JOHN186 - 700 Years of Chili's Gossip about the Samaritans and the Jews

You ever been in a really legitimate, super toxic, long-lasting saga where two people or two sides are in a great big fight, like an institutional fight, like at work, or sadly, maybe church or a team or a social group or something like that. And when that happens, if you've been in it, this is gonna ring a bell.

Eventually the story gets so complicated and convoluted that it takes very long meals at Applebee's or chilies sitting in a corner where nobody can hear you to dump out all of the gossip passionately and to recount all the grievances from your side of things. I don't know what the worst fight you ever got in was, but let's say it was like a six-month fight or whoa, maybe like a year-long fight.

Well, then there's only so much time for stuff like, well, then he said this, but then his wife told that other guy's wife about this, but she said she wouldn't tell. And that was on Tuesday, and she said it was on Monday, but it couldn't have been because she actually knew about it on Sunday. Are you pulling your hair out?

Are you annoyed yet? Are you irritated? Okay, now just imagine that kind of fight, but for like 700 years. That's what you get with the Samaritan fight with the Jews. It was exhausting. It was the kind of thing that just could not possibly be adjudicated or sorted out. It had simply gone on for too long.

Think about what you were doing 700 years ago. I mean, it was nothing, but think about what your people were doing 700 years ago. If you're an English speaker, well, you can't even read what your people were doing 700 years ago, and neither can I, because old English is barely recognizable to us from back then.

It's a really long time. And yeah, there's historical grudges and things like that, but this one is for the ages. And what's wild is it isn't global, it's a very local little fight between the Jews and the Samaritans that bleeds over from deep in the Old Testament into the Jesus stuff in the New Testament.

And we've been looking at this for the last week or two or whatever. And the really exciting thing that we're gonna get to at the end of all of this is that this unsolvable problem has a solution. And it is the solution that Jesus is going to offer. So we're not just going over this Samaritan Jewish stuff because I like history, though that's part of it.

We're not just doing it because it's entertaining. Oh, it's very entertaining. That's part of it. We're going over it because I really want to set up the problem. I want you to feel the exhaustion, the impossibility of the tension between the Jews and the Samaritans. I want it to feel to you as impossible as whatever current global conflict you most perfectly understand, or whatever social issue you most perfectly understand that it seems like there's no solution to, because Jesus offers a solution to it, and it's brilliant.

And that's a big part of the payoff of John chapter four that we're going to get back to. But here's where we are so far. The Jews and the Samaritans used to kind of be the same people, at least halfway. We've been bumming around in 2 Kings, looking at the way the northern kingdom of Israel, which was wicked and lousy anyway, and didn't listen to the prophets, but they got wiped out by the Assyrians, and the Assyrians moved them out, and they moved in a bunch of people from all corners of the Assyrian Empire and brought in one lousy priest from the cheapened version of the northern kingdom's whatever version of the religion of the god of Abraham, and it started a spiral up there.

Well, then a while later, the Jews, the southern kingdom of Judah, they got captured by the Babylonians, and it kind of looked like maybe both would be lost to history. But that isn't how it plays out. After the Southern Kingdom, which was more faithful than the Northern Kingdom, gets conquered in 586 BC by Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians.

They get conquered and they've got real heavy hearts, and they're super sad as they can smell the soot of their burning roofs and burning temple in their nose as they get marched away. That's a bitter smell, but there is one thing they can hold on to, and it's a promise that God delivered through the prophets, most notably through Jeremiah, saying that God has not forgotten you.

He's not done with his people. Go and be productive in the land of your captors. And in 70 years' time, God is gonna redeem the thing. And that's exactly what happens. The Persians come along under the leadership of Cyrus the Great. In 539 BC, Babylon gets destroyed. Now the Persians are here. The Persians, for whatever reason, God puts it on their heart to like the Jewish people, that is, the descendants of Judah, the southern kingdom, the two tribes that were left from down there.

