Warning! The following story may be difficult if you have ever been the victim of a religious zealot who wanted to tell you how wrong you are about your faith – and how right they are. It may be challenging if you have ever experienced discrimination because of your gender. And it may be triggering if you have ever been shamed privately or publicly. The woman you are about to encounter had been treated as an apostate by any and all Jews living on every side of her country, had been mistreated as a woman because women are always mistreated to varying degrees depending on the context, and was shamed by her community, forcing her into isolation. What might Jesus do with such a person? How will he exhibit the weakness of God that is stronger than humanity’s greatest strength?
How do you relate to the woman in this story?
Who might you come across who has experienced the world differently than you? How will you approach such a person? What are typical, destructive approaches? Why are they chosen? What keeps us from following the path laid out by Jesus?
Commentary...
Lent 3 (Year A): John 4:5-42 and Exodus 17:1-7
Big Picture:
1) This is the third of the six Sundays in Lent. Matthew has been our main guide this year, and we’ll come back to Matthew on Palm Sunday — but as we follow the lectionary over the next three weeks, we’ll explore stories from the Gospel of John.
2) In Jesus’ day, Samaritans were the descendants of generations of intermarriage between (a) Jews left behind during the Babylonian exile and (b) Gentiles the conquering Assyrians settled in Israel. Thus Samaritans shared a common heritage with Jews, but also were quite different: for example, while Samaritans held that the proper place to worship God was Mount Gerizim (see Deut 11:29), Jews held that it was instead the Jerusalem Temple. Imagine Roman Catholics and Protestants in early modern Europe, with their mutual bigotries, suspicions, and appetites for vengeance. Jews and Samaritans were likewise enemies, their similarities only sharpening their contempt. All this would make this week’s story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman surprising to its early audiences, even scandalous — not least because for many Jews, “Samaritan” was a kind of shorthand for both “apostate” and “adversary.”
3) John presents this dialogue as a companion to a parallel exchange that happens soon after between Jesus and the crowds (John 6:25-35). Here, the woman asks Jesus for water; later, in John 6, the crowds ask for bread. Jesus responds to the woman that there is another, more deeply nourishing “living water”; and later, to the crowds, he says there is another, more deeply nourishing “true bread” (4:10; 6:32). Misunderstanding this special water as physical, the woman asks for it, saying, “Sir, give me this water”; likewise misunderstanding, the crowds say, “Sir, give us this bread” (4:15; 6:34). And then, in each story, with an “I am” statement, Jesus declares his identity (4:26; 6:35). In this way, John highlights a basic underlying choreography — encounter, misunderstanding, invitation to deeper insight — as a paradigm for the learning involved in discipleship (from the Latin discipulus, “student”). Through these stories, Jesus calls us, too, to move beyond narrow-minded ideas and adopt wider, deeper forms of trust in God.
4) This is part of a larger pattern in John in which people misunderstand Jesus because they are thinking too literally, prosaically, or conventionally. Think of Nicodemus (“How can anyone be born after growing old?” (John 3:4)), or the crowds who ask for bread (“How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” (John 6:52)), or the skeptical hometown crowd (“Isn’t this Jesus, whose parents we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” (John 6:42)). Prosaic misunderstanding is a recurring motif in John, and accordingly, should function for us as an important cautionary signal: don’t take things too literally! Open your minds to “higher” or “deeper” or more "poetic" insight, forms of thought more fitting for what Jesus himself, in his conversation with Nicodemus, calls “heavenly things” (John 3:12).
5) Just a page or two earlier in John’s story, Jesus launches his public ministry by driving the merchants, animals, and money changers from the Jerusalem Temple, in effect enacting Zechariah’s ancient prophecy: “there shall no longer be traders in the house of the LORD of hosts on that day” (Zech 14:21; John 2:13-22;see SALT’s commentary here). The idea seems to be that the traders are part of a layer of separation between God and humanity that will one day be overcome. Holiness will overflow conventional bounds, and the-temple-as-we-know-it will give way to a more widespread and direct mode of encountering God. This basic theme surfaces again in this week’s story.
Scripture:
1) What’s most striking about the conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman isn’t its content — it’s that it’s happening at all. They break two taboos at once: one against a religious teacher speaking with a woman in public, and the other against Jews and Samaritans interacting on such intimate terms (asking to share water, for example). John goes out of his way to call attention to this scandalous dimension of the dialogue — and sure enough, both the woman and the disciples are taken aback (John 4:9,27). Two fault lines of social division — gender and religious/ethnic sectarianism — are brought front and center.
