JesusX30 Challenge—Scene 6: THE INFILTRATION

JesusX30 Challenge—Scene 6: THE INFILTRATION

 

1. Key Texts

•John 2–4

•Luke 4:14–15

•2 Kings 17:24–41 (background on Samaria)

•John 4:4–26 (Jesus and the Samaritan woman)

2. Outline / Notes

Date & Place

•Spring 27 AD.

•From Judea → through Samaria → to Galilee.

•Sychar (Jacob’s Well); Capernaum (northern base).

•Culturally charged territory—Jews avoided Samaria due to centuries of ethnic and religious tension.

Main Account

•After his Temple strike (John 2), Jesus goes underground—meeting Nicodemus at night (John 3) and reconnecting with John the Baptist in the wilderness.

•He warns John that the authorities are closing in. Soon after, Herod arrests John—a turning point in the movement.

•Jesus retreats north, back toward Galilee—but instead of avoiding Samaria , he goes through it.

•At Sychar, he stops at a well in the heat of the day. A woman approaches alone—isolated, shamed, and avoided by her own people.

•Jesus initiates conversation, breaking every cultural rule:

–Jews and Samaritans avoided each other.

–Men didn’t speak privately with women.

–Rabbis avoided people with “reputations.”

•Jesus sees her and asks for water, then offers her living water.

•When he reveals her story, he’s not shaming her—he’s showing her she’s fully known and still chosen.

•She leaves her jar—the symbol of her daily burden—and becomes the first public witness of Jesus’ messianic identity.

•Others avoided her, but Jesus entrusts her with his message.

Meanwhile

•In Judea, John the Baptist’s arrest fulfills his role as the “forerunner” and signals Jesus’ independent campaign is now fully underway.

•Jesus sets up headquarters in Capernaum, a small town on major trade routes—a perfect location to spread the movement.

•His route through Samaria wasn’t a detour but strategy.

–He’s infiltrating the cultural divide, beginning his revolution in the margins.

–Samaria becomes the bridge between Judea (south) and Galilee (north), giving Jesus safe mobility for a while.

•The first explicit revelation of Jesus as “Messiah” (John 4:26) is made to a Samaritan woman.

Main Point

•God isn’t avoiding us—He’s infiltrating the spaces we’ve been told He won’t go.

•Jesus refuses to stay within religious or social boundaries.

•The story of the woman at the well shows that grace begins where society draws its hardest lines.

•Jesus starts his movement in a place of rejection and through a person others considered disqualified.

Exegetical Insight

•Hydōr zōn (“living water”) means “flowing” or “fresh spring water.” In Jewish ritual purity law, only flowing water could cleanse. Jesus uses it to describe divine, renewing life that flows from himself.

•“I who speak to you am he” (egō eimi) echoes Exodus 3:14—God’s self-revelation as “I AM.” The first person to hear that from Jesus’ mouth is not a priest or disciple—but a Samaritan woman.

3. Devotional / Reflection Questions

•Have you ever felt like God was silent or distant? How does this story challenge that feeling?

•What boundaries—social, religious, or personal—has Jesus crossed in your life to reach you?

•What “well” are you being called to show up to today?

•How can Jesus’ treatment of the Samaritan woman reshape how you see people who’ve been labeled or left out?

•What might it look like to leave your own “jar” behind—to release shame or distraction and carry the good news instead?

4. Action Step / Challenge

•Think about one area of your life where you feel unseen or disqualified.

•Sit with this prayer: “Jesus, if you met the woman at the well, then you can meet me here too.”

•Journal one way you sense Jesus already waiting for you in that place.

Buy the books! 

Jesus: The Strategic Life and Mission of the Messiah and His Movement (3 Volumes, Hekhal Publishing Co., 2025).

You can buy or borrow the trilogy at:

Hekhal Publishing Co. (look for free samples of each book as well)

Jesus, vol. 1

Jesus, vol. 2

Jesus, vol. 3

Amazon (print or ebook)

Barnes & Noble (print or ebook)

Episode Transcript

(00:09):
Honest question for you, have you ever felt like God is
avoiding you? Be honest, like you've been
showing up, trying your best, giving everything you have,
waiting, listening, just exhausting yourself.
You're praying, you're crying out and all you want is like
just a word, just something fromGod just to know he's there but
he's gone totally quiet. I'll be be honest, I've been in

(00:31):
this position more times than I'm proud to share.
If you're like me, if you've ever felt overlooked, forgotten
on the outside looking in, this scene is for you.
It's getting good. Jesus has gone public.
His movement is in full force. I'm glad to have you with us
today. I'm Tyson put off.
And this is scene 6 of the JesusX30 challenge.