God puts it on the heart of the Persian king to be nicer to them. And that king, Cyrus the Great, says you can go back and rebuild. This gets us into the final chapter of the history of the Old Testament, a chapter you and I have spent a lot of time on here. That's the chapter that unfolds in Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther.

If I remember right, chronologically, that goes Ezra 1 through 6, then Esther happens between chapter 6 and chapter 7 of Ezra, then Ezra rolls right on into Nehemiah, and that covers from about 539 BC to around 440-ish BC. And in that time, we see that even though 200 plus years have passed since the Assyrians, now two whole empires back, even though 200 plus years have passed since they wiped out and moved out the northern ten tribes of Israel and moved in other people and brought in some lousy priest, somehow, out of that, a tradition has persisted.

And the tradition has some whiffs of Judaism. It looks a little bit like the religion of Abraham, but it's certainly been augmented. And there's kind of a priesthood that's been set up there. There's a temporary temple, some kind of sacrifices are happening to the god of Abraham, but not according to the law of Moses.

It's twisted. It's like a funhouse mirror version. Well, around 520 BC, as recorded in the book of Ezra, the guy who would be king, the descendant of David who would sit on a throne if there was a throne to sit on, he goes back to Jerusalem with the blessing of the Persian king. His name is Arubbabel, and he starts to rebuild the temple.

And who should come skulking out of the shadows? But a bunch of people claiming to be kind of relatives and sort of associated with this. And they're a little curious about why these Jews are able to rebuild with the blessing of Persia, and they kind of want in on the action. And when you read it for the first time, it looks really mean because Zerubbabel is like, no, get out of here.

Absolutely not. You have no part with us in building a house for our God, since we alone must build it for the Lord, the God of Israel. That's right at the beginning of Ezra IV. But when we went through Ezra and Nehemiah and Esther in an earlier season of this podcast, we discovered, oh, there's some kind of age-old rivalry here.

Well, I we didn't pull on that thread a ton, but what is the rivalry? Well, it's part of the Samaritan rivalry. In the late 500s, at the beginning of the Persian era, at the beginning of the rebuilding of the Second Temple, there are people who you could call Samaritans who are lurking about and they want in.

And their representatives don't come off great in the biblical text. They come off as a little schemy. And when they don't get what they want, they try to subvert the entire thing and they go behind the back of Zerubbabel, who is God's anointed and appointed to accomplish this thing. Then they succeed in throwing a wrench in the works.

Well, that's bad blood. And it's the kind of thing that if somebody could live to be 800 years old and they lived through all of this and they had a side in it, they would tell you about it for a very long time in a dark corner at Chili's, and they would be very dismissive of the waitress who they're sick of coming over and interrupting right while they're in the middle of telling this very important saga about this feud between these two parties.

Well, a generation or two later, we run into the exact same problem. Now that the temple has been rebuilt, we're in the mid-400s BC, a new generation of leaders are on the scene, including a guy named Nehemiah. He hears that the gates are all busted up and the walls are down, and that the enemies, the locals around Jerusalem during this later Persian era, they're starting to jackal about.

They're menacing and threatening God's people. And Nehemiah's like, I gotta go fix this. So he asks his buddy, the king, Artaxerxes, if he can go fix it. And Artaxerxes is like, How long do you need? When are you going to be back? Yeah, right on. Fist bump. Nehemiah makes the trip, and what he discovers is an absolute mess.

He finds out that there's been intermarriage between the high priest of the temple of God in Jerusalem, between his family and Samaritan families who are worshiping in a different way at a different temple, playing a different game. And Nehemiah is not impressed. And this is pernicious. They do not back off this alliance that has happened between the scheming high priestly family during the age of Nehemiah and the apparently Samaritan families nearby and other rival cousin group historical heritage legacy groups nearby is a huge deal.

