Andrew Forrest

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Thirsty

In the time of Jesus, Jews considered Samaritans to be half-breeds: Israelites who had intermarried with Gentiles centuries before. And so Samaritans were considered unclean, and they were considered heretics. They read the Torah (the first 5 books of the Old Testament) but rejected everything else in the Hebrew Bible: Psalms, prophets, etc.. Instead of Jerusalem, they believed that the Lord should be worshipped on Mount Gerizim.


Samaria was between 2 Jewish regions: Judea in the south and Galilee in the north.


So, Jesus’s interactions with this Samaritan woman are extremely transgressive:

  • She is an unclean foreigner;

  • She is a woman;

  • And she is someone who is currently in an ambiguous moral state (she was divorced or widowed 5 times—presumably through no fault of her own—but the man she is currently with is not her husband).

In spite of all of that—or because of it?—Jesus reaches out directly to her.

Jesus has a way of reaching out to outsiders.

To whom do you need to reach out today?

Do it.

Today’s Scripture