Christ changed people. Not a small change: a move to modify diet or where you park or what you do. A radical change. The shunned women tells her neighbours to come hear Christ. And Christ’s immediate response is to stay in a Samaritan village for two days, and when he leaves there is belief in that village. It was, then, time for people to come to Christ. It is always time for people to come to Christ.
Just then his disciples came back. They marveled that he was talking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you seek?” or, “Why are you talking with her?” So the woman left her water jar and went away into town and said to the people, “Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?” They went out of the town and were coming to him.
Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, saying, “Rabbi, eat.” But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” So the disciples said to one another, “Has anyone brought him something to eat?” Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work. Do you not say, ‘There are yet four months, then comes the harvest’? Look, I tell you, lift up your eyes, and see that the fields are white for harvest. Already the one who reaps is receiving wages and gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.”
Many Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me all that I ever did.” So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them, and he stayed there two days. And many more believed because of his word. They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is indeed the Savior of the world.”
(John 4:27-42 ESV)
When there is urgency, you don’t wait. You get on and work on the issue. In an emergency, you have to be there immediately: if you can stop and get a coffee it is not an emergency. Christ is saying that this is important: that this village is taught now. Not social justice[1], the gospel.
To my knowledge, this is the only foreign village Christ stayed in. He was a Jew, and lived as the Jews did, observant to their law, if not the customs around the law, and the custom of the Jews was to shun the Samaritans. Christ did not. In doing this, he was looking further: the gospel was not merely to be preached in Jerusalem but to the who world.
Even in the virtual networks.
I once sat in a Parachute Band concert. About the first thing they said was from Isaiah: from the ends of the earth praises will be sung to God. And we were in the antipodes: about as far from the old world as one can be.
Today, we know that there is a need to preach the law, and from the law, our need for a saviour, and the work of Christ.
Let us do as the Samaritan woman. Point to Christ, who knows what we have done, and calls us regardless.
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1. Flint, Michagan has undrinkable water. This is an issue for their local government. Water is a human need: but I pay a considerable amount of money in property taxes to have clean water and sewage. It is as free as food is. Better to fix the plumbing than write hashtags.
