JOHN177 - The Samaritans Were the Jews’ Repugnant Cultural Other and Vice Versa

0:17 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.

0:39 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.

1:02 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.

1:37 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.

2:09 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.

2:35 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.

2:52 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.

3:25 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.

3:54 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.

4:16 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.

4:42 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.

5:26 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.

5:54 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.

6:28 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.

6:57 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.

7:34 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.

7:58 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.

8:23 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.

8:48 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.

9:12 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.

9:40 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.

10:04 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.

10:29 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.

10:49 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.