The Samaritan Divide

 The greatest rift to peace in the United States is and always has been its racial divide. A divide that started hundreds of years ago that seems impossible to close. However, it is imperative that it closes. I believe that present-day commentators and activists on both the right and left are very far off on putting this issue to bed. Besides missing the key ingredients of God and His Truth, present-day civil rights activists lack an important virtue, and practically blatantly preach against it. 

That key virtue is Humility. I am not just calling out the activists for lacking in the virtue. Our society from the actual racists, people with biases, to the indifferent, and to myself all lack humility. Fr. Bryan Massingale, a Catholic thought leader on racism, once said, "At it's Core Racism is a Soul Sickness" That soul sickness starts with the capital sin of Pride. When one's heart is completely filled with pride, they are incapable of loving. Humility allows oneself to step back and see the bigger picture. Frankly, how can we even love God if we do not first recognize that we are his creature. How can we love our neighbor if we can not see them as the brother/sister that they are.

Humility must be the action taken when a racist action happens. You can't fight pride with pride. In human history, we have seen oppressed groups take over their oppressor and then enforce the same kind of dehumanizing treatment. Actual humility allows one to have "good pride".  A pride rooted in things from God. Such as the dignity and self-respect one should have. If you get teased, made fun, or laughed at in a non-physical way, humbly respond to your aggressor in a way that upholds their dignity. Human nature wants us to lash out, and to say one thing better. We need to ignore that impulse. It will only create a bigger divide. As C.S. Lewis puts it, “Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less.” 

Humility is obviously the right Christian response, but will responding in this manner actually create change? Humility alone will not. Humility and Truth will. Let’s take a look at an incident in Jesus’ life where He made racial change with humility and truth. This story is recorded in (John 4:4-42). 

To give pretense to this recorded story of Jesus we find Christ traveling from Judea to Galilee. To get to Galilee in those days one would have to travel through Samaria. The Jews and Samaritans did not get along with each other at all. They originally came from the same ancestors but through centuries of squabbles, foreign empire invasions, and cultural differences they had come to a hatred of each other. They did not view each other as equals and Jewish law found Samaritans to be “unclean.” Some biblical scholars have even stated that many Jews would travel around Samaria by boat instead of trekking through the defiled land. Nonetheless the Messiah of the world, who happened to be a Jew, stolls through the unclean land and decides to take a seat at Jacob's well as the hot midday sun beats down on him. Jesus sits alone because his brand new disciples head into the nearby town of Sychar to buy some food for their ravenous stomachs.

[ Now he had to go through Samaria. So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon.

 When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” 

The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”

“Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?”

Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”

He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.”

 “I have no husband,” she replied.

Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.”

“Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”

“Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”

The woman said, “I know that Messiah” (called Christ) “is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”

Then Jesus declared, “I, the one speaking to you—I am he.”

Just then his disciples returned and were surprised to find him talking with a woman. But no one asked, “What do you want?” or “Why are you talking with her?”

Then, leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people,“Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?” They came out of the town and made their way toward him.

Meanwhile his disciples urged him, “Rabbi, eat something.”

But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about.”

Then his disciples said to each other, “Could someone have brought him food?”

“My food,” said Jesus, “is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.]  Skip a couple verses and we find this story ends with the Samaritans inviting Jesus to stay with them.

[Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I ever did.” So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with them, and he stayed two days. And because of his words many more became believers.

They said to the woman, “We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world.”]

Unpacking This Gospel Message

Both Jesus and the unnamed woman break messed up culture norms by simply just talking to each other. Jesus shows us that everyone is in need of the gospel message. The woman could just have ignored Jesus, but she chose to engage with him. Oftentimes in our society we choose not to engage with someone because of their race, nationality, or stereotype. We find it easier to ignore each other because of language barriers or simply that we get uncomfortable. We need to get uncomfortable and let the Spirit lead us! Jesus wasted no time to drop truth into the conversation. The truth of Jesus being the giver of the living water is a little hard to understand, but the woman decided to run with it. Jesus then rewarded her curiosity with proof of his divine power by the knowledge of her many husbands.