2) From the outset, Jesus’ language signals to his listeners that he has in mind an unconventional meaning for the word “water,” just as he does later for “bread” in John 6:25-35. For here is “water” and “bread” that comes not from the ground or the clouds but from a person, and for those who partake, “hunger” and “thirst” are banished. This is something more than a meal ticket, and indeed something more than physical hunger and thirst. Jesus is talking about a deeper, more profound form of nourishment and wellbeing.
3) By John 6, it comes clear that Jesus is using “eating” as a metaphor for “learning,” for “taking in” and metabolizing the life-giving instruction of the incarnate Logos (see SALT’s commentary on John 6 here). This week’s story highlights two consequences of this instruction, two principal features of the Way of Life Jesus recommends: first, that we subvert and dismantle divisive hierarchies, like the one patriarchal societies create between men and women. And second, that we build bridges over religious and ethnic sectarian divides, like the one between Jews and Samaritans. In a word, the Way of Jesus comes down to this: reconciliation.
4) The conversation itself implicitly exemplifies this barrier-breaking and bridge-building, but it also makes explicit the reconciliation at the heart of the Gospel. The woman challenges Jesus to clarify an ancient dispute: “Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem” (John 4:20; the Greek word for “you” here is plural, as in, “you Jews”). Jesus proclaims that “the hour is coming” when this religious divide will be overcome, and both Jews and Samaritans will worship God “in spirit and truth” (John 4:21,23). Just as in the cleansing of the Temple, Jesus points toward a new epoch in which holiness will overflow conventional bounds, reconciling ancient enemies.
5) It’s worth remembering that the Gospel of John was written after the Roman armies had destroyed the Jerusalem temple, a period when both Jews and early Christians were struggling to make sense of the world without what they had considered its sacred axis. Rabbinic Judaism eventually refigured “the temple” in the home, and early Christians refigured “the temple” as the body of Jesus, which is also the body of the church.
6) In Exodus, too, the presence of “living water” is a sign of God’s abiding presence with us. In the story of Moses striking the rock, the wandering, anxious Israelites ask a fundamental question, the doubt lurking beneath all other doubts: “Is the LORD among us or not?” (Ex 17:7). The presence of a new spring gives them the courage and consolation they require; and likewise, the “living water” Jesus provides becomes a “spring of water” within us, an ongoing sign that Jesus is Emmanuel, “God with us” (John 4:14).
Takeaways:
1) For John, Jesus’ arrival signals the dawn of a new era, a new intimacy with God, a new conception of “the temple” not as a building but as a person “in spirit and truth,” Jesus himself, God’s Word made flesh. The old sacrificial system must end; there's no need for animals and money changers, and no need for competing sacred sites, either. In fact, these aspects of the old system are impediments to the dawning new day.
2) And “the old system,” as it turns out, is made of more than brick and mortar and money and sacrifice. It’s also made of social barriers between men and women, Jews and Samaritans, friends and enemies, insiders and outsiders, “us” and “them.” But Jesus heralds a new era of reconciliation: Take down the barriers! Bridge the divides! For the hour is coming — and is now here! (John 4:23).
3) What’s driving Jesus in all of this? It’s the ancient passion of the Jewish prophets, a sacred zeal that moves against and beyond the sacrificial system of dead animals and toward an intimate simplicity of prayer, spirit, and truth, unbound by any particular building, mountain, or economic arrangement.
4) And it’s an ancient passion, too, for the coming of God’s Jubilee, a new exodus from all bondage, a new freedom to abide in God, as God abides in us, in a world drenched with divine presence and glory. These ideas are shot through the prophets: think of Jeremiah’s “temple sermon” (Jer 7), or indeed his prophesied “new covenant” in which God’s law is written on our hearts (Jer 31:33). Think of the devastating critique of sacrifice in Isaiah, Hosea, and Amos (Isa 1:11; Hosea 6:6; Amos 5:22), or the famous verse in Micah, contrasting animal sacrifices with justice, kindness, and humility (Micah 6:6-8). In his own way, Jesus picks up this prophetic mantle. At its heart, his mission is about dismantling the barriers that keep us apart from God and neighbor — and in that sense, his mission is finally about reconciliation, mutual indwelling (“Abide in me, as I abide in you” (John 15:4)), and living a just, kind, and humble human life.