(00:54):
It's a month long walk with Jesus. 30 days, 30 scenes, 30
episodes, one per day. And today we are following Jesus
into enemy territory, into the land of people his culture had
told him to avoid. And we're going to watch what
happens when God refuses to keephis distance.
So in the last scene, we watchedJesus March into the temple in

(01:17):
Jerusalem during Passover, flip the tables, taunt the
authorities, criticize their abuse of God's name, and prevent
seekers from encountering God, all the while making a lot of
money off of this process. It was loud, it was public, it
was powerful. But here in scene 6, things
quiet down a little bit and and Jesus sort of lets the dust

(01:37):
settle. So if you're following along in
my books, and if you haven't grabbed your copy, go do that
today. You can buy them online, buy
them in the links in my profiles.
We're following the scenes that I lay out in the books,
following Jesus's life from start to finish, to death, to
resurrection to ascension. And you're going to see that

(01:57):
right now. We've been trekking through
John, chapters 2-3 and four, andwe're still early in Jesus's
public campaign. And compared to what we saw in
the temple account in John 2 that we just looked at
previously, Jesus goes pretty quiet in John three and four.
And one of the fascinating aspects for me as I think as a
little boy still with a, with a bit of a superhero complex, I

(02:21):
love the idea of secret revolts in these elite warriors.
Well, already here at the start of Jesus of public campaign, we
start to see his strategic and tactical brilliance take shape.
So we know he was 100% God, 100%human.
But I think a lot of us underestimate how tactical, how

(02:41):
strategic, how intelligent he had to be to launch the movement
that he launched. He wasn't just dropped from
heaven with a full blown following.
He had to develop a movement from the grassroots, and John
the Baptist's movement helped start that.
But then he had to do certain things and make certain
maneuvers throughout his public campaign, which only lasted just

(03:03):
over 2 years, in order to gain abig enough following so that
when he was crucified and rose back from the grave, this
following would be strong enoughto survive without him in
physical form among them, right?We know he sent the Spirit, and
we know there were other supernatural divine forces at
work here, but Jesus was incredibly strategic in

(03:24):
everything he did. And so in this scene, in what
resembles a sort of guerrilla tactic, Jesus strikes the
temple, puts his movement on themap.
That's John 2. Then he disappears literally
into the night. Remember in John 3, where he
encounters Nicodemus at night, and after that he gets the heck
out of dodge? He makes the short trek out to
the Judean wilderness where he meets with John the Baptist.

(03:46):
And we're not really told what the conversations are between
Jesus and John at this point. But knowing that John is
something of a mentor to Jesus throughout his life, which is
part of his role as the forerunner that we read about
who will pave the way for the Lord.
I think Jesus is probably talking to John about a couple
of things. One, he's telling John how

(04:07):
things went down in the temple, that he's officially put his
name on the Jewish and Roman authorities radars 2.
He's probably given John a warning.
Remember, John the Baptist has been in operation publicly a
little while longer than Jesus. And when I say publicly, he's
been all over the news. He's been on the socials and by
now he's laying into the authorities and into the temple
system, the crooked economy, thepoliticians, including even

(04:30):
Herod Antipas, the ruler over this region at the time of Jesus
public campaign. So Jesus is warning him that the
authorities are going to find out that Jesus and John are
connected and that they're goingto be coming after you soon,
John. And lo and behold, they do here
to rest John soon after this. This has to be a hard moment for

(04:51):
Jesus, knowing that John is going to be imprisoned because
of his work in laying a foundation for Jesus and his
messianic campaign. But he also knows it's how John
wants it. And John's made this very clear
and also that he that is Jesus, still needs time on earth to
establish his own movement and campaign, still has to be tough

