John 4:1-42
Introduction
The story of the woman at the well is perhaps most famous for its use amongst Evangelicals to encourage and model personal witnessing. Others of a more liberal persuasion use this text as an example of Jesus’ progressive attitude towards females. There is a measure of truth in both these approaches, but the pinnacle of this story is surely to be found in a much fuller revelation whose implications are without limit, ““But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in Spirit and truth.”” (John 4:23-24 ESV). The main lesson we can learn from Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman is not a pragmatic “how to” win souls for Christ, but the unbounded revelation of the supreme attractiveness of God the Father unveiled in the sending of his Son who crosses all imaginable barriers to seek and save the lost (Luke 19:10).
Contextual Background
John’s Gospel commences with a very wide canvas, expounding the Word of God as Creator, Life-Preserver, Illuminator and completer of all past revelation (John 1:1-18). In the midst of this picture we hear a crucial testimony, “He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God,” (John 1:11-12 ESV). The Word is the object of faith through whom human beings find God as Father. The acceptance and rejection of the Word is tied to a previously unimaginable transformation, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14 ESV). The Word becoming flesh means nothing less than the humanising of God, or as we say in theological language, the Incarnation of the Son of God in the person of Jesus Christ. The rest of the Gospel will expound how the presence of God in frail mortal humanity polarises those who hear Jesus; the proudly self confident cannot accept that this ordinary looking guy from Nazareth (John 1:46; 8:57) is God’s final revelation (John 1:46; 7:52), whilst ordinary struggling human beings will find in Christ eternal hope.
The second chapter of John is dominated by the story of Jesus cleansing the temple. By now Jesus is already anticipating his own death and resurrection. The guardians of the Jerusalem temple cannot believe that the man standing before them could possibly be the fulfilment of all the house of God stood for, access to God’s own saving presence. The insignificant physical life of Jesus could not be compared to an imposing structure that took 46 years to build and was the biggest economic hub of the eastern Roman Empire (John 2:13-22). Things become even more perplexing as the Gospel moves on.
In John 3 Jesus receives a rather clandestine visit from a famous orthodox rabbi called Nicodemus. This “teacher of Israel” (v.9) is totally confused by Jesus’ statement, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.””(John 3:5 ESV) Despite being a representative of the most biblically informed, pious and missionary minded group in the nation Nicodemus has no comprehension of either earthly or heavenly things in the realm of the Spirit (v.12). After a proclamation about God’s saving love for the world in sending his Son as a sacrifice for sinners (vv. 16-17) and a dialogue concerning the Messianic identity (vv.22-35), the chapter ends on an ominous note. “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.” (John 3:36 ESV). John 4 flows on purposefully from John 3 but by way of sheer contradiction, the access of outsiders and insiders to spiritual truth seems totally reversed.
Exegesis
The Setting: John 4:1-6
The first six verses contain some details that may at first sight seem incidental. Jesus is on the move from Jerusalem the hub of divine worship but the site of his most fierce opposition to Galilee. Then we are told, “he had to pass through Samaria” (v.4). Since there were other routes between Judea and Samaria it seems Jesus “had to” pass this way because the Spirit of God had him on a mission . On the face of it a mission to the Samaritans would seem to have little chance of success.
The Samaritans were an ethnically mixed class of descendants of people resettled in northern Palestine by the Assyrians after they destroyed the ancient kingdom of Israel (2 Ki 17). They accepted only the first 5 books of the Torah (books of Moses) and had a long history of conflict, sometimes violent, with the Jewish people. They considered themselves rather than the Jews to be the true worshippers of God.
This introductory section of John 4 ends with a little note that can easily bypass us; “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 (12 noon).” (John 4:6 ESV). A little later we read the disciples had gone to buy some food for them all. Jesus is tired, hungry and thirsty, his very real human limitations will become the occasion for one of the most famous engagements between a man and a woman in human history .