Instead of being embarrassed by her personal life the Samaritan woman recognizes Jesus must be some sort of prophet and proceeded to ask the pivotal question of the conversation. A question that not only could easily cause their conversion to go into complete chaos but also a question that Samaritans and Jews had quarreled over for centuries. “Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”

Jesus replied with the blunt truth. The Samaritan woman could have argued or taken a major offense but she humbly took it in. And finally when Jesus revealed himself as the Messiah the woman humbled herself to believe that a Jewish man could be the savior of the world. This story exemplifies why humility and truth creates true racial change. Many Samaritans came to believe in Christ that day because of that conversation. They went as far as having the Jewish Christ and his Jewish disciples stay in their homes for two days. Wow… that is change we could use in America.

In the United States, education is used to combat racism. Education about microaggressions, African-American history, and inclusion. To a certain extent this “education” is truth. As a tanned skinned American who is from African and European descent I assure you that racism and systemic racism exists. People of color do face a bigger uphill battle in life due to living in a culture dominated by white people. That fact does not make me or any person of color special though. Our culture would like to think that it does. It thinks by putting the black race on a pedestal racism can be solved. We see this with the media bombarding us with “Buy Black,” “Vote Black,” “Hire Black,” and etc. This is nonsense because it excludes all other races which ultimately causes even more division. Frankly it also is just another play from the playbook from the white government leaders who segregated us.

Unfortunately division is the ultimate goal of the leaders of the City of Man. And they can either overtly or subtly get us to divide ourselves over the simple difference of our skin color. Someone being less human than another person because of their skin color is just common sense stupid. As a society we should not forget the evils of slavery and how Black people had to fight to get their freedom and equality, but we should not subtly force a new era of racism. An era in which we view each other as oppressor and oppressed or as privileged and underprivileged. We must not see each other in these ways. We must see each other as Christ sees us. He sees us as a brother or sister in need of God’s love. With those eyes we can break the unjust and biased systems of power that rule our nation. In the City of God we are not loved more or less because of our skin color. We are loved by God because we are his creatures that are made in his image and likeness. So as we live here in the City of Man let us love each other for that fact and not love or hate our neighbor for something that one day will rot away.

One of the reasons why Jesus was put to death was because his gospel message threatened the political establishment. The hope and salvation His message brought united many people from all kinds of races and backgrounds. The threat of unity was too great for Jewish hierarchy and the Roman government. Ultimately Christ’s execution brought forth his resurrection which created and strengthened a universal church. A church that welcomes and belongs to people of all different races and nations. Even through all its scandals the Church has brought an insurmountable good to the world. It has been the true champion to the poor and outcasts of  society. For this reason so many governments have tried to oppress and shut down the Church. Tyrannical Governments realize when their nation is filled with Christians that have a Godly moral conscience revolution is bound to happen. True Chrisitans will not turn a blind eye to slavery, racism, or social injustices. Ben Franklin puts it this way, “"Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God" The Cristero war that took place in Mexico during the 1920s is one such example of this.

The last thing I want to bring up in this chapter is the lie that Christianity is a white person’s religion. This is an argument and perceived thought that many non-believers hold. Their perceived thought comes from how many Europeans evangelized up to our modern age. Scandals of the Crusades and forced conversions in the founding of the New World rock many minds of want to be believers of non-white descendent. How could Chrisitan’s own slaves and treat them in inhumane ways and at the same time be believers of the true religion?

I believe the white evangelical preacher, Billy Graham explains this best in his sermon at the 1971 Chicago crusade. ( “And don’t you Black people ever forget one thing. The man that helped Jesus carry the cross was a Black man. And don’t ever forget another thing: Jesus belongs to Africa as much as he does to Europe and Asia. He was born in that part of the world that touches Africa and Asia and Europe. And Jesus was not a white man like me! Nor was he as Black as some of you. Because we have no physical picture of Jesus, other than what is depicted in Scripture Graham explained. We don’t know what the color of his skin, but it must have been a dark color like the people of His day, because He was a man like them. Don’t ever say it’s a white man’s religion or a Black man’s religion. It’s a world religion! He belongs to the world.”)

The Truth is through good and bad European evangelization millions of souls have been saved. This is because the gospel message repels all oppression because it is spiritual and not of the physical body. The City of Man wants division but we know as the Church Militant on earth we are one mystical body! One Body in Christ.