Post by M.R. Hagerty on Mar 3, 2023 23:57:05 GMT -7
John 4:1-16
1 Therefore when the Lord knew that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John 2 (although Jesus Himself was not baptizing, but His disciples were), 3 He left Judea and went away again into Galilee. 4 And He had to pass through Samaria. 5 So He came to a city of Samaria called Sychar, near the parcel of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph; 6 and Jacob's well was there. So Jesus, being wearied from His journey, was sitting thus by the well. It was about the sixth hour.
There came a woman of Samaria to draw water. Jesus said to her, "Give Me a drink." 8 For His disciples had gone away into the city to buy food. 9 Therefore the Samaritan woman said to Him, "How is it that You, being a Jew, ask me for a drink since I am a Samaritan woman?" (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.) 10 Jesus answered and said to her, "If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, `Give Me a drink,' you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water." 11 She said to Him, "Sir, You have nothing to draw with and the well is deep; where then do You get that living water? 12 "You are not greater than our father Jacob, are You, who gave us the well, and drank of it himself and his sons and his cattle?"
13 Jesus answered and said to her, "Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again; 14 but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life." 15 The woman said to Him, "Sir, give me this water, so I will not be thirsty nor come all the way here to draw." 16 He said to her, "Go, call your husband and come here."
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Commentary
John 4:1-7
1 Therefore when the Lord knew that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was . . baptizing more disciples than John . . . 3 He left Judea and went away again into Galilee.
We must never conclude that Jesus was at anytime afraid of the Pharisees themselves, or what they might do to Him. This was purely a matter of timing. Jesus did not wish to provoke them to acting earlier than the appointed time. He therefore left for another journey into Galilee.
We also learn that Jesus was baptizing with His disciples. But John feels strong about clarifying that Jesus Himself did not perform baptisms, but delegated His disciples to baptize. This is not a proof text that Jesus had a low opinion of baptism or that it was optional, as some churches teach. (Their argument would be that if baptism was essential to salvation, Jesus would never cast any aspersions in His own behavior about baptizing.)
But the reason Jesus did not personally baptize is on another plane. He did not want to create a division among his followers on the basis of who baptized whom. We can understand that persons baptized by Jesus might turn this into an advantage, ”But I was baptized by Jesus” and this could easily be avoided by delegating.
Whether one teaches that baptism is essential for salvation or an act of obedience to the Lord’s command separate from what is needed to be saved, no conservative NT church can neglect it. The end result of any and all arguments is that all must be baptized if they wish to be obedient to the Lord.
4 And He had to pass through Samaria. 5 So He came to a city of Samaria called Sychar, near the parcel of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph; and Jacob's well was there.
Samaria was one of the northern cities that had come to be repopulated since the carrying away of the northern tribes into Assyria in the 8th century B.C. Ironically, it had again for the second time become a city in opposition to the primacy of Jerusalem and its Temple.
In the period between the testaments, a faction developed that rejected Jerusalem and traditional Judaism and separated themselves in Samaria. The result was a distinct rift between Jew and Samaritan that remained in Jesus’ day.
Interestingly, the Jewish-Samaritan issue was very similar to the Christian-Mormon issue today. Mormons separated themselves from historic, traditional Christianity, seeing it as an abomination. They have separate and unique Scriptures, a separate worship and priesthood. In many ways they exemplify better the tenets of Christianity than many Christians do. But ironically, they had for a time a strange view of marriage and continue in a different view of the deity of Christ that contradicted traditional views.
Similarly, the Samaritans despised traditional Judaism, held apart unique sections of OT Scripture, set up a separate temple and priesthood, were exemplified by Jesus as having a better sense of charity (the Good Samaritan), yet also, had a strange view of marriage whereby they inter-married among themselves to the degree that they suffer in present times from idiocy and other side-effects.
Samaria proper was W of the road on the way that led to the Sea of Galilee. The key cities were Shechem and the city of Samaria. Sychar was a smaller town just E of Shechem.
Jacob had arranged land rights for his twelve sons. In the conquest of the land under Joshua, Joseph was given the area that became Samaria, settled at various times between the half tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh. Jacob had dug wells at Shechem and Sychar. (If one of the two sites with a well is legitimate as Sychar, we may in fact be able to look at the very well mentioned in this story.) The well at Sychar was exceptionally deep due to its water table sitting on a basalt formation some 50 meters below the surface.
