Manchaca UMC

Week 4 “Come and see a man...” (John 4:29)
It turns out that social distancing has been around quite a while- all the way back to biblical days. In the Old Testament social distancing was practiced for health reasons as lepers were made to live outside the camp or the city. Food and supplies had to be brought out to them. It was also practiced for reasons of ritual cleanliness or purity; many situations rendered a person “ unclean” and people were not allowed to come into contact with them. The beaten man in the Good Samaritan story is an example. His blood would have made the priest and Levite unclean. If he were dead, that would make the penalty for touching him very lengthy. Of course, in every generation, people practice social distancing from enemies and people whose behavior is not approved of (remember your parents warning you about being careful whom you hung around with?).

So we come to a social distancing story at the well near Sychar in John 4. Jesus comes there at noon and finds a woman who is practicing social distancing by coming to the well at that time when most women would come draw water in the morning or evening. She likely knows that people will distance themselves from her anyway. Likely they had concerns about her character; she’d been married five times and was currently living with a man who was not her husband. What had she done to cause five men to divorce her, or worse, cause five men to die and leave her widowed??!

Jesus would have had two additional reasons to distance himself from her. She was an unmarried woman and men did not have long conversations with unmarried women - especially at a well. Many Old Testament figures met their wives at a well such as Isaac, Jacob and Moses! It would look to the people of Sychar as if Jesus had gone to a singles bar. And even worse, she was a Samaritan. Jews and Samaritans were enemies like Arabs and Israelis today.

So, Jesus ends up crossing a number of barriers to speak with this woman- a character/reputation barrier, an appropriate social norm barrier, and crucially, an ethnic/religious barrier. And the result of his barrier crossing? The woman runs off to tell her village about Jesus and many Samaritans come to believe (4:39). How many people in our community might be attracted to Jesus if we would but risk closing the distance between us and them through hospitality?

~David

Questions to consider:
1. Have you ever been excluded at home, work, school or church? How did that feel?
2. Have you ever reached out to someone who had been excluded?
3. What barriers do you see at work in our world today? Which one is the most difficult for you to cross?