Você encontra este texto em português em postagem anterior (20-07-2009, Jesus não escolheu outro caminho).
It came about that Jesus was in Southern Judea and decided to come back to Galilee, probably to Capernaum.
Normally, when Jews went from Jerusalem to Galilee they traveled either by the seashore road, The Way of the Sea (also called Via Maris) or by the road across the Jordan river.
To reach Galilee through the Jordan River Way, the traveler had to go down the Mount of Olives, go to Bethany, cross the Jordan River, travel along the East Jordan bank towards the North, passing through Pereia, Decapolis and at the Galilee sea enter the Galilee land.
Through The Way of the Sea, the traveler would get to Galilee going from Jerusalem to Lyda, to Joppa and to Caesarea. From Caesarea he or she would shore the Carmel Mount and enter Galilee.
The Third Way
Jesus didn’t choose any of those ways. He took a different route, called The Way of the Center. It was a shorter way to get to Galilee.
The Jews avoided The Way of the Center because it passed through Samaria. The Jews didn’t come along with Samaritans to the extent that they preferred to take tiresome and longer routes. They would walk longer, if necessary, to not run into Samaritans on the way.
When Jesus decided to go to Galilee, he chose the road of the center, an option Jews would think twice to make.
Jesus didn’t avoid the embarrassment of meeting a Samaritan because in him there was no prejudice. For him there wasn’t anybody avoidable, anybody inferior. For him misunderstandings should be understood. For him there was no subterfuge, shortcuts, and pretense. If there were a point, he would go to it.
He took the road of the center because it is in the center that he is. He is in the center, to unite, to make things clear, break barriers, to save.
If he had taken the road of the seashore or the road of the Jordan River, he would be reproducing and validating what was already religiously established, that the Samaritans were nothing, fruit of ethnic mixture, impure. Doing this, Jesus would be just one more religious Jew.
In the Way of the Center he would show the meaning of the Gospel how he did many times: God making up with humankind, humankind making up with God, freedom from guilt, from shame, new life for the present and for the future through him.
Through the road of the center he got to Sycar where the well of Jacob was located. All his truth came out when he took the road of the center, tearing apart what was not life and had been shown as such, a kind of situation represented in the woman’s life.
A Samaritan woman with a questionable life, under suspicious eyes, frustrated after several loving disencounters, and family clashes, things that made her cheerless. She was a knower of religious matters (it is what her talk to Jesus reveals – John, chapter 4). She had her life restored by the power of Jesus’ truth, he who walks in the center.
Happy was that woman, that region, that day because fewer steps were made, distances were shortened in order to make hope, peace and strength for living longer. The place where that Samaritan lived was changed by Jesus’ action, with which he said to her, and with her attitude in response to what she felt.
What can we take from this story of the way of the center?
That Jesus may come and meet us, may help us with his real truth to find out who we are and may he heal us, relieve us from the burdens we alone are not able to get rid of. May Jesus make us to understand that the barriers that, in our eyes, separate us one another, from everything, from him, are nothing.
Meet us Jesus.
