John 4:1-27

Including the Excluded

Jesus in Samaria

John 4:1-27     Jesus and a Samaritan Woman

1 Jesus learnt that the Pharisees had received word
that Jesus was making more disciples than John
and was baptising, too –
2 though Jesus himself did not baptise but his disciples –
3 he left Judea and went back again into Galilee.
4 He had to pass through Samaria.

The shortest route from Jerusalem to Galilee passed through Samaria. Jews often avoided that route because of the anticipated hostility of the Samaritan inhabitants. 


Samaritans

Early in their history, the original Hebrew kingdom ruled by David divided into two kingdoms, a northern kingdom based in Samaria and Galilee, and a southern one centred on Jerusalem. Relations between the two were frequently strained. After the conquest of the northern kingdom by the Assyrians eight centuries before Jesus, most of the inhabitants of Galilee and Samaria were deported, and the area was populated by other pagan peoples brought in to colonise it. 
 
In time, the southern kingdom of Judea was conquered by the Babylonians and most of its inhabitants were deported to Babylon. After their return from exile in Babylon, the returned Jews had spurned offers of welcome and help offered to them by the Samaritans, because they believed them to be heretics and ritually “unclean”. About a century and a half before the time of Jesus, the Jewish inhabitants of Judea had destroyed the Samaritan Temple at Mt.Gerizim. Since then, relations between Jews and Samaritans had been particularly strained. A favoured term of abuse among Jews was to call someone a Samaritan.
 
As a people, the Samaritans preserved some elements of their Israelite heritage. They accepted the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Torah. They worshipped God, but they had done so in their own Temple on Mt.Gerizim -  while it was still standing.
 
Like many of the Jews, the Samaritans looked forward to a future Messiah, or Teacher, though their understanding of the person and role of that Messiah differed from the various Jewish expectations (that had been nourished, particularly, by the prophets who operated long after the destruction of the northern kingdom based in Samaria).
 

This would be the only formal mention of Samaria in John’s Gospel and it showed its inhabitants in a favourable light. Some scholars, from this and other references, have inferred that there may have been Samaritan disciples in John’s community.

5 So he came to a Samaritan town called Sychar,
near the field that Jacob gave to his son Joseph.
6 Jacob's spring was there.  
Jesus was worn out from the journey and sat down by the spring.  
It was around the sixth hour.  

The mention of Jacob and of a spring recalled the experiences of two of the Israelite patriarchs, Isaac and Jacob, as well as of Moses [Exodus 2.15-21]. The wives of each of the three, Rebecca, Rachel and Zipporah, were first encountered by their respective husbands as they came to draw water at a well/spring. The author gently inserted a nuptial resonance into the narrative.

Living Water

7 A Samaritan woman came to draw water.  
Jesus said to her, "Give me something to drink". 
8 (The disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)

It is important for modern readers to be alert to the literary technique used in the Gospel. The author drew on historical incidents, but was not interested in recounting historical details. His concern was theological, not historical. He was addressing believers and seeking to lead them to a deeper appreciation of the Jesus in whom they already believed. He approached the incident from the viewpoint of faith in the risen Jesus and the meanings to be drawn from the incident for the current life of the community of disciples. The literary form was that of a dialogue, but it was not the transcript of an actual conversation. It offered, rather, a series of theological messages.

9 So the Samaritan woman said to him,
"How come you, a Jewish man, ask a drink of me, a Samaritan woman?"
[Jews do not associate on friendly terms with Samaritans.]

The woman was surprised. What made Jesus’ request unusual was not just that the person was a Samaritan, but that she was also a woman. It was not proper for men to initiate conversations with women, particularly when they were strangers.

10 Jesus answered her, "If you knew about the gift of God,
and who it is asking you, 'Give me a drink',
you would have asked him
and he would have given you fresh water.

Not surprisingly, at this stage of the interaction, the woman knew neither the gift of God nor the identity of Jesus.

Fresh water, generally, would refer to flowing water, or water welling up from a spring. In line with the literary technique, Jesus’ comment had a deeper meaning than the obvious immediate sense.

11 The woman said to him,
"Sir, you do not have a bucket, and the well is deep.  
From where are you going to get fresh water?

As the story developed from historical narrative to theology, she would discover the deeper answer to her question.

12 Are you greater than our father Jacob
who gave us the spring
and who drank from it himself,
and his sons and his cattle?"

In line with the familiar literary technique, the woman misunderstood Jesus’ comment. Her response was courteous, but puzzled. She addressed Jesus as Sir (The word could also be translated as “Lord”). At the same time, she challenged his apparent pretensions to power greater than Jacob’s.

