"5 So he came to a town of Samaria called Sychar, near the field that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6 Jacob's well was there; so Jesus, wearied as he was from his journey, was sitting beside the well. It was about the sixth hour.
7 A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” 8 (For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.) 9 The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?” (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.)10 Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink’, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”
John 4:5-10
It is reality in the lives of believers that makes impact on others, not our methods or our 'opening gambits' or our sometimes subtle and sometimes purely clumsy efforts to twist the conversation round to spiritual things. And reality will sometimes mean that we shall break with 'orthodox procedure', as Jesus did here. It was not the done thing for Jews to consort with Samaritans, nor for men to be speaking with women. But how little store did Jesus set by any religious pattern! There is an important lesson for us here, and it is this: if being natural conflicts with orthodox patterns, so much the worse for orthodox patterns, because the Lord prefers us to be natural than to be orthodox. He wants us to be real, and if it puts our lives into an unnatural mould when we try to conform to an unorthodox pattern, we ought to throw the latter overboard, because it is dispensable, in the way reality and naturalness in Christian life are not.
The history of the rift between Jews and Samaritans goes back to post-exilic times. We are told in Ezra how the Samaritans asked the returned Jewish exiles to be allowed to help them rebuild the temple at Jerusalem. Their refusal, on the grounds that the Samaritans were a mixed race, with a semi-heathen, semi-Jewish religion, led to a bitter and unremitting antagonism between the two peoples (cf. Ezra 4; 2 Kings 17:24-34).