6 . . So Jesus, being wearied . . . was sitting thus by the well. . . about the sixth hour. There came a woman of Samaria to draw water. 7 . . Jesus said to her, "Give Me a drink."
We have here in the hands of Jesus Himself a tremendously valuable lesson with respect to witnessing. It involves a frequently dreaded situation we all face – our eventual confrontation with certain individuals who are ready to foment a full course of justifications as to why their lives don’t have to change; and who need little provocation to add, "Don’t judge me or you’ll get both barrels!" We are easily perplexed because we are caught between the unction that such persons need Christ, but we find ourselves at a complete loss as to how to begin without creating a train wreck.
This situation is precisely the one Jesus faces here with the woman at the well. We need to observe carefully how He deals with it, to the effect that her life is in fact successfully and permanently changed. We need to first observe who this woman is and the circumstances of her life. For starters, she has three strikes against her at the very outset. She is a Samaritan. She is a woman; and she is of low reputation in that she practices serial monogamy outside the legitimacy of marriage.
Ordinarily, the stigma of these factors would cow most people into the kind of person who spoke seldom in public and stayed at home as much as possible to avoid social interaction. But here, we find a woman who is outspoken, opinionated and confrontational, even after she learns that Jesus is a man of considerable wisdom and savvy. This suggests that she has come to justify within herself her chosen way of life, her moral attitudes and a view that she is as good as anybody else.
Some expositors have gone a bit farther to infer that she may be approaching Jesus as a new chapter in her string of “arrangements”, since this kind of behavior is characteristic of a flirtatious and forward manner. The lesson here from Jesus is that the very worst thing a Christian can do in these circumstances is to begin with a judgmental approach or even the mere hint that your only reason for talking to them is to bring them out of their sinful life.
Observe Jesus. He avoids this tack until the moment is right and the way has been prepared. It’s not that He is afraid. He simply knows what is expedient and what isn’t. Instead, He begins with a discussion about what she is there to do. He takes advantage of the symbol of water to open a discussion about the things that satisfy. He wants her to see the difference between earthly satisfactions (hence, why her life has come to be what it is) and the satisfaction of things from above. Take off the veneers, the blustering, the masks, and all men everywhere have a place in the heart where they yearn for this kind of satisfaction.
Notice that Jesus does not begin weakly, but in a manner that is daring (to get her attention) while not being judgmental - “Give me a drink.” The text explains that this is because His disciples had gone away to buy food, but we see that Jesus had more serious intentions.
John 4:9-12
9 "How is it that You, being a Jew, ask me for a drink since I am a Samaritan” (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.)
The tack worked in so far as it caught her attention immediately. She is surprised first that a Jew would talk to her, but also that He has had the boldness to order her to bring up a drink. It has served to take the focus off the obvious and in fact she is able to bring up herself the negative factors that separate her from the Jews - a sign of a complete lack of intimidation from Jesus. She feels free enough to mention the very things that would ordinarily provoke denigrating words.
10 . . . Jesus answered . . "If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, `Give Me a drink,' you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water."
But Jesus side steps her question and moves her focus to the extraordinary circumstances in which she finds herself at this very moment. He explains that there is a “gift” in play - one that if appreciated would alleviate her concerns about the strangeness of the circumstances. He is in essence answering her by announcing that she is being visited by someone extraordinary.
”the gift of God”
The gift is not something known to her or understood as obvious between the two of them. It is Jesus Himself as Messiah. This is surely a gift in that she has the rare opportunity of speaking to the Savior of God’s people and the whole world. If this were known to her, she would instead be asking for the kind of water that eternally satisfies. But this is all unfortunately lost on her at first.
11 "Sir, You have nothing to draw with and the well is deep; where then do You get that living water?
12 "You are not greater than our father Jacob, are You, who gave us the well, and drank of it himself and his sons and his cattle?"
She chooses to skip over further inquiry about who Jesus is and is much more intrigued with the mention of living water. But she misunderstands this as a means of relieving her daily chore. However, she quickly discerns that He can’t be referring to the well and its drudgery because He lacks any means, which is all the more poignant given its depth. But more than this, the water in this well is used by everyone and, as such, it has yet to be perceived as “living water.”
