JOHN177 - The Samaritans Were the Jews’ Repugnant Cultural Other and Vice Versa
John 4:4
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Music by Jeff Foote
1 SPEAKER_01: Hey everybody, it's Matt.
This is the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast.
And yesterday we were talking about the fact that we get this
one little travel itinerary detail from John the Evangelist
in John 4.4.
Jesus is down south in Judea, presumably Jerusalem, based on
what we looked at yesterday with how the maps work out and stuff.
And he's going to make his way north to Galilee, where most of
Jesus' ministry happens.
And we just get this one weird, cryptic little travel geography
detail here in John 4.4.
It says, now he, Jesus, had to go through Samaria.
Huh.
Now to you and me, that just sounds like okay, uh, I guess
that was the trip.
That's the way he went.
But to the original audience, that was loaded.
Yesterday we considered all the different possible reasons that
John might have given us this little detail, and geography is
certainly one of them.
But also, there's no getting around the cultural weight of
the thing.
John is pretty neutrally here, given his historical context,
acknowledging that Jesus was going through somewhere that has
a reputation.
You got a Jewish guy and his buddies walking through
Samaritan territory.
So what would this be like?
Mm-hmm.
Boy, this is tricky, isn't it, Whitman?
There's a whole lot of ways to get myself in a whole lot of
trouble here.
Because anytime you start talking about modern equivalents
of the kind of racial ethnic hatred that existed between the
Jews and the Samaritans at the time of Jesus, I mean, you're
just jabbing your fist into a hornet's nest.
How can I even draw on a modern example that won't stir
passions?
Yet what I want to do is stir passions.
Okay, this is how we're gonna do it.
You make your own likewise today.
Picture two groups that don't like each other very much.
If you want to be bold and look deep into your heart and the
heart collectively of your people, consider your own
historic rivals.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's acute, innocuous rivalry, like
Nebraskans are like, Iowa stinks and it's terrible.
And you know what Iowa means?
Idiots out walking around.
And then the Iowans can be like, well, you know what the N on the
Nebraska helmet means?
Knowledge.
SPEAKER_01: Like you got kind of harmless rivalries like that in
my country, but you also got some pretty uh some pretty legit
ones, right?
Like where people groups have got really bad blood.
And what's at the heart of that bad blood?
Well, there's usually a few outstanding incidents, and
there's also usually a pretty good fight over the story, and
that ties in very closely with one more part of the anatomy in
these blood feuds that go on for generations and centuries
between different people groups.
It's not just that there tends to be a fight over what really
happened and who controls the narrative.
The fights also tend to be with people who are similar to you,
fighting for similar real estate.
Think about who you don't like religiously.
And maybe you're right not to like them.
Maybe their ideas are really bad and dangerous, and maybe it is a
a righteous dislike on your part, but think about who it is.
I bet it's not some crazy far-off foreign thing you don't
know anything about.
I bet the group that you don't like and are most irritated by
is one that is pretty similar to your own, but they did some
weird stuff with the story, and you don't like it.
The I don't remember the person who came up with this term.
I used to know it.
I learned about it in the book How to Think by Alan Jacobs.
But there's a woman, a sociologist, who came up with
this term repugnant cultural other, the RCO.
And one of her observations is that the rep repugnant, excuse
me, cultural other is it's somebody who's like you.
That hatred doesn't run as hot for people far, far away.
Even though if you really got to know the people far, far away,
you'd probably find their ideas to be far more threatening and
appalling.
No, no, we tend to be more agitated by stuff that looks
almost just like us.
I would argue that you're seeing that phenomenon right now.
There are certain parts of the political spectrum in the West
who are weirdly aligning with certain elements of very radical
Islam, which is a just an odd choice because the values of
Islam conflict very, very heavily with the political side
in the West that kind of buddies up with them.
It's just, I mean, objectively, it's very strange bedfellows.
Well, how does that happen?
Well, I don't know.