13 Jesus answered her, "Whoever drinks this water will get thirsty again;
14 but whoever drinks the water that I shall give will never thirst again.  
Rather, the water I shall give them
will become a spring of water within them
bubbling up for eternal life."

Jesus used the misunderstanding as the occasion to elucidate his deeper message. For the Gospel’s readers, Jesus was the source of a spring of water bubbling up for eternal life – in them. The Gospel would return to the image later in the narrative [7.37]. What message was the beloved disciple trying to convey? What was his sense of the presence and action of Jesus in the life of the believer? The first sign that Jesus had given, at Cana in Galilee, had involved water, which, transformed into wine, symbolised joy and abundance. Here, the beloved disciple seemed to be inviting his fellow believers to recognise and appreciate the irrepressibly refreshing, sustaining and invigorating impact that Jesus could have in their lives.

In line with what he had already spoken about, that source was the unmerited, unconditional love that Jesus had for whoever would believe it. The task was precisely to believe it: to trust Jesus and to entrust themselves to Jesus.


Bubbling Spring and Eternal Life

The Beloved Disciple was speaking from experience to a community of fellow believers, who could also reflect on their experience, not of the historical Jesus, but of the Risen Jesus who “dwelt within them”.
 
In their experience, how might “eternal life” have been felt? Whatever it was, it was seen as originating from their relationship with Jesus, and was pure gift.
 
When meditating in the Prologue on Jesus, the Word made flesh, the Beloved Disciple had been helped by the metaphorical image of Wisdom, of which the Jewish Scriptures had spoken so beautifully. The author of the Book of Proverbs had written, for example:
 
… I was beside him (the creating God), like a master worker;
and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always,
rejoicing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the human race. [Proverbs 8.30--31]
 
Jesus, the Word made flesh, “delighted in God” and “delighted in the human race”. His delighting was very much the expression of the life within him; and was an essential component of “eternal life”, even during his historical life. Jesus delighted in persons. He delighted in this woman; he delighted in Samaritans; he delighted in everyone, even those who would eventually bring about his death. His delight could not be contained. It flowed from within him, and was not conditioned by what those he delighted in might do.
 
As disciples learnt to grow into Jesus, to stay with him, to share his vision and, indeed, his life, they, too, would begin to delight in God their Father and in every person. Their delight, originating in Jesus and welling up from limpid depths within them, would be irrepressible and eternally refreshing: “a spring of water bubbling up for eternal life”.

***

15 The woman said to him, "Sir, give me this water
so that I shall not be thirsty again
nor keep coming here again to draw water."

The woman had still not understood, yet she was open to cooperating with whatever Jesus had to offer.

Faithful to God

16 Jesus said to her, "Go and call your husband and come back here."
17 TThe woman answered him, "I do not have a husband."
Jesus said, "You have truly said that you have no husband.
18 You have had five husbands,
and the one you have now is not your husband.  
You have spoken the truth."

It is important again to remember that the dialogue was essentially a theological discourse. This exchange between Jesus and the woman probably had nothing to do with her marital history. Yet, the narrative context may have had importance for the theological meaning. The woman’s experience of five former husbands and one current partner cast her as a woman deeply hurt, either by bereavement or divorce or desperation. She would have known loneliness, abandonment, rejection and betrayal. She would have been familiar with dreams turned sour, and with hopes unfulfilled.

The more pertinent theological meaning was, however, different. A number of Hebrew prophets had used the imagery of husband and wife to refer to the relationship between God and Israel. 

Jeremiah had lamented:

… as a faithless wife leaves her husband,
so you have been faithless to me, O house of Israel [Jeremiah 3.20].
 
It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors 
when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—
a covenant that they broke, 
though I was their husband, says the Lord [Jeremiah 31.32].
 
Isaiah had written in similar vein:
For your Maker is your husband;
… the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer,
… For the Lord has called you
like a wife forsaken and grieved in spirit,
like the wife of a man’s youth when she is cast off…
 For a brief moment I abandoned you,
but with great compassion I will gather you. [Isaiah 54.5-7]

When the northern and southern kingdoms had first split, both had been relatively faithful to God; but over time, the northern kingdom had adopted the gods of its successive conquerors. At the time of the encounter between Jesus and the woman, though Samaria believed itself faithful to God, Jesus insisted that that was not the case. “With great compassion”, he sought to call them to conversion.

Since the woman's present partner was not her husband, new possibilities opened up for her. She could have a new marriage, this time with the true God: not the nationalistic God envisaged by current Judaism, nor the one worshipped on Mt.Gerizim, but the God revealed and embodied in Jesus.


