From Hate to Hope
Notes
Transcript
In this nation we have seen an increasing divide between people in many different areas of life.
· Economic– rich and poor
· Political– liberals and conservatives
· Religious–Christians, Muslims, Jews, atheists.
· Racial– blacks, whites, Hispanics, Asians
· Gender – men and women
When you read or listen to the news, you’re being indoctrinated into their political view of our world – whether it is conservative or liberal. They tell you what you should believe and how you should feel. This just adds fuel to the division that is growing in our nation.
And this is not the first time we have seen such hateful division in our nation. In 1861 our nation was so divided that we fought a civil war and more than 600,000 soldiers died in battle and an unknown number of civilians. The truth is, there has always been hatred in our world. There have always been some people who hate some other people. There has always been a sense of us verses them.
When you consider all of this it might make you think: is there any hope that we can move from hatred to hope? I think we can and the answer is found in the bible.
And before we go any further, I want to be very clear about something. This is not a sermon about racism or politics. This is message about how we can all move from hatred to hope. All of us are tempted to hate others but that’s not we are called to do. Our focus today is going to be on how we can be the kind of people that God has created us to be and calls us to be every day.
So in order to understand how we go from hate to hope, we’re going to look at a story in the bible that is pretty familiar to most Christians. It’s the story of Jesus talking to a Samaritan woman at a well. It may not seem like a big deal to us, but what happened in this story was really radical at the time. And in order to really get a hold of it, we have to take a quick review of the 900 years of history that came before this story.
Don’t worry – I’ll go through this quickly. 900 years before Jesus was born the nation of Israel ended up splitting in two because of an arrogant king. This division lasted for centuries and it had serious consequences for the people. When the nation split, the capital city of Jerusalem remained in the southern kingdom which is important to understand because that’s where the temple was located.
The temple was critical to Jewish worship. So when the northern king saw that people were leaving his territory to go and worship at the temple in the southern kingdom, he decided to do something about it. He built his own temple on Mount Gerizim. That way they didn’t have to go to Jerusalem to worship. Over time, the worship in the northern kingdom became more and more distorted from God’s original plan. About 200 years after their original split, the northern kingdom was punished by God for their worship of false gods.
They were captured by the Assyrians and taken away from their land. Only a few people were allowed to stay. Then the Assyrian king brought in some outsiders to live in their land and they ended up marrying those who stayed so that you had Jewish people married to gentile people from different places.
Those who lived in the southern kingdom called them Samaritans and they thought of them as inferior because they were not pure Jews, they were a mixed race. Over time this grew into hatred on both sides. The Jews hated the Samaritans and the Samaritans hated the Jews.
The Samaritans worshiped God but their worship was a little bit different. For example, they only read the first 5 books of the scriptures and rejected the rest of it. The Jews thought they had the pure religion and the Samaritans thought they had the pure religion. It was almost impossible for them to get along with each other.
Think about it. The original rebellion dated back 900 years before Jesus. The Samaritans dated back 700 years before Jesus. The prejudice we deal with in America has been around for 200 years. Their prejudice had been around for more than 700 years. That’s a really long time for people to hate each other.
Jesus Broke the Barrier
Jesus Broke the Barrier
So with that understanding, let’s look at this story.
John 4:4–6 (NIV)
4 Now he had to go through Samaria. 5 So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6 Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon.
The land of Samaria was located right in the middle of Israel. Judea was in the south and Galilee was in the north. If you wanted to travel from Jerusalem to Galilee, you had to make a choice. You could travel through Samaria – the land of your hated enemy – or you could go across the Jordan River and travel through the desert to go around Samaria. Many people chose to go around the long way.
In 1977 my family moved from Maine to Georgia. For a kid who just finished 6th grade, this was culture shock. When my sister and I went to a convenience store to buy an icee, the lady told us she had cherry and coke. We couldn’t understand what a coookkkeee was, so we got cherry.
One day I went for a ride on my bike. Before long, I found myself in a different neighborhood and I was quickly surrounded by a crowd of black kids. They asked me what I was doing in their neighborhood. My response: I’m riding my bike. They told me that white people didn’t go in their neighborhood. They were shocked to see me there and I was shocked that this was a thing.
I learned about racism for the first time that day. White people lived in one part of town and black people lived in another part of town. For me it seemed really weird.
Now imagine Jesus traveling through the wrong part of town. Jews lived on their side and Samaritans lived on their side. They just didn’t associate with each other. However, Jesus had a mission and he wasn’t going to let their ugly traditions get in the way. After traveling for a while, he came to a well and sat down because he was tired. It’s hard to imagine, but Jesus got tired just like we do.
His disciples went into town to get food for them to eat. Then a Samaritan woman showed up at the well to get water. Now normally, a Jew and a Samaritan in this situation would simply ignore one another. But Jesus didn’t ignore her. He asked her for a drink of water.
