When you read the biblical account, you also find that the Samaritan woman is the one to whom Jesus first reveals that he is the Christ.‡ Jesus chose to first reveal the core of his mission and identity to a woman. He ended up staying with the Samaritan people for several days. For Jesus to lodge there, eat Samaritan food, and teach Samaritans is roughly equivalent to defying segregation in the United States during the 1950s or apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s—shocking, extremely difficult, and somewhat dangerous.8 But Jesus is more concerned with what the truth of Scripture teaches
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