"from Every Nation" - The Bible And Race - Pt.2 Series

Racism, prejudice, and discrimination are sins that have been around as long as humanity. Those sins have taken the very good and beautiful design of God in all its diversity and corrupts it into something God never intended and makes it something ugly. Such sin existed down through history and still exists in every corner of the world in some form and to varying degrees. It is evident in both the Old Testament as well as the New.

There is a long and bitter history between the Jews and Samaritans. After the Assyrian conquest of the Northern Kingdom, those Jews captured and exiled and returned, intermarried with Assyrians. Their religion became a mixture, some holding to just the first 5 Books of the bible, others incorporating idolatry. Nearly 300 years later, When Ezra returned to start the rebuilding of Jerusalem after the Babylonian conquest we can see the distain the returning Jews had for the Samaritans. Ezra 4:1-4 reads;

“When the enemies of Judah and Benjamin heard that the exiles were building a temple for the Lord, the God of Israel, 2 they came to Zerubbabel and to the heads of the families and said, “Let us help you build because, like you, we seek your God and have been sacrificing to him since the time of Esarhaddon king of Assyria, who brought us here.”

3 But Zerubbabel, Joshua and the rest of the heads of the families of Israel answered, “You have no part with us in building a temple to our God. We alone will build it for the Lord, the God of Israel, as King Cyrus, the king of Persia, commanded us.”

4 Then the peoples around them set out to discourage the people of Judah and make them afraid to go on building.”

From there, the Samaritans went and built their own Temple. Then it is recorded in their history,

“Manasseh, brother of Jaddua the high priest, was threatened by the Jews with deprivation of his priestly office because of a marriage he had contracted with a foreign woman. His father-in-law, Sanballat, obtained permission from Alexander the Great, then besieging Tyre, to build a temple on Mount Gerizim. Manasseh was its first high priest. It became the refuge of all Jews who had violated the precepts of the Mosaic law. With this account must be compared Neh.13:28, which from the names and circumstances probably relates to the same event…The Samaritans altered their copies of the Pentateuch by substituting Gerizim for Ebal in Deut. 27:4 and by making an interpolation in Ex. 20 and so claimed divine authority for the site of their temple. Antiochus Epiphanes, at the request of the Samaritans, consecrated it to Jupiter, the defender of strangers. John Hyrcanus, a Maccabean and Jewish High Priest, destroyed it (109 B.C.).” However, the Samaritans continued to worship on the Mountain into the New Testament period.

Around 9 AD, while Jesus was a young boy, some Samaritans secretly joined in with Jews going to the Temple in Jerusalem for Passover. Once inside, they desecrated the Temple by spreading human bones around the sanctuary and courts. This was probably the most sacrilegious thing one could do to the Temple aside from destroying it.

Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well notes this tension. In Jn.4: when Jesus asked the woman for a drink she responds in v.9;

“You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink? (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.)…

“Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”

21 “Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22 You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 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.”

Elsewhere in Luke we saw that when the Samaritans rejected Jesus, James and John asked;

“Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven and destroy them?”

That was during Jesus’ lifetime. But the animosity continued unabated. Again, in 51 AD, about 20 years after Christ ascended, but before Luke wrote his gospel, some Samaritans from the village of Ginae murdered some Jews on their way to Jerusalem for Passover. The Jews appealed to Rome for justice but were ignored. In retaliation, a mob from Jerusalem went to the village of Ginae, massacred all the inhabitants and burned the village to the ground. Then Rome intervened and arrested and executed several of the mobs leaders.

So there existed great tension and animosity between the Jews and Samaritans for thousands of years. Think of any group and then think of the group they hate most and you get the idea, like the Hatfields and McCoys. This hatred could be racial, blacks and white or religious, Jews and Muslims, or social as the Hindu caste system of Brahmans and untouchables, or you and the person you hate, for whatever reason, so this parable is very applicable. This bold parable is so applicable that you can interchange the characters wherever racism and hatred is found and not miss the point of the parable.