The Necessary Detour--March 11, 2026

The Necessary Detour--March 11, 2026

"[Jesus] left Judea and started back to Galilee. But he had to go through Samaria. So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon. A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) 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.” (John 4:3-10)

Of course, he didn't "have to" go through Samaria. Or rather, he didn't "have to" in the sense that it was the only route from Point A to Point B for Jesus.  Plenty of folks in Jesus' culture and time would make trips from down south in Judea and go up north to Galilee, but many of them would have deliberately avoided going through the in-between region of Samaria.  After all, that was where--gasp!--Samaritans lived.  And if you were a good and devout Judean or Galilean, you didn't want to be caught dead in Samaria.

We might like to imagine that we, in our "enlightened" modern age, have outgrown such geographic segregation practices, but we are fooling ourselves.  It's not just the lingering memory of Jim Crow segregation in American history, with its "sundown" towns and separate stores, schools, and drinking fountains for people with different skin colors. It's not just the memory of redlining neighborhoods in cities so that Black families could not buy homes in communities that were deemed "White" neighborhoods, and it's not just the recollection of those who grew up in towns with Catholic and Protestant sides of town, either.  My guess is that you've been in situations where you chose not to drive through "that neighborhood" for whatever reason--it might be dangerous, or you're worried about who lives there, or it's run down and impoverished, or whatever other euphemisms you choose--even though it was the direct route through to your destination.  Highways, interstate bypasses, and beltways have all made it possible to avoid having to even set foot in "those places"--as well as helping to contribute to isolating the very neighborhoods that already felt cut off from the rest of their community.  We are all guilty of going out of our way in order to avoid having to go through "one of those bad neighborhoods," because somebody ingrained it in us NOT to go there.  And people have been doing the same for literally thousands of years.

The point here in the opening scene of this story from John's fourth chapter, which many of us heard this past Sunday in worship, is that Jesus would have had plenty of excuse NOT to go through Samaria if he was intent on going from down in Judea up to Galilee.  Most of the folks he had grown up with all his life would have modeled for him that little exercise in geographic bigotry by avoiding Samaria altogether with a longer, more out-of-the-way route instead of a course straight through this region of "those people" traveling as the crow flies, as they say.  So for John the narrator to say that Jesus "had to go through Samaria" points to something different.  It's not that the lay of the land or the concerns of safety required Jesus to go through Samaria--plenty of people didn't go that way, and they told themselves it was in order to avoid going into a dangerous neighborhood.  There's another reason Jesus "has to" go through Samaria.  It's a person.  The woman who comes to the well looking to get the day's water supply is his reason for this necessary detour.  Jesus is intent on breaking down boundaries between "us" and "them," and the only way he can do that is with a real, honest-to-God face-to-face conversation with one of the people he had been told was "an outsider," someone who also viewed Jesus himself as an "outsider" from her perspective.  Jesus "has to" go through Samaria, not because there is only one road to his eventual destination, but because Jesus is intent on pulling down barriers and welcoming in those deemed "unacceptable" by the Respectable Religious Crowd.  I'm not even sure that Jesus initially had it in mind that he had to meet up with this particular woman.   We don't necessarily get the sense that Jesus had some sort of clairvoyant or prophetic vision about her in particular, so much as that Jesus is deliberately bringing the Reign of God to everybody--people like him, and people not like him... insiders and outsiders... men and women... everybody.

And while Jesus certainly could have just stayed safely in his own comfortable turf and just preached sermons about how God's love is "for everyone," those words would have rung pretty hollow if he had only ever stayed in the gated communities and HOAs of his own group. The only way to create a community that really includes everybody is to take the risk of being the stranger who shows up among the ones you had always thought of as "outsiders" and building real relationships with each other.  So that's what Jesus does--and he brings his disciples along on this field trip, too, to watch and learn from him... and to be transformed.  Episodes like this (and similar stories in the other gospels as well, where Jesus crosses borders into Samaritan or Gentile turf) are how the first followers of Jesus learned to overcome the prejudices and casual bigotry that had been ingrained in them without even realizing it from their youngest memories. This is how Jesus builds a new community that will deliberately welcome women from Samaria, mothers from Phoenicia with troubled daughters, Roman centurions with sick members of their households, and Gentile beggars at the roadside with ailments and sicknesses.  Jesus doesn't just leave the church a written constitution that says, "You should welcome in Those People" somewhere in its by-laws; he models that kind of inclusion himself by deliberately taking field trips with the disciples that bring them all into the experience of being the outsiders in someone else's territory, so that they learn what it feels like to be the foreigners at the mercy of others' welcome and hospitality.

This is how Jesus' revolutionary kind of family comes into existence: one boundary-crossing, stranger-welcoming face to face conversation at a time, as Jesus himself initiates relationship with people who would have seen him as the outsider in their town, and then teaching his disciples that God's new community really does welcome ALL people.  Twenty centuries later, we still don't always (or maybe even often?) get it right. We are still much more likely to invent ways to keep "those people" out, or to politely discourage them from even trying to get "in" in the first place.  We divide ourselves along socio-economic lines, racial and ethnic groupings, political party alignments, and denominational cliques as well. And over the generations, we have gotten quite good at inventing skillful and subtle ways of avoiding the people we label as "other," even more sophisticated than the longer-route travel plans that would have taken many a Judean traveler out of their way to avoid going through Samaria.  So we have no ground for imagining that we are more enlightened or unprejudiced than the folks of the first century.  

What we do have is the relentless witness of Jesus, who keeps taking us by the hand and pulling us (sometimes kicking and screaming) into new places, across old boundary lines, and into relationships with the very people we had taught to fear or look down on, only to discover that they have been claimed and loved by God, too, just as we have.  When we take that seriously, it will change every interaction we have with every other person we meet.

How might it shape the conversations you have... today?

Lord Jesus, take us by the hand, and then take us where you will, even if that means going with you to cross boundaries and meet new people beyond our comfort zones.