Good Tuesday morning! The holiday is over and we are back for more devotionaling... devotionaling? I think my old language arts teacher just cringed, or rolled over in her grave, not sure if Mrs. Lancaster is still around or not. Have you ever thought that the old teacher from your youth must surely be dead by now, only to find that the teacher wasn't that much older than you? Somehow we often find that the "ancient of days" from back then didn't have quite so many years on us as we might have thought. What is all this depressing talk of old age anyway?
Today, after we learned Saturday that Jesus had to go through Samaria on his way back to Galilee, we learn that Jesus is still on the road.
Eventually he came to the Samaritan village of Sychar, near the field that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. John 4:5
We read along just fine, but then something occurs... Joseph? Did the Bible really say the field was given to Joseph? Would that have been before Joseph was sold into slavery or after? It must have been before because as I recall Joseph never came back to Israel until the folks following Moses hoisted his old bones onto a camel and took off for the desert some 400 years later. Ah, but the Bible scholars will know that I am wrong in this. Joseph did in fact receive permission from Pharaoh to return to Canaan and bury Jacob his father at the end of Genesis. Joseph took quite the entourage with him too! Although the field may have been given while Joseph was a youth, the jealousy of his brothers prevented him from building his cabin by the lake, or well in this case, and living a life of quiet farming and genial retirement. We know that Joseph didn't stay in what would become Israel in either his youth or after burying his father. Pharaoh, his boss, had given Joseph the instruction to return as soon as possible. At this time Pharaoh very much valued Joseph's service and couldn't stand to have him gone for long. Joseph retired as the number 2 man in Egypt and it took many years for Egypt's leaders to forget the great thing Joseph had done for their nation.
But if this is the same Jacob and Joseph that we are familiar with from scripture, this verse does show that Jacob had given Joseph much more than just a fancy coat. A field would have been just as valuable then as it is to us now. Notice how the mark of Jacob's favor is remembered for centuries after the fact though? If Jacob had given this field to Joseph, why wasn't this land part of Israel? It was, but in the centuries since Joseph had lived in Egypt, the field had been lost when the Israelites picked up and went to Egypt to survive the famine, regained when Joshua conquered Canaan once more about 400 years of so later, and then lost once more when the northern kingdom of Israel was overrun and scattered among the nations. Now, as Jesus walks through the half-breed land of Samaria, the field belongs to... Rome! All of the land once ruled by Israel and Judah had become Roman territory, but the local people still remembered their divisions from the days just after Solomon's life. Both kingdoms, Israel and Judah, had fallen to the Assyrians and Babylonians respectively, and both lands had fallen to the Roman invasions, but they still liked to entertain the old hatreds.
Jesus has arrived at a village in the land of the despised Samaritans. What will he do there? Jesus has already done what few of his Jewish mates would not by going into Samaria in the first place. Something interesting is surely going to happen there. Not fair; I'm reading ahead. Have a wonderful day in Christ!
Bucky
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