“Those who had been scattered preached the word wherever they went. Philip went down to a city in Samaria and proclaimed the Messiah there. When the crowds heard Philip and saw the signs he performed, they all paid close attention to what he said. For with shrieks, impure spirits came out of many, and many who were paralyzed or lame were healed. So there was great joy in that city.
When the apostles in Jerusalem heard that Samaria had accepted the word of God, they sent Peter and John to Samaria. When they arrived, they prayed for the new believers there that they might receive the Holy Spirit, because the Holy Spirit had not yet come on any of them; they had simply been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. Then Peter and John placed their hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit.
After they had further proclaimed the word of the Lord and testified about Jesus, Peter and John returned to Jerusalem, preaching the gospel in many Samaritan villages.“
Acts 8:2-8, 14-17, 25
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NOVEMBER 13, 2024
Can we take a moment to remember what Samaria is, and what it meant to the Jewish followers of Jesus (the Jewish Messiah)?
Samaritans were the enemy, the other side of a feud that went back generations. Not an enemy like the Romans, an all-powerful empire you couldn’t really touch. No, this was a family wound, a betrayal of brothers and sisters, and the cut ran deep. Throughout the course of the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian exiles, the people on this mountain had sided with the oppressors over their own cousins. They had betrayed the Temple and all that was sacred. They had inflicted pain in all the most sacred religious, cultural, and ancestral ways imaginable.
When Jesus answered the question “How do I inherit eternal life?”, the person he described winning God’s favor was not the “good” religious people in the story, but a Samaritan. With generations of vendettas and revenge between them, Jesus declared that a Samaritan who showed compassion to a traveling stranger was the one to whom God would grant eternal life.
That was a huge statement.
The woman Jesus met alone at the well and engaged in deep theological conversation—she was a Samaritan, too. And when she went back to town and started preaching to her townspeople, convincing many of them that Jesus was the Messiah—well, there were no categories for that sort of upheaval.
And now, as they flee Jerusalem to save their lives, these Jesus followers don’t have the luxury of taking the long way around to avoid Samaria, as was their custom.
Out of the frying pan and into the fire, huh? That’s what it looks like from a human perspective. But the Spirit is at work in Samaria, just as when the Samarian woman was called the first evangelist there a year or two before.
Perhaps Jesus sent her to pave the way for this very moment.
All the Spirit-led growth of this Christ-following community that Saul tried to destroy is continuing—in Samaria of all places. Once again, the persecutor is becoming the brother, the sister.
Once again, we see that following Jesus requires untold depths of forgiveness, compassion, humility, and ego-less service in ways we never, ever expected.
Questions for reflection and discussion:
- Can you imagine a generational pain as deep as the one between the Jews and the Samaritans?
- What does it mean for the gospel that both Jesus and now the Church preached there, anyway?
- How does this story remind us of the forgiveness, compassion, humility, and ego-less service the gospel requires of us?
Church Reading Plan: Amos 2; Psalm 145