She entertains the notion that if He is talking in such terms, He might be great enough to turn this common water into something miraculous. She poses this in a sort of incredulous question – ”You’re not greater than our father Jacob who gave us this well are you?” It sounds like an expression of incredulity, but in essence it is one that contains expectation and hope that He might be able to make good on His claim.
John 4:13
13 "Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again; 14 but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; . . . a well of water springing up to eternal life."
As we’ve seen before, Jesus does not answer her question in her own terms but uses the question to make further, deeper disclosure about the subject He is really addressing. First, He clarifies that He does not mean the water in the well. ”Everyone who drinks this water will thirst again.”
The analogy is that everyone who seeks to satisfy some human, purely horizontal need will thirst for it again. This is the way of human existence. We think that if we can just have such-and-such we will never ask for another thing again, our lives will be so full of the happiness of having it that we can live devoid to all future wants and desires. But it never happens. We get that certain thing and we merely move to a new plateau of wants and desires, new horizons stretch out before us, and our list of wants remains just as before. Such is the way of earthly desires. While we can’t live without some aspect of earthly needs and wants, there is a water – a supply for living – that does satisfy completely and finally. And it is not meagerly dispensed, but “springs up to eternal life.”
Is Jesus teaching that the water of eternal life will, if properly sought, supplant all earthly thirsts? Experience tells us no. We will still need a better car, a better home, a better job. Instead, it is a lesson about the difference. We are to understand the weakness and entrapment of earthly satisfactions and add to our life the satisfaction of that which is from above. The former are necessary evils, the latter is a necessary good.
A minister once came to a Christian couple who were experiencing oppression and even worrisome experiences in their house. He noticed on the wall in the entryway an arrangement of pictures representing prominent figures in world religions, with Jesus arranged as merely one of many. There were baghwans, Hindu personages, representations of Mohammed, etc.
He suggested that this may be the source of their problem. It was for him a sign that the couple was still looking for that which would satisfy their spiritual quest for the truth. But it must be made clear that Jesus is not merely one of many legitimate paths. When someone finds Jesus, the search comes to an end. Neither would it do to simply arrange Jesus above all the others.
The only right arrangement was to take the others completely away and leave Jesus alone on the wall. For them the search needed to come to an end. Searching for truth in other options was never going to satisfy. Making Jesus the One and True Lord would.
John 4:15-16
15 "Sir, give me this water, so I will not be thirsty nor come all the way here to draw." 16 . . "Go, call your husband and come here."
She has yet to gain His meaning - understandable from the few words He has actually spoken. But she realizes that He is serious about giving her something in line with His words, so she asks, ”Give me this water.”
Jesus then speaks at a completely oblique angle to the discussion. ”Go, call your husband.” This is meant to bring the example of the two waters to bear on the subject of her way of life and the kind of satisfaction it provides. Her life was one of using men, not at its lowest modality as a prostitute, but on a rung slightly higher, with some strongly rationalized sense of respectability. She had lived with men without marrying them, but had purposed to live as man and wife, monogamously. But the end of all such relationships is boredom and the inevitable search for the next live-in opportunity. She would never be able to get the concept of living water until she came to see the waste this kind of life begets. As for living water, she needed to be able to reach for it. And she would never do that by continuing to legitimize her present state.
Now in Jewish social life, this arrangement was no more acceptable than prostitution. She was probably just as ostracized socially. Judaism at the time of Jesus did not rigorously exercise the Mosaic Law about fornication. Her life would not be classed as adulterous because her mates were not living with her while otherwise married, and she herself was not otherwise legitimately married. In these times, even some cases of outright adultery were overlooked (the woman about to be stoned had lived for some time in her practice without the Law being invoked.)
But the key to her understanding the truth about the living water of which Jesus speaks is wrapped up in the truth about her lifestyle. This must be settled first. In other words, she cannot acquire the living water and then begin thinking about changing her present life later. Spiritual life comes only when we abandon all legitimacy and trust in our former life. We must first agree and confess that our former way of life is wrong. We will see next how she responds . .