A friend to all

Finish this sentence: "I could never be friends with someone who...."
Lots of people have ideas about who they can't be friends with. Maybe you could never be friends with someone who was mean to you, didn't like your dog or got you in trouble.
Jesus couldn't finish the sentence. There wasn't anyone He didn't want to be friends with: people who hated Him, people who were far from God -- and, in this week's Gospel (John 4:5:42), an enemy of the Jews, the religion Jesus was raised in.
Jesus met a Samaritan woman getting water from a well. "Give me a drink," Jesus said to her. "You're Jewish -- your people don't like mine. Why ask me for a drink?" the woman said. Jesus answered, "I could give you living water." Then He told the woman all about her life, so she believed in Him. When she told her friends, they followed Jesus, too.
Have you ever tried to be friends with someone you didn't like before? They might think you're crazy at first, wondering why you're being nice. The woman in the Gospel story was like that. Her people were enemies of Jesus'. She couldn't imagine why Jesus would want to be friends!
It's good to become friends with someone you didn't think you could like, because you can talk about why you felt that way. If the person teases other kids, you can tell him you feel angry about it. That's what Jesus did. He pointed out how silly it was not to like each other because they were different religions, and then He showed the woman that He was really God by telling her secrets!
When we say, "I could never be friends with someone who did something I don't like," we're judging people for what they do. Jesus looked at who people are -- like the nice woman who just happened to be a Samaritan. She soon found out what Jesus wants us to remember: that everyone's the same inside -- even if on the outside, they're mean, they tattle or they don't like your dog!

PRAYER FOR THE WEEK: Jesus, teach me to look at people's insides, not their outsides. Amen!

(03-04-99)