Devotion for 16 October

A brief prayer is offered that you can add to your daily prayers this week. The scripture is from our Sunday Service Bulletin for today.  Today we conclude the sermon series on “Foundations, back to the basics of faith”.  Our discussion theme today is on how we worship as a foundational part of our faith. The theme and content of the devotion is from Concordia’s Preaching Project.

So he came to a town of Samaria called Sychar, near the field that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6 Jacob's well was there; so Jesus, wearied as he was from his journey, was sitting beside the well. It was about the sixth hour. 7 A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give Me a drink.” 8 (For His disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.) 9 The Samaritan woman said to Him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?” (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.) 10 Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water.” 11 The woman said to Him, “Sir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? 12 Are you greater than our father Jacob? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock.” 13 Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14 but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

The text says that the “Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans”. In fact, it is worse than that, the Samaritan were considered to be half-breed Jews.  In 722 BC, the Assyrians sacked northern Israel and carried off the Jews into exile.  These Jews intermarried with foreigners and came up with their own custom made religion, which is what they were doing even when they were living in northern Israel.  The custom of the day was that men don’t talk to women, Jews don’t talk to Samaritans because they are “unclean”, and strangers do not talk to each other. A Jewish rabbi would go thirsty before he would ask a stranger for water, much less a Samaritan. Jews would not touch anything a Samaritan had touched. Thus the woman is shocked when Jesus asks her for water. Jesus provides us an example of getting out of our comfort zone to share the life giving Gospel with someone we would not normally approach. Can we turn this into an audacious opportunity to witness this week?