John 4.15-26

15 “Please, sir,” the woman said, “give me this water! Then I’ll never be thirsty again, and I won’t have to come here to get water.”

16 “Go and get your husband,” Jesus told her.

17 “I don’t have a husband,” the woman replied.

Jesus said, “You’re right! You don’t have a husband — 18 for you have had five husbands, and you aren’t even married to the man you’re living with now. You certainly spoke the truth!”

19 “Sir,” the woman said, “you must be a prophet. 20 So tell me, why is it that you Jews insist that Jerusalem is the only place of worship, while we Samaritans claim it is here at Mount Gerizim, where our ancestors worshiped?”

21 Jesus replied, “Trust me, dear woman, the time is coming when it will no longer matter whether you worship the Father on this mountain or in Jerusalem. 22 You Samaritans know very little about the one you worship, while we Jews know all about him, for salvation comes through the Jews. 23 But the time is coming — indeed it’s here now — when true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. The Father is looking for those who will worship him that way. 24 For God is Spirit, so those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth.”

25 The woman said, “I know the Messiah is coming — the one who is called Christ. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”

26 Then Jesus told her, “I AM he, the man talking to you!”

Comments

It is interesting to track the progress of the conversation between Jesus and the woman. She expresses interest in this living water he has offered her. She seems to mistake his offer for something that will make her physical labor easier, but at least she is open to receiving what Jesus is offering. Jesus reorients her thinking toward the spiritual nature of what he is offering by getting her to recognize her own spiritual need and express it to him. This water is not about lifting buckets, it is about healing the brokenness of her life.

Of course, this is uncomfortable for her, so she responds with an artful dodge: I have no husband. At which point Jesus speaks directly into her pain, but notice how he affirms her in the process. Jesus tells her she spoke well and spoke truthfully – he sandwiches the hard truth in between those two encouraging statements. And about the five husband thing. The church has a tendency to read into this a lot more immoral behavior on her part than the text warrants. This betrays the church’s long standing male gender bias, our preoccupation with sexual sins, and just flat ignorance of the historical context. As a first century woman living in a patriarchal society, this woman had litte to no freedom or power over her own life. The five husbands most likely either died or abandoned her and the man she was with at the time was unwilling to commit to her, even while her very life probably depended on staying with him despite his refusal to commit. What Jesus reveals here has less to do with her sin and more to do with the sin done to her and cruel twists of fate that often attend this life. This is not to say that Jesus could not have offered such kindness and grace to a sinful woman (he will later in John), but we should always take meaning from the text, not read meaning into the text.

So Jesus brings up her pain as gently as he can, but she responds with another dodge – one I see all the time. When God things get uncomfortable, we often think that is the best time to talk about theology! Especially when it involves some sort of religious controversy, with one group denying some form of worship to some other group. Perfect distraction. She probably expected Jesus to get defensive and hoped he would get so far off topic he would forget. Jesus doesn’t do either. He acknowledges her comment while setting the whole discussion politely aside. He also acknowledges both her approach to the faith and the argument she would expect him to make – but this is just Jesus saying, ‘yes, I know how we’ve framed the issue, but’ – the but is the key there. Because what he tells her next is not in keeping with her faith or Jewish faith, except for their shared expectation that Messiah was coming.

And then Jesus does for the first time what we will see him do several times in John, he uses the old “I AM” phrase (remember Moses and the burning bush) to let her know that she was talking to the One she (and everyone else) had been waiting for. Wow. This is a Wow moment in the Gospels. I hope you can feel that as you read it. This may seem a long way from the messianic secret we saw in Mark at the beginning of the year, but it has more in common than you might think. Note that Jesus did not share this with his disciples or with Nicodemus. He shares it first with a person who is triple marginalized: a woman, a racial minority, and a person with a sketchy past. Jesus looked at her in all her weakness and pain and thought ‘Yep, I’m telling her first.’ That is the message John wants us to get here, which accentuates both Mark’s secret theme and Luke’s reversal theme. We are still talking about the Jesus who reveals himself selectively and who privileges the underprivileged.

There is a lot here for us to think about. We do this same sort of dodge-dance with Jesus all the time. Misdirect. Change the subject. We are all artful dodgers. Yet Jesus keeps coming. Gently persistent. Invasively kind. Truthfully loving and lovingly truthful. This is how he always is with us. And how he calls and teaches us to be with each other.