(05:12):
for Jesus knowing that his cousin is going to suffer like
this. Then again, John's pretty crazy.
So we're in the spring of 27 AD.This is early on in Jesus's
public campaign. Jesus is retreating from
Jerusalem, remember, and decidesto go ahead back to Galilee,
back to his home region up north.
And by doing this, he's going toavoid the heat that he'd

(05:34):
otherwise face in Jerusalem if he were to stay there.
And he also knows that the Galileans, as we talked about in
an earlier scene, are a feisty bunch.
The Galilee is a hotbed for antiRoman, anti establishment Jewish
revolutionaries. These dudes like to fight and
they're not afraid of the big bad Roman Empire.
And in Galilee, Jesus knows thathe can generate a lot of energy

(05:57):
for his own messianic campaign because they're ready for what
he has to say. They're ready for a Messiah of
their own, they're ready for a king of their own.
They're ready to follow Jesus. So Jesus leaves Judea in the
South and he heads back up northto the Galilee.
But instead of taking the safe route home around Sumeria,

(06:18):
crossing over to the east, traveling up, and then crossing
back over to the West and getting into the Galilee and
bypassing Samaria all together like every good Jewish teacher
was supposed to do, he does something completely baffling,
borderline inappropriate, and potentially dangerous.
He walks straight through Samaria.
It's the shorter route, but it'sthe more dangerous route.

(06:39):
OK, so this is wild. Jews and Samaritans don't mix.
Centuries of ethnic, political, social, religious hostility
stands between the Jews and the Samaritans by Jesus time dating
back to the seven hundreds BC. So there are a lot of bad takes
about who the Samaritans were and I want to clear that up a
little bit. They weren't bad people.

(07:00):
Their story and situation was actually tragic to be honest,
but they sought to worship God just like the Jewish people down
in Judea and up in the Galilee. Their story took a bad turn and
in that the 700 years before Jesus, when the Assyrians who
were over in modern day Iraq came around, conquered this
region, the region of Samaria, and basically deported the

(07:24):
people who were living there at the time, the Israelites, back
to Assyria. And then in the process replaced
those whom they had deported with their own people with, with
fellow Assyrians. This was a way to ensure that a
conquered nation was loyal to you.
You took their people away, you put your own people there, and
you have loyalty and instant culture in a conquered nation.

(07:46):
So because the Samaritans were intermixed with Assyrian
ancestry, they were viewed as illegitimate?
I mean, they weren't geneticallypure descendants of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob by this point. And this caused a long standing
rift between the Jews and Samaritans, and between Genea
and Samaria by Jesus's lifetime.Most people went hours out of

(08:07):
their way just to avoid walking on Samaritan soil.
But not Jesus. On his way back N to the
Galilee, he stops in a town called Soukar.
It's the middle of the day. He's tired, and he sits down by
the well. That's that's where this story
takes a turn. A woman approaches.
It's noon. She's alone, which already tells

(08:29):
us something. Most women came to draw water
early in the morning or late in the day, and they travel
together in groups. So it was a social thing, and it
was safer that way. But this woman is here at noon,
in the middle of the day, the heat of the day, all by herself.
So that means she's either avoiding others, or she's being
avoided by others, or both. And here we go.

(08:52):
Jesus starts a conversation withher.
It makes me think about going toa conference in in Chicago in
2012 with my dad and I was finishing the PhD and I was
giving a talk at this, this massive conference and this like
it was a it was a dream conference for me at the time
hadn't had any publications yet.And this was an opportunity to

(09:16):
rub elbows with some really top notch scholars in my fields.
So Dad and I drove up there, stayed in the hotel, hung out,
saw some sights, went to a bunchof the conference sessions
together. I mean, this Conference Center
in Chicago was bigger than the hometown I grew up in.
It was massive. And so you had to walk from one

(09:37):
side to the other. And every time we'd be walking
and and screwing along, I'd lookback and see him talking to
someone. I mean, the guy can can talk to
anyone. And that when you watch this,
you know what I'm talking about.So here's Jesus at the well in
the sun at high noon. And this woman approaches to
draw water from the well. You know, she doesn't want to
talk to anyone. You know, she's she's got to be

(10:00):
begging. God, don't let him see me.
I don't know who this dude is, this stranger.
Don't let him see me. I just want to get water and I
want to go back home. But instead of not seeing her
and not saying anything, Jesus sees her and he starts up a
conversation with her as soon asshe gets there.
And this isn't a small talk moment.
Jesus isn't just making conversation while she draws

