Loving Our City, Par Deux

By the way, in case anybody's wondering, I think the message went well on Sunday morning. It seemed to connect with a number of people ... now if we can just work on applying it.

2. We learn to see people for their humanity (John 4:9, 27, 17-18)

There were all kinds of barriers between Jesus and this woman going into their interaction. There are two that really stick out, though, and these are barriers we still struggle to cross today.

1. Barrier 1: Culture (vv 9, 27)

Jesus was a man, and a rabbi or teacher. In the eastern common to both of them, rabbis didn’t talk to women – especially sinful women like this one. But Jesus consistently challenged this cultural barrier, both by his interaction with this Samaritan woman and by his direct interaction with women like Mary and Martha and Mary Magdalene and the other women who seem to have traveled with Jesus and his disciples and ministered to them.

Furthermore, we already talked about Jews and Samaritans. They did not get along, they did not interact unless it was absolutely unavoidable. The Jews possessed a racial hatred for the Samaritans, considering them all basically on the level of illegitimate children because they were the descendants of Jews who had hung on in the region and then intermarried with gentiles. This was no small thing. But Jesus completely ignored these conventions and addressed the woman in a personal and friendly way. It may look like he was kind of bossing her around, but culturally, he was honoring her by addressing her and asking her for this favor.

2. Barrier 2: Sin (vv 17-18)

This woman was made further untouchable by the sin that had come to characterize and define her life. Now a normal stranger wouldn’t have known this, but everyone from her town would have. Now this woman wasn’t a prostitute, but she was almost certainly known as a “loose woman.” It sounds like she had slept with just about everybody in town, whether as a result or as a cause of failed marriages we don’t really know. But when you picture this woman … I don’t know how many of us have seen and spoken to real prostitutes. But if you have, you know that usually, you can see the hard-knock life on their faces. Whatever beauty they had at one point has been worn away by their destructive life. That’s the woman Jesus is talking to. And once again, if he had been following the prejudices of his culture, he never would have reached out. If he had been scared that her sinner-ness would rub off on him, he never would have reached out.

For another example of this, we should go back to Matthew. The story of how Jesus called Matthew to be his disciple is really mind-blowing. Jesus was walking by Matthew’s tax collecting booth and called him right out of it. Now we need to understand what’s going on here. First of all: who here likes to pay taxes? Who loves looking at their check and seeing that a quarter of their money is gone before they ever get it? Well, it was much worse in the Roman Empire. To be a successful tax collector in those days, you had to basically rob people. You worked for the Roman government, and you had to collect what they required. Then to make your living, you just added on as much as you could extort from people. You didn’t get paid a normal wage; you got paid whatever you could bring in. So the tax collectors were hated and vilified for their betrayal of their own nation and the way they made their living. Now, to once again draw a parallel for today, this is as if Jesus went and found the guy working at the adult bookstore in town and said “hey, come follow me. I think you’d make a good disciple.” Does that make any sense to us? It didn’t to the Pharisees. But Jesus looked beyond Matthew’s sin, saw him for who he was and who God intended him to be, and brought him out. You notice that there’s no mention that Jesus said right then, “you need to quit your tax-collecting.” That was something that happened naturally as Matthew learned to follow Christ.

So this idea is exemplified by Christ in his ministry in general. Let’s get something straight – all the people he was interacting with were sinners, religious and irreligious alike. But Jesus made no distinction between the two. The ones were socially unacceptable because of their sin actually got more of his attention. He didn’t ignore the religious people. He ate with Pharisees too. But it sure sounds like he ate with the riff-raff more often.

Application: Now this is something that we can easily blow off, but if we are to fulfill God’s calling on our lives, we have to do self-examination at this point. We should ask ourselves this question:


What kind of people am I uncomfortable being around?


What kind of people can I just not stand? This is tough, and once again, we have to rely on the Holy Spirit and we have to listen to him and be obedient. We have to allow God to convict of our sinful prejudices. This is important, because Jesus loves those kind of people just as much as he loves our kind of people. Their sin condemns them no less and no more than our sin condemned us before Christ redeemed us! And Christ’s love is most clearly demonstrated when we reach out beyond these barriers to build loving relationships.