Changing Images of God

The Gospel was written so that the readers’ faith might be deepened [20.31]. Did the Samaritan woman’s experience have symbolic relevance to the faith growth of disciples?
 
The imagery used in the earlier discourse between Jesus and Nicodemus to express the mystery of Baptism [3.3-15] had focussed on birth, life and the reality of becoming children of God. In line with the imagery of the Hebrew prophets, Baptism might also be seen as the beginning of a deeply personal, intimate and pledged love relationship with God. Christians may be less awkward when they think of God as Father than as Husband, but the prophets did not have such inhibitions.
 
Projection. In the first stages of their love relationship with God, people’s sense of God can be very inadequate. They are devoted to a God whom they unknowingly make in their own image. The God they love can be the God they feel safe with, a God whose love, in the present, they can unconsciously ensure by appropriate prayers, novenas and sacraments; and, in the future, by indulgences and similar extrinsic means.
 
Control. Over time, they can grow out of that image of God and may seek, rather, to gain God’s love by their personal behaviour, by their readiness to obey, even at considerable personal cost. But their need to feel somehow in control of the relationship – that it really depends on them – betrays a lack of trust and an undeveloped understanding of God’s love. And their inability to make themselves blameless can lead them to feel desperate.
 
Surrender. They have to lose their faith in that God in order to discover the God whose love for them is unconditional and unmerited. They have to struggle to let go of their often unrecognised fear of God and to learn, instead, to trust that “the one you have now is not your husband”.
 
In time, they may recognise that their efforts to trust the loving God may still be motivated by their need to be right before God, with the difference being that rightness now consists, not in their own achievements, but in trusting.
 
Patience. Their image of the loving God has to move from their heads to their deepest personal core. The need they feel to discover, by their own efforts, the God who loves them deeply must, eventually, die. They need to come to terms with their powerlessness. Only God can reveal, as pure gift, God’s own face. Their task is to relax, as best they can, with what sense of love they have, to thirst, and simply to wait.
 

19 The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet.

The woman had no adequate words to express her growing fascination with Jesus. Given that it was prophets who had spoken of God and Israel in terms of husband and wife, it was a good effort on her part to see Jesus as a prophet. This was the first time in the narrative that the title was used of Jesus. He would use it of himself on a later occasion [4.44].

20 Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain.  
And you people say that Jerusalem is the place to worship."

Worship – Personal Integrity Replaces Corrupted Ritual

The woman was not particularly familiar with finer theological distinctions between Jews and Samaritans; but she was aware of the practical difference between their places of worship – Gerizim and Jerusalem. Perhaps, she felt that the God whom Samaritans had worshipped on Mt.Gerizim was the same God worshipped by Jews in Jerusalem. She felt more familiar exploring that issue.

21 Jesus said to her, "Believe me, woman, the hour is coming
when neither in this place nor in Jerusalem
will you worship the father.
22 You worship one you do not know;
we worship the one we know –
because salvation does come from the Jews.

Jesus was speaking of the Jews as the People of God, not confining the term here to the Jewish leaders. Jesus was Jewish, and stood within the long history of Israel. God’s work of salvation, begun with Israel, would culminate through the person and action of Jesus.

23 But the hour is coming, it is now,
when genuine worshippers will worship the father in spirit and in truth.  Indeed, the father wants worshippers such as this.
24 God is spirit,
and those worshipping him need to worship in spirit and in truth."

The Gospel’s readers were well aware of the destruction of Jerusalem and of its Temple by the Roman armies in the year 70 AD. Even before that had happened, they had emotionally moved from their previous sense of Jerusalem as the focal point of their worship. By the time the Gospel was written, they were unwelcome even to meet with their fellow Jews in the synagogues scattered around the Diaspora. They had learnt to be self-sufficient. Under the influence of the Spirit of the risen Jesus in their midst, their worship had become worship in spirit and in truth.


Worship in Spirit and in Truth

Jesus’ immediate intention was not to reject worship either on Mt.Gerizim or on Mt.Zion; nor was it specifically to commend either. God, however, was not a God of specific nations, nor a God confined to sacred places. God was the God who delighted in the whole universe and who could be encountered intimately in the humanity of Jesus. The narrative would develop further the message that the destiny of disciples was to be drawn mystically into that humanity of Jesus and to live in him, and, in and through him, to live in deep communion with God. Everything in life, and everywhere, could be sacred.
 