New Living Translation (NLT) Holy Bible. New Living Translation copyright© 1996, 2004, 2007 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale HousePublishers Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

John 4.1-14

1 Jesus knew the Pharisees had heard that he was baptizing and making more disciples than John 2 (though Jesus himself didn’t baptize them — his disciples did). 3 So he left Judea and returned to Galilee.

4 He had to go through Samaria on the way. 5 Eventually he came to the Samaritan village of Sychar, near the field that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. 6 Jacob’s well was there; and Jesus, tired from the long walk, sat wearily beside the well about noontime. 7 Soon a Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Please give me a drink.” 8 He was alone at the time because his disciples had gone into the village to buy some food.

9 The woman was surprised, for Jews refuse to have anything to do with Samaritans. She said to Jesus, “You are a Jew, and I am a Samaritan woman. Why are you asking me for a drink?”

10 Jesus replied, “If you only knew the gift God has for you and who you are speaking to, you would ask me, and I would give you living water.”

11 “But sir, you don’t have a rope or a bucket,” she said, “and this well is very deep. Where would you get this living water? 12 And besides, do you think you’re greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us this well? How can you offer better water than he and his sons and his animals enjoyed?”

13 Jesus replied, “Anyone who drinks this water will soon become thirsty again. 14 But those who drink the water I give will never be thirsty again. It becomes a fresh, bubbling spring within them, giving them eternal life.”

Comments

I have shared already about how John seems more aware than the previous Gospel writers that the nature of Jesus Christ was an important issue. At the start of chapter 1 we saw John begin with a very clear statement that Jesus is the Son of God, equal with the Father in being eternally present and in creating the world. Those who would deny that Jesus is God (like the Ebionites I have been writing about) have to contend with what John wrote here. This emphasis can make it seem that John has a view of Jesus that is more God and less human, or else that we as readers are prone to read back into John the later church decision that Jesus is to be regarded as fully God and fully human (this was decided at the Council of Nicea in 325AD). But I want to suggest that a proto-Nicene understanding of Jesus is present in John, that what Nicea came to affirm was congruent with what John had in mind (and viably consistent with what the other Gospels have too). This may sound like so much theological dancing around (and to some extent it is, cha cha cha!), but I do think there is an important point here for us (I try not to bore you with pointless theology – and yes, some of it is).
What we have in the beginning of this story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman is the juxtaposition of Jesus’ humanity and divinity – and what comes of that. This is a theme John is going to develop, we will see this as we go, and the groundwork for it is right here. Jesus is weary, thirsty, and alone. John knows we’ve read about the cross already, so he is expecting us to catch this foreshadowing. His thirst (can there be a better symbol for what it means to be human?) is what leads to his conversation with the woman, where he offers her an unlimited supply of water. This is a promise only a god could make. The woman was taken aback by such a strange response coming from a thirsty man who was breaking an ethnic and gender barrier in even speaking to her. What could he even mean?
We will get into her response tomorrow, but for today I want us to sit with this progression: out of a full expression of Jesus’ humanity comes a revelation of his divinity and a promise of – of what? What does the water represent? John will tell us later (7.39) that the water is a symbol for the Holy Spirit. The promise and giving of the Holy Spirit is a major theme in John and this is how the Spirit comes: through an expression of Jesus’ humanity and a revelation of his divinity. The culminating symbol for this will be on the cross, when Jesus’ side is pierced and blood and water flow (19.35). John makes clear that the Holy Spirit is not given until the death of Jesus. More than that, the Spirit is given BY the death of Jesus.
As Karl Barth explained it, “The community and all its members are born out of that wound in his side, and they live on that which flows from there: the blood and the water which is the Spirit. It is a community of the cross or it is not the Christian community at all.” (Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/4, 126) The divine/human nature of Jesus is not just some weird theological concept. It is the wellspring from which the Holy Spirit flows and creates the community – the body of Christ. We are a community formed by and inescapably marked by the cross. Keep this in mind as we go (I know I keep saying that. I suppose it’s my job to do the reminding.) because we will see John develop this theme. And in the mean time, know that this is still how and why the Spirit comes: to reveal Jesus as God and human, to heal us as humans, to help us crucify our flesh as humans, and to resurrect us to new life in Christ.

New Living Translation (NLT) Holy Bible. New Living Translation copyright© 1996, 2004, 2007 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale HousePublishers Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.