The Woman at the Well: John 4:7-9
It is hard for us to imagine the social and economic precariousness of the woman Jesus met that day. The first thing that strikes our attention is that the woman is at the well at all! It is 12 noon the hottest part of the day when no sensible person would be out in the sun and she is alone (a most unwomanly thing). This gives us every reason to think she is an outcast in her own society.
There is nothing really going for this lady. When Jesus said, ““You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband. What you have said is true.”” (John 4:17-18 ESV) he struck an immensely delicate nerve. In ancient Middle Eastern society a woman’s identity was bound up in marriage and family, this lady seemed to have neither. Whatever her past history she had the status of a prostitute, someone who in that society’s eyes was considered “sinful” and under the wrath of God (Luke 7:39). Promiscuous women were viewed as so defiling that some rabbis would not even talk to females at all. Moreover, there was always the danger that the woman was menstruating and as such a ritually unclean person in terms of the Old Testament law. Contact with such a person brought defilement and was a barrier against entering the presence of God (Lev 15:19ff etc.). It would have been considered an unwise thing to drink water from a possibly unclean woman’s vessel . Jesus however experiences no shame in being seen talking to this shameless woman, he was not at all concerned about what others may have been thinking. It is at this point that God’s plan for this woman and her neighbours becomes clear.
The Gift of Living Water John 4:10- 15
In his typically transparent manner Jesus moves the direction of the conversation beyond immediate physical needs to the blessings of God, ““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 4:10 ESV). The woman’s response seems to be on a par with Nicodemus, who somehow thought that talk about being “born again” related to re-entering a mother’s womb (John 3:4). ““Sir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock.”” (John 4:11-12 ESV). Something however begins to transpire that draws the connection between Jesus and the Samaritan woman deeper and deeper. ““Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”” (John 4:13-14 ESV) is not met with confusion or rejection but with openness. ““Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.” (John 4:15 ESV). Jesus began the conversation with this woman believing the meeting was a divine appointment and it was now visible to him that she was being drawn by the Father to him to receive the word of life . Something in the innermost being (cf. John 7:38) of this woman was thirsting for God so much that nothing else could satisfy her (Ps 42:2; 63:1).
Whatever the Samaritan woman understood by “living water” those familiar with the prophets would remember that God had described himself as living waters (Jer 2:13; 17:13), and promised that life giving streams cleansing from sin would flow out of Jerusalem and its temple at the end of the age (Ezek 47:9; Zech 13:1; 14:8). Further on in the Gospel it will be made clear that spring of eternal life welling up in the believer is the Holy Spirit (John 7:37-39). The story is building up to a climax where it will be revealed that all the heavenly blessings that both Jews and Samaritans had hoped for are now found in Jesus.
The Seeking Father John 4:16-26
The woman had earlier introduced the notion of fatherhood as a direct challenge to Jesus’ status and authority by saying, “Are you greater than our father Jacob?” (v.12). Readers of this Gospel would have know Jesus’ answer to this question from his reply to Nathaniel; “Truly, truly, I say to you, you will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.”” (John 1:51 ESV). This was a reference back to a critical point in the life of Jacob when had a dream of a ladder spanning heaven and earth. It is now revealed that this ladder connecting above and below is Jesus himself, Jacob called the place of the dream “Bethel” which means “house of God” (Gen 28:10-22), Jesus is about to reveal that he is the dwelling place of God.
The woman’s recognition of who Jesus truly is emerges piece by piece, when he tells how the secrets of her married life she exclaims with honest recognition, ““Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet.”” (John 4:19 ESV). From there the conversation takes a giant leap, ““Our fathers worshipped on this mountain, but you [Jews] say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.” (John 4:20 ESV). She is referring to Mt Gerizim which still today is the worship centre of the Samaritan people. The Samaritan form of the Ten Commandments stipulated that the true worship of God was to be conducted on that mountain. It is what Jesus has to say next that will shift the religious thought world of this woman from its foundation and must shift ours too.
““Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in Spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in Spirit and truth.”” (John 4:21-24).
When Jesus says us, “the hour is coming/and is now here” (4:21, 23 cf. 5:25; 16:25, 32) he means the time of the End has broken into human history . The End time has broken into history because, to use the language of Revelation, Jesus, who is “the Last …and the End” (Rev 22:13) has come. As the final person, the one who is the goal and consummation of all of God’s plans (Col 1:16), Jesus is about to unveil the scope of God’s Fatherhood which surpasses all racial, ethnic, nationalistic and gender boundaries. Mt Gerizim and Mt Zion, the sacred sites of Samaria and Jerusalem, are now irrelevant, because the worship that Jesus introduces is “in Spirit and truth” (vv.23-24). There is an important translation question in these verses. Because the early Greek manuscripts were written only in small (minuscules) or capital letters (uncials) this expression could convey worship with our spirits or by God’s Spirit. In John’s Gospel however the Holy Spirit is the one who comes to live in believers and he is “the Spirit of truth” (John 14:17, 23; 15:26; 16:13). Worship in “Spirit and truth” is worship in the power of the Spirit, who always bears witness to Jesus as the one in whom is found the complete fulfilment of all God’s desires (14:6; 15:26 cf. 1:14, 17; 8:32; 18:37). The worship God has always sought is found in Jesus’ devotion to the Father. The great contrast between worshippers is not material versus spiritual, or outward compared to inward, worship is polarised around the centrality of Christ.
Since we have generally shrink “worship” down to what we do in Church I need to add a note here on the boundaries/limits of worship. Jesus was surely worshipping the Father as he was growing up and working in the carpenter’s shop in Nazareth, he worshipping when he was overturning the tables in Jerusalem and as he obeyed the Father by speaking to the woman in Samaria. This Gospel teaches us that joining in the communion between the Father and the Son in the context of the totality of life is true worship .
Jesus repeatedly emphasises a focus of worship that is foreign to Jews, Samaritans, Gentiles, and even to many Christians, worship of “the Father” . That God is revealed as Father is only fully and truly known, in the sending forth of the Son as the Saviour of the world in the power of his Spirit (John 3:34; 10:36; 17:3). The revelation of the truth that the Father is “seeking” worshippers is not a concept; it is contained in the coming of Jesus. This revelation is one so scandalous that it is barely received; the energy of true worship is released by God’s passion in seeking us, rather than our passion in seeking him.
The situation in some of our “worship services” is tragic. I was in a fairly large conference here in Perth some years ago and after a while I noticed that not one of the songs focused on God’s outreach to us in grace through Christ and his Spirit. It was all about our passion and devotion for spiritual experience. I said to the brother sitting next to me, “We need to get down on our knees and pray, the spirit of antichrist has taken over this meeting.”
The essence of all idolatry, Jewish, Samaritan, Gentile, Christian, is to place the emphasis on our efforts to reach God rather than God’s reaching out to us in Christ. From the time he had left Judea Jesus knew that the Father had been pursuing a true worshipper and that this was Jesus mission in Samaria. It is now about to become clear that this mission has been successful.
“The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ). When he comes, he will tell us all things.” Jesus now reveals who he is to the woman in a way he has not disclosed his identity to anyone outside of the band of disciples, he “said to her, “I who speak to you am he.”” (John 4:25-26 ESV).
Testimony John 4:27-30, 39-42
Suddenly the woman abandons her water jar and rushes back into town proclaiming, ““Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?”” (John 4:29 ESV). Living water has taken precedence over natural water and the shame of social exclusion has been dissolved with a message of good news. The story concludes with a note on the multitude of believing Samaritans, “They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is indeed the Saviour of the world.””(John 4:42 ESV). The woman and her friends have become worshippers in Spirit and in truth. The power of Jesus life and teaching had converted a forgotten group of people through the testimony of a previously despised social outcast into a horde of true disciples. Jesus mission had been an overwhelming success. How the Father must have rejoiced (cf. Luke 15:5-6, 9-10, 22-23).