And Nehemiah is willing to risk his whole reputation to say, you have no part in building this wall, you have no part in leading this temple. He pulls people's beards out, he forces divorces, and then he and Ezra gather everybody together to straighten things out, and they do a big renewal of the covenant ceremony, in part to just, you know, teach people what the Bible says, but in part to be like, this is the actual truth.

This is the through line of God's work historically, not this other stuff that are kind of twisted up fun house mirror versions that are lurking about here. Well, that makes for a lot of bad blood. Ezra and Nehemiah successfully initiate mass divorces in their time in Jerusalem between the descendants of Abraham and these neighboring people groups who sort of lurk about and are lightly mingled with the descendants of Abraham.

Of course, that's going to make people mad. Whatever side you're on, it's going to make people mad. Do you return the dowry? What happens to the land? Do you get to see the grandkids? I mean, this is crazy. It's also why God said to his people in the Old Testament not to enter Mary and to be a people set apart, a covenant people.

Sounds really weird in the age of the church, the age of the new covenant in which we live now. Sounds really weird to modern sensibilities, but that was the deal at that point. Well, things don't get better, they get worse. There's a big, maybe apocryphal, but I think there's something to it. There's a showdown after Alexander the Great in uh this would be like the mid-100s BC, where a Samaritan envoy and a Jewish envoy go to a descendant of Ptolemy, one of Alexander the Great's generals, the ruler of Egypt, the great, great, great-granddaddy of Cleopatra, and they say, settle the debate.

The Samaritans worship at a fake temple, the Jews say, on Mount Gerizim, and they've augmented the Bible to support this. We worship at the true temple in Jerusalem, ordained by God, and we've agreed to have you mediate this, O great King Ptolemy. You're an outsider to all of this. And whoever loses, we consent to being executed by you.

Well, the Jewish side argues in terms of continuity of the priesthood, and that's compelling enough to Ptolemy the Sixth, and the Jews win, the Samaritans lose, and Ptolemy follows through on the bargain, at least according to the story, and he kills the Samaritan envoys who lost the argument before the Gentile throne of the Ptolemids.

Okay, that's more bad blood. That's gonna stick with people, right? Well, about a generation later, a Jewish king named John Hyrkanus destroys the temple at Gerizim. And according to the story, he reroutes streams off of the mountain to wash away all of the archaeological remains. And to the best of my knowledge, the archaeological research supports that there's this huge destruction layer there around 100-ish BC.

So that probably actually happened. The Samaritans still mark the day their temple got destroyed. It makes sense. I mean, the Jews mark the date that their temple got destroyed. Well, that's not the end of it. About a hundred years later, or right around the time Jesus is born, just a little bit before then, Passover is going on at the Jerusalem temple, and some Samaritans decide they're going to be stinkers, kind of like pranksters, but in like an old high school rivalry, we're going to sneak in there and steal your mascot.

But instead of those rascals sneaking away and absconding with Mongo the muskrat, the mascot of your high school, instead, they bring in a bunch of corpses and chopped-up body parts and they scatter them all around the temple in Jerusalem during Passover, so it'll be unclean and nobody can do any passing over.

That doesn't sit real well with the Jerusalemites or the Jews in general. That's right before the New Testament starts. This is a hot, burning issue. There's probably not enough chilies or applebees in the world to contain 700 years worth of these kind of stories and incidents. But it's not small, it's unfixable.

The offenses are too great. And in the end, Jesus affirms the Jewish claim. He affirms that his father's house is in Jerusalem. He affirms that the prophetic, miraculous through line of the redemptive work of God is through the Jews. But as we're going to see now that we're ready to turn the page into John chapter 4, that's not the end game for him.

The end game is this new family of faith that transcends these boundaries, that transcends these unsolvable offenses. And of all things, he's going to initiate the gospel going to the Samaritan people with a woman at a well. We'll pick it up there next time around. I'm Matt, this is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast.

Let's do this again soon.

JOHN186 - 700 Years of Chili's Gossip about the Samaritans and the Jews

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