Forward Movement is an official, non-profit agency of the Episcopal Church whose mission is to create compelling content for Christian living. Since 1935 we have published the quarterly devotional Forward Day by Day, as well as pamphlets, booklets, and books that encourage and nourish people in their lives of prayer and faith.
SUNDAY, March 27
John 4:5-42. Salvation is from the Jews.
“How odd of God to choose the Jews,” someone once said. To which another replied, “But not so odd as those who choose a Jewish God but hate the Jews.”
I have never understood anti-Semitism, especially among Christians. Whatever else our Savior was, he was a Jew. Jesus was a Jewish prophet in the great line of prophets dating back centuries; he was a rabbi who knew and taught the Jewish scriptures; he honored the Jewish law (albeit sometimes by reinterpreting it); he observed the Jewish holy days. Apart from his Jewishness, the life and ministry of Jesus makes no sense. As Christians, we are not only spiritual descendants of the Jews, debtors to the Jews, but we worship a Jew.
Jesus the Jew seems to have accepted the Samaritan (non-Jewish) woman in today’s story, suggesting that soon the “true worshipers” would worship the Father in spirit and in truth. There was no suggestion that the “true worshipers” had to be Jews. And the woman seems to have accepted the Jewish prophet who told her everything she had ever done. Both Jesus and the woman erased traditional ethnic and religious lines and had no problem doing so. It was later Christians who drew those lines again.
PRAY for the Dioceses of Mount Kenya Central, Mount Kenya South, and Mount Kenya West (Kenya)
Ps 95; Exodus 17:1-7; Romans 5:1-11
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A Meditation for Pentecost
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