Like for people in the West, the RCO, the repugnant cultural
other, is not the person halfway across the planet who does, you
know, practices Islam.
And we'll worry about that later on.
The repugnant cultural other is your neighbor who looks and
sounds a lot like you, but they got the story all twisted.
They're thinking wrong about stuff.
That's who you have to defeat.
And so sometimes you buddy up with strange bedfellows far, far
away to defeat them.
Look, I'm trying to be delicate here.
I'm not trying to pick a fight with anybody, but you're just
not gonna understand in your bones the Samaritan thing and
why John had to bring up the Samaritan thing in order for the
original audience to really get the story that was about to
happen, unless you are willing to think honestly about human
nature.
And when we do think honestly about human nature, well, we see
things in ourselves and we see things in others, and we see
things in society that are not pretty, but they are real.
Also, you and I talk about the Bible every day and Jesus and
the gospel.
Everything that we're seeing in the text is sort of, I mean,
it's the solution to what is wrong with us in this way.
So, yes, we're looking at the Bible and we're gonna be looking
at stories over the next few days that cause me to want to
invite you to picture some of the uglier aspects of blood
feuds and tribal rivalries and things like that.
But when we go into the ancient text that is the Bible, and we
think openly and clearly about tribalistic reality of our
humanity and our fallness, then the Bible just pops among any
ancient document we would ever read because the vision, the
trajectory of the Bible is going from all the nations being
scattered and all the languages being scattered.
You know, you remember the story of the Tower of Babel way back
early in Genesis, all the way up through the centuries as God's
working His redemptive plan, you get to Jesus and then the time
right after Jesus, and what happens?
God undoes Babel.
In Acts chapter 2, after Jesus is ascended, when the Holy
Spirit shows up, the languages are put back together
miraculously by the same God who separated the languages
miraculously.
What does it mean?
It means that God is building something that is bigger than
tribal rivalries and having our lives burned up and our all of
our life energy consumed by worrying about who gets to
control this part of the story or that part of the story in our
bitter blood rivalries.
When you start to look at these kind of stories, you realize
there is no out from some of these.
And then people have lofty, nice ideas about how to solve Israel,
Palestine.
Good luck.
That fight's been percolating since long before the material
you and I are reading here in the Gospel of John.
People have ideas for how to solve Ukraine, Russia.
Man, I believe me, I want these problems solved.
But when we get deep into the Bible, we see an answer to these
gigantic problems.
And the answer is a new family of faith in Christ that
transcends these ethnic tribal rivalries that will never go
away.
Rivalries like the one between the Samaritans and the Jews.
What Jesus did on the cross and in the resurrection makes stuff
like this possible.
Galatians 3:28.
You might remember this one if you were there for that season.
There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female,
for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed and heirs
according to the promise.
Look, I say again, we are getting into stuff that is about
an ethnic rivalry with a long history that we're going to be
looking at over the next day or two between the Samaritans and
the Jews.
There are a billion sensitive modern analogues for the tension
that we're going to be looking at here.
And we're pretty weird about talking about it right now.
But nonetheless, what we're going to talk about takes us
into delicate territory.
And further, the Bible isn't going to treat this rivalry as
uh, well, you know, you see it this way, and this other team
sees it this way.
Jesus is about to communicate with a Samaritan and not say,
you know, everybody kind of sees it their own way, and every
single group ever is equally right, especially the ones that
have most recently lost or have the lower hand.
And so, you know, you, Samaritan person, like you're right in
your emotional ways, and the Jews are right, and he doesn't
play that game at all.
So we're about to learn about a very old blood feud, and then
we're about to look at a text where Jesus is going to say
which side of the blood feud is right.
And our first toe in the water into all of this delicate
subject matter is just because of this one travel detail that
John gives us in John 4 4.
Now he, Jesus, had to go through Samaria.
Grace and peace to everybody.
I'm Matt.
This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast.
Let's do this again soon.