Dumbfounded Disciples
I have slightly rearranged my order in dealing with the passage to terminate with Jesus dialogue with his regular disciples. When they return from the town with food they are amazed to see Jesus speaking to a woman (v.27), and when they urge him to eat he replies with a damning indictment, ““I have food to eat that you do not know about.” So the disciples said to one another, “Has anyone brought him something to eat?” Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work.””(John 4:32-34 ESV). In other words at this stage of the journey Peter, James, John etc. were not worshippers in Spirit and truth. Jesus then starts to explain to them that “the fields are white for harvest” (v.35), in context this refers to a harvest amongst the Samaritans. ““I sent you to reap that for which you did not labour. Others have laboured, and you have entered into their labour.””(John 4:38 ESV). Ultimately this can only mean that the one true labourer is the one who fulfils the will of the Father, Jesus himself.
Application
This ancient story has many applications to us. From beginning to end it is a story about divine initiative. In a time when there has been a lot of emphasis on those who are seeking God, this story teaches us that the grace of God always advances towards us before we can advance towards him. The Samaritan woman quickly understood this because considered as a person – by gender, morality, social standing, religion, she had nothing going for her. In terms of experiencing God, it was sheer grace or nothing. Her responsiveness, and that of other Samaritans should not surprise us, Jesus always seemed to attract the poor, demonised, diseased, socially ostracised and sinful of his day (Matt 4:23-25; 9:10-13 etc.). The average church however seems to gravitate to professional and business people, or a sports star or politician if it can find them, rather than those on some form of government assistance, indigenous people, refugees, those with a cranial record or the mentally disturbed. These sorts of people are highly demanding but a Spirit led mission to the extremes is always accompanied by an extraordinary grace.
A friend of mine wrote a simple little book a few years ago called Mission on the Outside . It is based on John 4 and encapsulated his passion to see Christians communicate as Jesus did to those completely outside the reach of ordinary church activities. Andrew and his wife Sharon minister to gays, prostitutes and a whole bunch of incredibly broken people in Perth. They have seem many extraordinary miracles over the years with financial provision, lost people encountering Jesus in dreams and visions, deep repentance of sin, multiple beach baptisms and so on. They do not have a strategy, programme or organisational apparatus to support them. How do they do it? The answer is simply that the Spirit has put them in touch with the Father’s passionate seeking for those who will worship him in Spirit and truth.
From eternity the Father has only ever had one goal, to communicate all that he is as God the Father, the infinite glory of his wisdom, power and goodness, to his beloved Son (Luke 3:22; Eph 1:6). At the heart of the historical plan of redemption is the communication of all of this glory through Jesus to us (cf. John 17:5, 13, 22-26). Christianity is not a “Jesus religion”, Jesus was sent by the Father to take us back to the Father (John 3:34; 4:34; 5:23; 13:3; 14:12; 16:17, 28; 20:17 etc.). Jesus’ motive for mission, which must also be ours, was never to get people “saved” from their existential misery and the fires of hell, but to bring “many sons to glory” (Heb 2:10), the glory of knowing God as Father as he knows the Father. This is the content of salvation.
There is an old theological statement, “What goes deepest to the conscience goes widest to the world.” (P. T. Forsyth). Let me rephrase this, “Whatever touches your heart most deeply will go into your world most widely.” The real problem behind the Church’s seeming inability to stop the slide of our culture into godless oblivion is not our “irrelevancy” or that we need to rejig our Sunday meetings to make them more attractive to “seekers”, it is that our congregations are not filled with those who are worshipping the Father in Spirit and truth. If this is true, and it is necessarily true if our witness is impotent, then our real problem is idolatry. But in what way are we dear Christian people idol worshippers?
