In my reading today I ran across some interesting thoughts which I wanted to share:
In John 4, Jesus meets a woman at a well. She was a Samaritan (Jews despised Samaritans). She’d slept around… Jesus knew this and yet the one man in the history of the universe with the ability to look down on her without hypocrisy, didn’t. He talked to her. He asked her for a drink of water. And he offered to show her eternal life. He THEN called her out in love and said she’d had 5 husbands despite her saying she wasn’t married. She had given herself to others in search of love… money… security… And Jesus tells her that if she’d only ask him for water, he’d give her an eternal spring of life giving water. Water such that she’d never thirst again.
Was he really talking about h2o here? Or was he talking about significance. Life. Security. Purpose. Relationship with the one true God.
When Jesus sufficiently freaked her out by knowing her personal secrets, she excitedly ran back into town to tell others what happened and to bring them to Him. Some believed just by hearing her testimony, but others came to see Jesus at the well. They begged him to stay with them and he did… for 2 days he stayed and no doubt talked to them, listened to them, influenced them… loved them.
The very people he as a Jew was “supposed” to hate since all Jews did…
After a couple days pass, he and his disciples pull up their roots and head out to Galilee where Jesus was from. His own people. Fellow Jews. Do they see who He is as the Samaritans did? No. They see Jesus son of Joseph and Mary… they remember who he was growing up in Nazareth. They see him as another person with a lot to say, but not wanting to give him credit as God, they brush him aside.
The Bible says a prophet is never accepted in his home-town. Never is it more true than here when the only Son of God is placed in their midst and they think they know better because they knew who Jesus WAS.
…
So I ask you, who are you more apt to be? Are you more like Jesus who sees not who the woman at the well WAS, but who she could BE? Are you the one who sees people not as Samaritans, not as homeless, not as poor, not as needy, not as someone you wish to distance yourself from… but as people… as humans in need of love, of life… of a Savior?
Or are you more like I am more often than not? Are you the one who sees people as what they currently are? We often see them as the Galileans saw Jesus. They couldn’t get past who he USED TO BE to see who he had become. He was just a boy to them. They had pre-conceived notions that they knew him and nothing he could say would change that.
I struggle often with this. And it’s no surprise since my two lowest spiritual gifts are empathy and compassion… I’m an analytical person. Logic defines most of my decisions and I have rather poor people skills at times. I struggle to see the disenfranchised with empathy when I logically tell myself they could do ____ to get out of their situation, or that they did _____ to put themselves there and it’s their fault. It’s who they ARE and no amount of my concern will change that.
But that’s not who Jesus was.
Jesus looked through who we were… who we are… and died for us all the same. He died for us IN SPITE of us.
So who are you? Samaritan or Galilean? Do you see who WAS or who COULD BE?