In Spirit. Jesus said that true worship must be worship “in spirit”. It must arise from and express people’s deepest and truest desires. In this, he followed in the footsteps of many of the prophets, who had castigated worshippers whose worship was ritually correct but whose hearts were far from God and the ways of God.
 
People worship both as individuals and as communities. Their community worship inevitably demands some degree of institutionalization. In mainstream religions, people belong for a variety of reasons, sometimes little more than by reason of their birth; their levels of personal conversion can cover a wide spectrum.  Worship can become, for many, an outward performance without much, if any, worship in spirit.
 
When seeking to reform the liturgy, bishops at the Second Vatican Council insisted that genuine worship presumed “active participation”. The “participation” that they had in mind, primarily, was worship that was alert, informed and truly expressed people’s deepest attitudes – worship in “spirit”. Only secondarily, did they consider practical involvements that might assist to express those deepest attitudes. Unfortunately, more energy has been spent in the aftermath of the Council debating details of ritual than forming people’s hearts.
 
In Truth. Jesus also expressed the need for worship “in truth”. Worship in truth expresses and responds to reality as it is – not only the truth of the worshipper’s own heart, but the truth, too, of God who is worshipped. It understands God as the one who loves and who forgives – the God who takes the initiative in coming close to persons. Essentially, worship is Eucharistic. It responds to God in thanks. True worship does not seek to satisfy an angry God, a God who seeks blood, a God who must be propitiated. Worship “in truth” is celebration of the God whose face is revealed in the face of Jesus.
 

Jesus as “I Am” 

25 The woman said to him,
"I know that the Messiah is coming, the one called the Christ.  
When he comes, he will tell us everything."

Through no fault of her own, theological discussion was beyond the woman’s range of experience. She was in no position to agree or disagree. So, to extract herself from a situation where she felt out of her depth, she expressed her hope that the coming Messiah would clarify the matter.

Samaritans expected a Messiah, not a descendant of David – a royal Messiah – but a teacher and revealer of things unknown.

26 Jesus said to her, "I am he, the one speaking to you."

The translation is not clear. It could be understood, simply, as Jesus' affirming that he was, in fact, the Messiah. To draw that conclusion would be to miss the point. 

In referring to himself as I am he, Jesus used the name that was reserved for God alone, the name God had revealed to Moses at the Burning Bush [Exodus 3.14]. It was a term that the woman would understand (since Samaritans accepted the Book of Exodus). 


The Divine Name

When Moses asked God's name [Exodus 3.14], God replied with the Hebrew word, literally transcribed as YHWH and sometimes pronounced as YaHWeH [Yahweh]. It is a verb whose translation is not clear. Scholars say it means “I am” or “I am who I am” or “I will be what I will be”. It is uncertain whether it is to be understood as a literal answer to Moses' question, or whether it is an avoidance of the question, conveying the idea : “Don't ask me who or what I am – enough to know that I am, and that I shall be with you.”
 
Jews would never pronounce the word out of profound reverence for the mystery that is God. When reading their Scriptures aloud, whenever they encountered the word YHWH, they substituted the word “Adonai”, whose English translation is “The Lord”. (Christians could well respect the Jewish sensibilities and refrain from pronouncing the Name.)
 

By identifying himself as I am he, Jesus identified himself as the perfect human revelation of God. He was also claiming that his identity was not drawn from his role (Messiah), his gifts, or his chosen behaviour. All of these flowed from his identity, but they did not constitute it. In a sense, any single predicate would be a restriction of his identity. Jesus' sense of himself was deeper, drawn from the simple truth of himself. He was in touch with his deepest reality, his radical being. He was truly self-possessed – his identity totally uncluttered, undefined, unlimited. He had come to know who he was, because he was loved by another, his Father.

The term would recur frequently as the narrative unfolded, but it was not by accident that the Gospel showed Jesus first revealing his name to a woman who was also a Samaritan. Jesus' particular concern was to reach out to and to include those marginalised by current social and religious systems. They were the ones oppressed by the power plays of those at the centre, but not so likely to be distracted by them. They did not need so deeply the “god-on-our-side”, the god who was the projection of the suppressed insecurities of the powerful. They were more open to receive the newness that Jesus had to offer.

27 With that the disciples came along
and they were amazed that he was talking to a woman,
though no one asked,
"What do you want from her,
or why are you talking to her?"

The Gospel briefly reverted from theology to narrative. The disciples’ amazement was due to the fact that Jesus defied convention to reach out to a woman. The Beloved Disciple may have included their comment in the narrative as a way of countering instinctive male diffidence regarding the place of women in the community of disciples.

 

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