When John wrote this, most of the people he was writing too were well aware of the issue between Jews and Samaritans, but some would not have been so he explained it by including this statement that Jews don’t associate with Samaritans. Some scholars would translate that phrase this way: Jews do not use the same dishes as Samaritans.
You see, according to tradition, Samaritans, just like Gentiles, were considered spiritually unclean. So anything they touched became contaminated with their spiritual impurity. A Jew would not drink from a cup that a Samaritan had touched.
Jesus broke several cultural barriers by talking to this woman.
First of all, he was a Jew and she was a Samaritan. We’ve covered this.
Secondly, he was a man and she was a woman. In their culture, men would rarely speak with women in public and a single man would never talk to or touch a woman.
The third thing has to do with the woman’s reputation. Why would she come to the well at noon, in the heat of the day? She came when nobody else was there because everyone knew that she had a bad reputation. She was considered a sinful woman, which is seen later in the conversation – but Jesus knew this from the very beginning. So why would a Rabbi, a holy man, even consider speaking to a sinful woman in public?
So how does Jesus respond to this woman’s surprise that he is asking her for water?
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.”
Even though Jesus was thirsty and needed a drink, the woman had much more desperate needs in her life. If she knew who she was talking to she would be asking him for living water. She didn’t know exactly what he was talking about, but he certainly did get her attention. She asked him how he could get living water when he had nothing to dip into the well with.
Jesus explained that if she drank from the water in the well, she would eventually get thirsty again. But if she drank from the living water he had to offer, she would never get thirsty again. As you can imagine, she was very interested in that. So she asked him to give her this water. This is where things turn in a different direction. Jesus told her to go and get her husband and come back.
She responds by saying that she has no husband. But look at how Jesus responds:
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.”
Jesus revealed intimate details about this woman’s life. By doing this she realizes that he is a prophet and he also knows the secrets of her heart. This is why she had such a bad reputation in town. She immediately changed the subject to worship – bringing up the controversy of where people should worship, Jerusalem or Mt. Gerizim.
Then she brings up the topic of the Messiah. She said that once the Messiah comes he will clear up the confusion about worship. This was the moment that Jesus was waiting for. He blew her mind with his response:
Then Jesus declared, “I, the one speaking to you—I am he.”
Jesus told this woman that he was the Messiah. You can imagine how she felt at that moment! Here I am, a Samaritan woman with a bad reputation but the Messiah came to see me!
At this point the disciples returned from getting food and they were really surprised to see him talking to a woman. The woman left and went back to town to tell everyone that she had just met the Messiah. They all had to see for themselves so they came out to the well to meet Jesus too.
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.
Jesus broke the barriers in culture and because of that, many people were saved. 700 years of hatred did not stop Jesus from caring about this woman and the people in her village. But sometimes we let an offense that happened once in our life 20 years ago stop us from showing love to people.
Called to Love
Called to Love
We have to be willing to break the cycle of hate and open our hearts to other people.
Jesus came to do away with barriers between people. Look at the way Paul described it in one of his letters:
For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility,
Paul was talking about the hostility that existed between Jews and Gentiles. But we can think about this in terms of any groups that don’t get along with each other. Even two groups that hate each other can find peace when they come to Jesus. Jesus breaks hostility and creates unity. Paul mentions this again in his letter to the Galatians:
There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
Jesus even said that the way people will know we are Christians is when they see the love we have for one another. If love is the defining characteristic of our lives then how can we allow hate to rule in our hearts?
I like the way John talks about this in one of his letters:
1 John 4:16b (NIV)
16b God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.
The reason that love is so important to us is that God is love. If we are his children then his love lives in us. And it’s not just love for God, it is love for other people as well. Look at what else he says in this same letter:
Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.
If we love God then we have to love each other. And this love is not just about a feeling, it is about our actions. Our actions toward one another should be loving. If we love others then we always try to do the right thing in our relationships with them. That means we don’t lie to them, we don’t steal from them, we don’t talk bad about them behind their back. When we love others it means that we don’t just think about our own needs, we consider their needs as well.
At this point some of you might be thinking, OK, if I have to love other Christians then I guess I can do that. But I can’t love people who are not Christians. They are my enemy. They are trying to hurt me. Well, I’m sorry to break this news to you…but you have to love them too.
“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,
When someone hates us and then we turn around and show them love it catches them off guard. They don’t really know how to respond to that. What it shows them is that there is hope. We don’t have to hate each other. We can learn to put away hate and embrace the hope of a better day. Jesus came to earth to change the world. How does this happen? One person at a time. Each time that we choose love over hate we bring the world a little closer to the kingdom of God. You may not think that your small act of love matters, but when we all show love it will make a huge difference in the world.
Don’t allow hate to win. Instead, embrace the greatest love of all – the love of God for all of us. If we do this we can bring hope to a desperate world.