Here I am, the Messiah, speaking to you.”
Lemme tell you, I had to change the wording a lot because all of John is written at a very high level. The difference between reading Mark and reading John is like the difference between reading something meant for teenagers to be able to understand and reading Shakespeare. Don’t get me wrong—Mark is my favorite Gospel. I know it better than all the others combined. But John is kinda highfalutin and complicated. Not that you guys can’t learn it and understand it but to do that can be really difficult. I am going to tell you a secret—sometimes people think John is the best Gospel for new Christians to read but I totally disagree. Okay, I guess I can’t call it a secret anymore. But I think the others are much better to read first. John was like, writing beautiful poetry full of symbols and deep teachings, compared to the others who wrote their Gospels more like regular biographies—which is actually exactly what they were. A biography is the story of someone’s life and isn’t meant to be deep or confusing. That’s what makes John so difficult, because everything is being hinted at and the teachings can be very mysterious and we can get the wrong idea if we don’t pay very close attention and John has a lot of context in it that the other Gospels don’t need. For example, John talks about Jesus being at the Temple during Hannukah, but none of the other Gospels mention it, so then we have to learn about Hannukah or there is a whole chapter that’s gonna seem weird and if you don’t know about vineyards, another chapter is going to sound strange if you don’t understand water jugs. And John has miracles the others don’t mention, and very mysterious teachings about what Jesus is doing but most of all in the Gospel of John, Jesus talks about specifically loving one another in ways He doesn’t in the other Gospels. John is terrific, of course, but it isn’t meant for beginners to easily understand.
What I really want to talk about first is the difference between Bible commandments and social rules. Bible commandments were given to Moses and the children of Israel after God saved them from slavery in Egypt. They showed the people how to learn to live with God as their King and with one another. There aren’t a whole lot of commandments, and most of them had to deal with what the priests were supposed to do and with sacrifices at the Tabernacle—things we don’t deal with anymore because there is no Tabernacle or Temple and doing them anywhere else is actually against God’s instructions. Mostly, the commandments were supposed to teach the people how to be wise and to be more loving than all the nations around them so that foreigners (people who lived in other countries or came from other countries to live near or in Israel) would be stunned at how different they were. As the Bible goes on from Exodus, the prophets add instructions to try to teach Israel to be even better. They add a lot more context to the commandments God gave to Moses and especially when it comes to the worshiping of idols and how they treated the people who didn’t have anyone to protect them. God’s commandments really came down to two different things—love God and love other humans. Don’t worship any other god and don’t do anything to harm humans because if you can’t love humans then you can’t love God either. That’s why we get the Holy Spirit when we accept Jesus as our King, so that we can be changed not only in how we behave on the outside when people are looking, but also on the inside because it’s what is inside us that matters most. If we are good on the inside, we will be good on the outside too. Jesus spent a lot of time teaching about that and why it was important for us to let the Holy Spirit keep making us more and more loving, peaceful, patient, kind, gentle, trustworthy and able to control our tempers when we get irritated. And that’s hard but every time we do better, it makes God really happy. No one but Jesus is perfect, but we can keep trying to do better.
Social rules are totally different. Social rules aren’t always written down but everyone knows them. And they are different from place to place. In some countries, people eat cats and dogs, but where I live, that makes people really angry. The people who eat cats and dogs look at us and think we are strange because doing that is normal. Their social rules say it’s absolutely fine and dandy. In ancient Egypt, even up until close to the time Jesus lived, a Pharaoh (the king of the country) would almost always marry his sister, which we think it super gross—and actually is against God’s commandments even though Abraham might have done that before he even knew God. We also don’t even marry our cousins where I live, even though that was normal in Bible times too. Social rules in some countries tell people that they can only marry certain people. Sometimes it is based on racist ideas that some people are better than others based on color or nationality or money. Just fifty years ago, if a black man married a white woman, he could end up dead. Every place has social rules that tell people what is and isn’t okay for the group.
In Jesus’s time, there was a social rule saying that Jews and Samaritans shouldn’t have anything to do with each other—even though both groups loved and read the first five books of the Bible—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. There were almost no differences between their copies, but one big difference caused a lot of problems. The Samaritans had a Bible that told them to worship God only on Mt Gerizim, and the Jews had a Bible that told them not to worship God anywhere except for in Jerusalem on Mt Zion. But that information isn’t in the first five books because when they were written, the place to worship God was at the Tabernacle that traveled around with them. They didn’t know anything about Mt Gerizim until the middle of Deuteronomy right before Moses died and they crossed the Jordan River into Canaan, which would later be called Israel. And they weren’t told to worship there but to speak blessings of the good things that would happen to them if they listened to God and obeyed Him.
The Samaritans had a different Bible for some complicated reasons. And if I taught you that, then we wouldn’t learn the stuff I want you to know this week. Because of the different Bibles, and fighting that happened between their group and the Jews who returned from Babylon about five hundred years before Jesus was born, they hated each other. Each hated the Temple of the other group. The Jews even destroyed the Samaritan Temple and then convinced the Romans not to allow them to rebuild it. As revenge, the Samaritans smuggled the bones of dead people into the Temple so it couldn’t be used until it was cleaned up. By the time Jesus was born, Jews and Samaritans had nothing good to do with one another and so when Jesus told His disciples to buy food from the Samaritans on their way home to Galilee in the north, that might have shocked them. But even more shocking was when Jesus asked the Samaritan woman for a drink, because although it wasn’t against God’s commandments, it went against the social rules. She knew it and He knew it too. But Jesus often broke the rules that were just social. He talked and ate and drank with the people He wasn’t even supposed to say hello to. Not only was she a Samaritan, but also a woman. Unlike today, people used to believe that women weren’t as good as men were and men didn’t speak to women who weren’t family members. Women couldn’t be witnesses in a trial, because they weren’t trusted to be any more reliable than children and we know from last time what they thought about children, right? And it wasn’t good. In our courts now, women and children are thought to be just as good witnesses as men. Also, a Samaritan woman was believed to be unclean all the time. The commandments that told Jewish women what to do to be clean enough to go to the Temple—the Jews believed weren’t good enough for a Samaritan woman because she was going to be unclean, or unfit, for going to the Temple in Jerusalem no matter what. And if Jesus took a drink from her bucket, He would be unclean too. Not like dirty, not that kind of unclean or “not clean” but too contaminated to go to the Temple. So, Jewish men and women had a social rule that told them not to have anything to do with Samaritans but that would go double for a Samaritan woman. Jesus would tell His followers in the Book of Acts to go and tell His story to the Samaritans and they were the first non-Jewish people to follow Jesus. But that was still in the future when this story happens.
