"The Barrier Breaker"

I hope you caught that the things I just listed all happened at the end; His arrest, His crucifixion, His resurrection, His ascension.

Therefore every movement of His was divinely orchestrated toward His goal, and there was not a moment when Jesus was not in complete control, not only of Himself, but the circumstances around Him.

Men thought they planned their way, but the Lord directed their steps (Prov 16:9) for His purpose and for the Father’s glory.

I could list examples; one is seen in His healing of the lame man by the pool of Bethesda in John 5, where His very intent seems to be to provoke the hypocritical ire of the Pharisees. That’s just one example that I give you, so you can read that account with these things in mind and see what the end result was of His actions there.

But today we are here with Jesus and His disciples as they set out from Judea to Galilee, and we will focus on what is recorded for us in this amazing account of the divinely appointed meeting between Jesus and this very fortunate Samaritan woman.

JESUS NEEDED TO GO

Now there is this statement in verse 4 of which very much has been made. “And He had to pass through Samaria”.

We have so much to consider today in this account, I don’t want to spend a big chunk of time here, but let’s look at it for just a moment.

If you go to your maps in the back of your Bible, to one that is titled, “Palestine in the time of Christ” or something close to that, you can see that Judea, Samaria and Galilee are sort of stacked one on the other. Galilee is the farthest North, with Judea in the South, and Samaria located between them.

There is an historical reason for what I’m going to say next and maybe we’ll explain some of that later, but for now let it suffice to say that there was great bitterness and hatred between the Jews and the Samaritans. The Jews would have nothing to do with the Samaritans. That is why Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan would have incited a very strong reaction from His hearers, when He contrasted the actions of pious Jewish religious men who neglected the victim on the road, with the actions of the Samaritan who helped the man.

Because of their history and their enmity with one another, Jews would not even pass through Samaria to get from Judea to Galilee or vice versa. They would cross the Jordan, traverse the miles it would take to go around the boarders of Samaria, then re-cross the Jordan. This added 2 to 3 days to their journey one way, but this is how great their disdain was for the Samaritans, that they would go to those lengths to avoid stepping foot within their boarders.

Now I explained all that here to point out that according to the typical Jewish thought of the day, Jesus would have ‘needed’ to take the circuitous, longer route.

So to say that He needed to pass through Samaria would be akin to one of us saying, “Fred needed to walk through that high-crime neighborhood instead of walking extra blocks to get around it”. The knee-jerk reaction to that statement would be, “No, Fred needs to go around, even if it takes longer!”