Let we begin to answer with an example. Someone sent me a video link the other day on a problem that seems to plague the Church as much as the world, pornography. The interviewee made a profound remark. “’You worship your way into porn and you must worship your way out’” (D. A. Carson).” This is very biblical for Romans 1 teaches that all manner of sins stem from idolatry (Rom 1:18ff.). There are however many forms of pornography other than the sexual, there was an ad for My Kitchen Rules on TV the other day, one of the hosts asked a lady why she had entered the competition, her response appalled me, “Food is my life.” I suppose my response shows that I am just naïve; either that or my conscience has yet to be dulled (1 Tim 4:2). Someone in a Christian marriage remarked that his wife “lives for her children and grandchildren”, there are thousands of Christian men who live for their work (of course no one admits to such things) and heaps of pastors who worship “their ministry”. Busyness has become the hallmark of our age for professional people and I hear continually from believers about how much stress this is putting on their marriages, families and time with God. Of course the simplest solution is to change lifestyle expectations, but this is unlikely, because the current Western Christian lifestyle of prosperity in every part of life is itself an idol. Everything in human existence without exception comes down to which image of Fatherhood you worship. Apparently the image of the Father worshipped by the majority of spiritually impotent believers in our nation is very different from the worship of the Father in Spirit and truth revealed by Jesus. Thankfully the story in John 4 teaches us just how this can change.
The personal presence and teaching of Jesus transformed a spiritually confused, morally and socially outcast woman into a true worshipper whose testimony powerfully impacted her community. The Jews had destroyed the physical temple on Mt Gerizim in the century before Christ, but Jesus’ Spirit built a living temple amongst the Samaritans that could never be destroyed. This is the vision of God for you in the community where he has placed you. If Christ is in you (Col 1:27) then his powerful presence and the words he will give you in the Spirit of truth are adequate to create a house of true worship in your office, factory, school, club, hobby group etc. The ultimate goal of God is not to “save souls” but to create communities of worshippers everywhere! There are no church buildings, religious programmes or orders of service at the end of the Bible, just men and women worshipping by the Spirit of God (Phil 3:3).
This is in a fact a vision God gave me some years ago – small groups of worshipping Christians in business, government, education, law, medicine, arts, service industries, trades…everywhere bringing the presence of Christ to disciple the nations for the glory of God (Matt 28:19; Hab 2:14). This is the vision of unlimited worship for which God became a human being and spoke to a Samaritan woman so long ago; if our vision is any less, we are not worshipping the Father in Spirit and in truth (Rev 5:13).
Conclusion
The story of the woman at the well may have entered into Christian folk lore as an illustration of one to one evangelism, but in the context of the totality of scripture and John’s Gospel it sums up the heart of God as a Father. There is a passion in the heart of the Father as deep and powerful as his own eternal being to bring to himself through his Son men and women from “every tribe and language and people and nation” (Rev 5:9).
Jesus is the one who redefines everything human, he redefines outside and inside, false and true worship, acceptable and unacceptable behaviour, not in terms of our own inward looking Christian communities rather than fellowship with himself and his Father. We have created sacred spaces in our special buildings/times/rituals rather than listening to Jesus who came to earth as a sort of mobile sanctuary recreating worship centres wherever he went.
The gospel of the crucified Christ is the message of the one who took upon himself on the cross all the shame, blame and pain of this world (2 Cor 5:21; 1 Pet 2:24), and took it away (John 2:29). Such a gospel surely teaches us that the very place where Jesus is most likely to be found is amongst the lost, the last and the least of this world, amongst shameless sinners (Mark 2:17). How we have turned in on ourselves! I was out praying some years ago and had a very unusual inner experience, it was like I could feel myself being turned inside out. This was a message to the Church in our nation, a Church which has prioritised its own interests in terms of finance, money and effort upon itself. May the Lord of the harvest turn us all inside out, this would make us worshippers of the Father in Spirit and truth.