(10:21):
water. He's breaking every single
cultural rule he could possibly break.
Jews didn't talk to Samaritans. Jesus is talking to a Samaritan.
Men didn't strike up personal conversations with women like
this. Jesus is talking to a woman whom
her community has shamed. Rabbis in particular didn't
associate with people who had baggage.
Both she and Jesus know that she's got plenty of baggage, and

(10:44):
Jesus talks to her anyway. Jesus doesn't care about any of
that. In fact, he asks her for water.
And then he starts talking aboutsomething deeper.
This is John 4. And Jesus says, if you knew who
I was, you'd be asking me and I'd give you living water.
And naturally, she's confused, right?
She thinks he's talking about plumbing.

(11:04):
Jesus keeps pressing. He tells her that he knows her
story. He knows she's had a bunch of
husbands. He knows that the man that she's
with right now isn't her husband.
And he sort of starts to peel back the layers of her life
story. He's not doing this to shame
her, but to show her that he sees her fully.
He knows who she is. He knows her darkest secrets.

(11:26):
He knows those closets in those corners of her life that she's
tucked things away and she hopesno one ever uncovers he knows
who she is. And to show her that in spite of
all of those who've pushed her out, in spite of the rejection
she's faced and the shame she's faced by those men.
Because let's face it, in her culture, the men could divorce

(11:47):
and destroy women however and whenever they wanted.
Women were nothing. They were property.
She's a Samaritan, she's a woman, and by social standards
of the time, she's damaged goods.
But while everyone around her continues to push her out,
continues to pile shame upon her, Jesus breaks all cultural
norms, all cultural customs, allsocial, political, religious

(12:11):
barriers, and he goes right to her and he invites her in, has
something to think about, and it's something a lot of us need
to pay attention to. Jesus doesn't expose her story
to embarrass her and and shame her or control her.
He does it to show that her story doesn't disqualify her.
OK. He does it to show her that even

(12:33):
though she's been taught that God is avoiding her, the fact is
that she's exactly the person God has his eye on and she's
stunned. She leaves her jar, she runs
back to town again, a shameful act.
We run around everywhere. We jog.
We do that for exercise. That's not a cultural thing in
Jesus day. She goes running back to her

(12:54):
town and she's shouting, come and see a man who told me
everything I ever did. But she's celebrating this
moment instead of walking aroundsaying, holding her head down
and saying, I know you all know who I am and holding that
against herself, right? She's celebrating.
She's saying, man, this guy knows who I am, but he invited
me in and he revealed something to me that to this point, Jesus

(13:16):
hasn't revealed to anyone else in his in his public campaign.
He's already a woman carrying years of shame.
So she's she's got nothing to lose at this point.
And what ends up happening is that woman, this outsider in
every sense of the word, is the first person to proclaim Jesus
to her community. She becomes, in all of history,
the first local evangelist, or Iwould say ambassador or

(13:40):
diplomat, we might say, of Jesus's messianic campaign.
It's not a rabbi that he entrusts this privilege to, not
even one of his closest disciples, not even his own
family. It's a Samaritan woman with a
horribly messy life story. Meanwhile, back in Judea, John
the Baptist is now locked up. His arrest marks this turning

(14:02):
point. It's clear that both John's and
Jesus's movements are are being watched.
They're under the eyes of the authorities.
And this makes makes it all the more important for Jesus to
pivot. So he heads back to Galilee and
he sets up shop in Capernaum. Capernaum is a small fishing
town on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee.

(14:22):
If you visit Capernaum today, it's pretty quiet.
It's an incredible little tourist spot.
There's a preserved synagogue there, most likely from a few
centuries after Jesus. But and check this out
underneath the synagogue that you can walk around, you'll,
you'll find the basalt foundations of an older
synagogue, likely the one that Jesus taught in incredible.