The woman is very surprised that He wants a drink from her. She’s shocked He is talking to her. She’s shocked that He is talking to her respectfully! This went against all of the social rules Jesus grew up understanding. But Jesus didn’t care. He saw a woman who came alone to the well during the hottest part of the day probably because the other women of the town wouldn’t let her go with them. For some reason, this woman is even looked down on by the Samaritans, who are looked down on by the Jews. Meaning, they thought they were better than she was. But why? After surprising her by asking her for water to drink from her bucket and listening to her questions and answering them respectfully, He told her that He was the Messiah that the Jews and the Samaritans were looking for. She told Him that she wanted the Messiah to finally clear up the question of whether God should be worshiped in Jerusalem or at Mt Gerizim but Jesus was telling her that was the wrong question to ask because God wanted to create people who could worship Him everywhere, wherever they were—not with sacrifices but with obedience and love. Only forty years later, there would be no Temple in Jerusalem or Samaria and there still isn’t. A new way to worship God was going to be needed, and when the Holy Spirit comes into a believer, they become part of a Temple that is made from every single believer on the planet. Paul even calls us stones that are alive, not like the stones of the Temple that were cut out of the ground.
Jesus asks her to go and get her husband and then she tells Him why no one else wants anything to do with her—she has no husband. Jesus tells her that she’s been married five times, and the man she is living with isn’t her husband. Now, we don’t know for sure what happened. We know that many (but not all) Jewish men believed that they could get rid of their wives for any reason at all, so maybe that’s what happened to her. Maybe her husbands had all died—that wouldn’t be so strange in a world where old men often married young women and when Romans soldiers could sometimes kill whomever they wanted as long as they weren’t Roman citizens. Maybe she couldn’t have babies, and her husbands kept getting rid of her. What we do know is that she couldn’t divorce all of those men. And a divorced woman couldn’t go out and get a job to take care of herself. Women needed men in those days so that they wouldn’t starve to death once they were kicked out of their houses. So, she was living with a man she wasn’t married to. Was she a nurse for an old man? Maybe even her father? Was she living with her brother? Was she living with a man who wouldn’t marry her, just to survive? Whatever happened here, she was leading a very sad life and Jesus knew it. The women and men of the town might have been shunning her, meaning ignoring her, or keeping their distance if she was barren or her husbands had all died because they might think she had the evil eye—which was the ability to curse people and make bad things happen, especially to pregnant women and children. There is a Jewish book called Tobit and it is fictional but very useful for seeing how people thought before Jesus was born. In it, there is a woman who is named Sarah, and every time she gets engaged to a man, a demon named Asmodeus kills the man! Talk about bad luck, right? Being around Sarah would get really scary really fast. It may be that the Samaritan woman was being shamed for not being married to a man she is living with like a wife, or because the people believe she is bad luck. Either way, she has led a hard life full of a lot of disappointment so far.
But Jesus isn’t mean to her, and tells her what He knows about her, and when she figures out He is a powerful prophet, she asks Him about which mountain they should worship on. Jesus tells her that’s not the important question, and ends up telling her (and only her) that He is the Messiah they have been waiting for! Her! The woman no one wanted to go get water with! The woman no one wanted to marry anymore! The woman who the social rules told everyone to stay away from. A woman! A Samaritan! What the heck is going on here? This was scandalous from beginning to end. The woman is so astounded that she goes back to the village and tells everyone that someone who might be the Messiah is out at the well, and they come to see. And they invited Him to stay with them, in a Samaritan town! And He actually stays for two whole days teaching them! And after they see Him and hear Him, they believe her and they believe Him. They even call Him the Savior of the World!
Unfortunately, Luke 9 tells us that later, the Samaritans of a certain town were angry at Him because He was going to celebrate the Passover in Jerusalem and not with them where they believed it should be celebrated. James and John asked if they should call down fire from Heaven to destroy the town and Jesus was like, “Dudes, that is not okay!” And they went to another Samaritan town for supplies. So, we see that Jesus speaks to the people no one thought He should be speaking to, eats and drinks with them, teaches them, stays with them in their houses, and protects them from vengeful disciples who are way too quick to want to kill folks when they are feeling rejected. Call down fire from Heaven, really. Good thing God changed them as much as He did before sending them out to the rest of the word! That’s just super messed up. But this isn’t the only time. Jesus is going to touch lepers, too. And eat with tax collectors and whatever sinners showed up at their tables. Being with Jesus changed these people because He loved them.
I love you. I am praying for you. Think about the difference between God’s commandments and what we think of as right or wrong based on social rules where we live. Sometimes those rules are very good, like not hurting animals, and sometimes those rules are very bad—like saying its okay to hurt some people just because they aren’t like us.