Something Worth Seeing (Friday Devotional)

When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”

- John 4:7-10

One of the quickest ways I can deduce the quality of a restaurant is by looking at its clientele. If everyone there is in their 20s, then the place is definitely trendy but may be better suited for Instagram than lunch. On the flip side, if everyone there is past retirement age, then chances are I’ve found a place whose best days came when I was in diapers, a place serving more nostalgia nowadays than creativity. If I go to an ethnic restaurant and every customer looks like me, I know to look elsewhere for an authentic dining experience. If I go to a so-called greasy spoon where everyone’s on break from their white collar jobs, that’s another red flag. You get the idea.

The way a restaurant immediately gets my attention is when the customers can’t be pigeonholed into one category. If a table full of maintenance men is seated next to a booth of executives catty-corner to a table of stay-at-home moms, then I’m interested. When I hear multiple languages being spoken in the restaurant, when I see multiple neighborhoods represented, when the college radical is as comfortable as the retired veteran—that’s when I know that there’s something worth seeing here.

The trouble, of course, is that there aren’t a lot of places like that. We are living in a time and place in which, sometimes unwittingly and sometimes willfully, we find ourselves segregated more and more from people who look, think, believe, and behave differently than we do. A yearning for comfort and security combined with the means to isolate ourselves has made it possible to go to schools, stores, events, and churches where we always fit right in—and where the ‘wrong kind of people’ stick out like sore thumbs.

What we have to remember is that Jesus didn’t just come for the ‘right kind of people.’ Jesus dined with religious leaders, but also with prostitutes. He loved his family, but he also loved lepers. The gospel he proclaimed, practiced, and embodied was not reserved for a privileged few, but was good news for the poor, freedom for the prisoners, and sight for the blind. The kingdom of God was never meant to be monochromatic.

The sinless, celibate, Christ could hardly have been more different from the Samaritan woman with five husbands in her past and a live-in boyfriend—yet those differences didn’t stop him from offering her living water. The disparities in their backgrounds were no match for the grace of God. As followers of Jesus, we must remember, respect, and replicate his willingness to reach beyond the boundaries of the comfort zone. A restaurant cannot be the only place where God’s people spend time with people different from them. There are ‘Samaritan wells’ all around you—if you’re going to bear witness to the gospel, then it’s time to drop by one sometime.