(14:44):
And they haven't uncovered it completely because that would
require destroying the layers ontop of it.
And you can't, you can't do that.
Annie and I went there a few years ago.
It's kind of an out of body experience being there, just
knowing that this was a town where in the year 27 AD and
between 27 and 29 AD, this was the home and the campaign

(15:04):
headquarters of Jesus. This was where he operated and
planned and strategized and prayed and healed and networked
and launched his movement from it's, it's really hard to
fathom. It really is.
And the town itself is small by modern measurements, but in the
1st century it sat on key trade routes that meant people from
all over the Mediterranean in the Near Eastern world passed

(15:28):
through it on their way from thenorth to the South and from the
east and to the West. Strategically, then, it was a
perfect base of operations for grassroots revolution like
Jesus's. And with Samaria as a sort of
buffer between the Galilee in the north and Judea in the
South, Jesus could operate relatively freely for a while

(15:49):
without the Jerusalem authorities actually getting on
his case during these early daysof his movement.
And it turns out that Samaria was incredibly important to
Jesus for a number of reasons. So Jesus didn't avoid Samaria,
he went right through it. And he didn't avoid the woman at
the well, He waited for her. And I think that that tells us
something profound about the kind of Messiah Jesus is.

(16:13):
This wasn't a coincidence. It wasn't just a pit stop.
John actually says that he had to go through Samaria, which is
kind of a a way of saying God made him it.
It was a strategic move and it was a divinely strategic move.
Jesus knew exactly what he was doing.
He was, he was building a movement that wouldn't begin at
the top. We're going to say this over and
over. Jesus's movement never began at

(16:36):
the top with the temple elites, with the religious influencers,
with the politicians, with the social elites, with the wealthy.
It begins in the margins with people like this Samaritan woman
at the well. And think about this.
This woman actually becomes the first person Jesus explicitly
tells us, as I mentioned a minute and to go I am the
Messiah. I'm the guy you're looking for.

(16:57):
She was disqualified by everyonearound her.
But Jesus saw her differently. He saw through her shame,
through the assumptions that people made about her, through
the view that she had of herself.
He sees her full story, and without flinching, he offers her
living water. He invites her in.
He trusts her enough to carry his message even before he
trusts his own disciples. And that's a theme with Jesus

(17:20):
entrusting women with the most important first messages of his
life and campaign. Remember that little
foreshadowing? First witnesses of the
resurrection are women. Same thing here is going on.
And this woman jumps at the opportunity.
She leaves her water behind. She runs back to town, tells
everybody about Jesus. She becomes the first diplomat

(17:42):
in Jesus's movement, first person to carry the news that
the Messiah is here. And that's incredible because if
you've ever felt like you're notthe right kind of Christian or
believer or Jesus follower, if you've ever felt like your past
or even your present disqualifies you or like you're
kind of stuck on the outside looking in, even now, the story

(18:02):
is a direct challenge to all of those voices that tell you
otherwise. Jesus doesn't just allow people
like her to be a part of the story.
He starts his story with her. He builds his movement with her.
So when you feel like God's gonerogue and sort of left you in
his wake and he's moved on, or that he's ignoring you or

(18:25):
avoiding you, when you're tempted to think that God is
silent or that maybe he's keeping a distance, I want you
to remember this scene. Sometimes God's not avoiding
you. Sometimes he's already at the
well, sitting in the sun, waiting for you to arrive.
You don't need to bring your perfection.
You don't need to bring credentials.
In fact, he doesn't want any of that.

(18:45):
Check this out. Test me on this.
Go and read the Gospels, All four of them.
Jesus never reveals himself explicitly and honestly to
anyone who's got perfection and credentials and whose life is
already perfect. Just do what you do every day.
Be who you are, just like the Samaritan woman, and show up at
the well. I don't care what you believe.

(19:06):
I don't care what your politics are.
I don't care what your identity or sexuality are.
And neither does Jesus. He says come.
And you might be surprised that in spite of all of the voices
you've heard around you, and in spite of all of the internal
voices that tell you that Jesus isn't like that, that that's not
who Jesus is. That Jesus needs you to be

(19:27):
cleaned up, That Jesus needs youto change before you can step
through the doors, before you can approach the well.
Jesus clearly shows in his encounter with the woman at the
well that all of that is bogus. Just show up at the well.
Doesn't matter who you are. Jesus already knows your story.
Jesus already knows who you are and you, just like you are.

(19:48):
That's who he wants to come to the well.
Jesus is there waiting. And that is where the revolution
begins. Lake Hamad, go and learn.
Come back for scene 7 of the Jesus X30 Challenge.