John 8:48-50 (NIV)
The Jews answered him, “Aren’t we right in saying that you are a Samaritan and demon-possessed?”
“I am not possessed by a demon,” said Jesus, “but I honor my Father and you dishonor me. I am not seeking glory for myself; but there is one who seeks it, and he is the judge.”
The charge of being a Samaritan was not about national identity or culture, but about religious compromise and corruption. The Samaritans lived in the area between Judea in the south, where the temple was, and Galilee in the north, where Jesus was from, and where many Jews lived and worked.
The Jews avoided the Samaritans at all cost. In fact, if they had to go from the north of the country to the south, or vice versa, it was common practice to cross the Jordan River and make the journey on the east side, going through gentile territory rather than set a single foot on Samaritan soil.
This animosity sprang from the origins of the Samaritan people. Samaria had once been the capital city of the territory inhabited by the ten northern tribes of Israel who, from the initial schism right after the reign of King Solomon, had fallen into idolatry and wickedness (1 Kings chapter 12). This wickedness increased so greatly that God brought the Assyrians to conquer the northern Kingdom, and took the people into captivity in Assyria, where they were quickly assimilated and ceased to be a distinct people.
The king of Assyria transported people from other places in his empire to live in the area around the city of Samaria. These people brought with them the worship of their old idols. But God sent lions among them, killing many as punishment for their idolatry (2 Kings 17:24-25). They asked the king of Assyria to return one of the priests who knew how to worship the God of the land, so that the lions would quit attacking them. So, the king sent one of the priests, and he taught them the law and how to worship God (2 Kings 17:26-28).
The problem was that this priest only knew the corrupted ways he had been taught, ways corrupted by the idolatry that had gotten the people of the northern kingdom exiled. And that is what he taught them. The Samaritans started to worship the Lord, but not wholeheartedly. They also continued to worship the gods that they had brought with them from Assyria (2 Kings 17:29-41).
The Jews who had come back from their own captivity in Babylon a century and a half later recognized that the worship of the Samaritans was corrupted by their worship of other gods and was therefore unacceptable to the true God. So, they avoided the Samaritans like the plague.
Now here was Jesus, and His words sounded strange to the people’s ears. He was talking about Himself as being the Son of God and telling them things about living in the kingdom of God that did not fit well into their belief system. So, they attacked Jesus as a Samaritan, a person who was trying to add to the law things that were incompatible with it, and even, perhaps, the worship of other gods as well!
Jesus’ defense was that He was being true to the mission He had been given by God, His Father, that He was honoring God, and that He was seeking not self-glory but seeking to glorify the name of the Lord alone. If His words sounded strange to those Jewish people, it was not that He was teaching about new gods, or even new laws. It was merely that He was directing their minds away from the man-made laws that so many of them followed, back to the simple truths that God had given them in the beginning.
Father, the real irony here is that it was those Jewish people who were far more Samaritan-like than Jesus, with all the additions that they had made to Your law, obscuring it to the point that they believed Jesus’ return to the basics was heresy! The sad thing is that we tend to do the same things, even today. We add our own requirements to Your word, and we interpret what You clearly say through lenses of modernism, materialism, philosophy, current thought, and even scientism, corrupting and distorting Your word to mean what we think it should mean, so that it fits what we believe. Help us to take a lesson from Jesus, to read Your word simply, plainly, and with open minds and hearts, so that we can see what it actually says, so that we can be shaped by Your word, instead of trying to shape it. Amen.