John Chapter 4:1-26
The Meeting with the Samaritan Woman

Introduction

Privilege and Status
As the song says, Everybody Wants to Rule the World. We human beings like to set rules and regulations, to draw up lines of authority that describe our social status. A good example to see this working in microcosm would be the private golf club. It is all about social privilege and exclusion and about petty rules that distinguish who is a winner and who is 'unworthy'.
And churches, by and large, are often little different:
For example, Catholics will not allow other denominations to partake of the Lord’s Supper because they’re not the right sort of people! And many churches will not marry you in church if you’re a divorcee, no matter what the circumstances.

Divisions
Every rule we create and barrier we put up creates divisions and exclusions, and if you end up on the wrong side of the divide you feel belittled, ashamed, upset and dirty. You then create your own justification in whatever circumstance you find yourself to reclaim some self pride. Welcome to the world of human values.

In the story of Samaritan woman we see an example of human social exclusion at work in the world. Looking at verse 9 of chapter 4 John tells us that the Jews of Jesus' day did not associate with Samaritans. Literally they did not eat out of the same cups and bowls, as an alternative version of the text puts it.

The kingdom of Israel had been divided after the death of Solomon in 722 BC (1 Kings 12:1-24). The Assyrians resettled the Northern area with foreigners ( 2 Kings 17:24 -41) and as a consequence, the people there had lost both racial and religious purity in contrast to the Judeans in the South. A religious divide was created that deepened when the Samaritans, as they came to be called, built their own temple and place of worship at Mount Gerizim around 400 BC because they were excluded from the Jerusalem Temple.

In addition to the racial divide, our present story also highlights other human barriers and divides by focusing on a woman who is blighted by the additional social exclusions caused by her gender and her lifestyle.

Bruce Milne says this,

"On the issue of gender prejudice, male Jewish attitudes at the time are reflected in the following rabbinic citations: 'One should not talk with a woman on the street, not even with his own wife, and certainly not with somebody else's wife, because of the gossip of men,' and ' it is forbidden to give a woman any greeting....
"Serial marriage was not altogether frowned upon, though the rabbis generally taught that three marriages with the maximum allowable. The deeper point is that Jesus brought to her awareness the relational desert in which she was living."

Theme Tunes!
At the St. Andrew's Summer School of 2000 in Sussex, UK, the speaker David Jackman taught the delegates to look for what he called the 'theme tunes' of the text when studying Scripture. I have found this to be an immensely useful piece of advice. As we look over John chapters 2, 3 and 4, we find John uses a recurring image or ‘theme tune’ to help us understand what we’re reading. The stories that here counts are the wedding at Cana, the meeting with Nicodemus, the dispute over public baptisms, and then the meeting with the Samaritan woman. A recurrent image or leitmotiv is that of H₂0. Water, Washing, Baptism. Water is used as a sign of spiritual blessing. So, a major issue in this early part of John’s gospel is spiritual cleanliness before God. Or, in a nutshell, what makes me right with God?

Let’s look at the construction of John’s writing:
We've mentioned that Jesus meets two people in these chapters and he has dialogues with them. In the middle of these encounters we read about the issue of baptism, the way into relationship with God. David Jackman describes the main point of these dialogues like this, “God defines the terms of religious reality, not man… It is what God thinks that matters, what God thinks that is binding.”

The Plan
We are going to think a little about being clean before God, and then about how we respond in worship to God once we have become spiritually clean before him. Pervading all this John is teaching us about God’s values and how they cut across human social and religious values

SECTION 1: WHAT MAKES ME CLEAN?

Contrast
Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman, the two who have personal conversations with Jesus in these early chapters, are with very different people.

• Nicodemus, Jewish male, highly literate Teacher, a Pharisee, strict adherent to the law, a member of the Sanhedrin, high public repute and authority.
• The woman: Samaritan female, illiterate (women were not educated), living in contradiction to the law, publicly despised, with no authority.

Nicodemus enjoys the life of privilege but the Samaritan lives a life of rejection. By placing these two meetings so close together John is saying that the ministry of Jesus and the message of the gospel is for every one, the socially rejected and privileged alike. We see that Jesus sets the agenda, not mankind. In Christ's kingdom, there is a different set of values to that of the world. Jesus crashes through all the man made social barriers to go through Samaria and talk to this woman to demonstrate his set of values. He shocks her by asking for a drink, using water as a sign and a means of talking about spiritual blessing.

What and Who
Let’s unpack verse 10 where Jesus says, "If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water."  Jesus implies the woman is ignorant of two pieces of information, firstly what God's gift is and secondly who he, Jesus is. Graciously, Jesus relieves her of her ignorance in this statement too!

The gift is what God wants people to have and it is simply this - Eternal life (see verse 13-14 for explanation). This raises the question, "how do I get this gift?" and Jesus says he is the one who gives it. This begs a further question, "who is Jesus?" By what authority can he make such a claim?

Of course Jesus expects an exchange as he serves her with eternal life. She is to serve him with just one cup of water. It seems a hugely simple task to us but it is not. To do as he asks is to overcome all kinds of social inhibitions, and to trust him.

Poor Nicodemus! He had spent his whole life in service to the Lord, not just providing a single cup of water. From a human perspective, he should earn a place in eternity for all he has done and this woman should be rejected  – indeed people would think that because of her life she should earn God’s condemnation. But God puts different values on things. God includes and excludes on quite a different basis to human beings. Jesus says in effect, “Before God your assessments of what makes spiritual righteousness are utterly wrong – they have more to do with human thinking than Godly thinking.”

The Heart of the Matter
John 3:23-36 put these two contrasting dialogue passages in perspective and verse 36 is the key:

“Whoever believes in the son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the son will not see life for God’s wrath remains on him.”

Religious cleanness is on the basis of faith, it is centred on Jesus and it brings eternal life. There are no other factors to consider, neither social nor religious, neither racial nor sexual.

SECTION 2: HOW DO I RESPOND? THE MATTER OF WORSHIP

The Samaritan woman realises that Jesus is special, even if she doesn’t yet know exactly who he is. She will soon know the truth about Jesus. She is intrigued and listening so she now makes the request for this miraculous water.

The question that Jesus addresses now, just ahead of dropping his bombshell, is how a person should respond to this generous God who is prepared to accept the social outcast just the same as the devout religious person. Once in relationship with God through Jesus, there is the matter of how one stays in that relationship. The passage takes as read that the relationship will be one of worship, but just what kind of worship is acceptable to God?

Keeping the conversation very firmly on the matter of relationships, Jesus probes the woman about her marital relationships in verses 16-18 and finds that she is prepared to be honest. His revelation that he - a stranger - knows about her personal life lets her come nearer the mark as to his identity, but she is uncomfortable with where this conversation is leading and so she covers her discomfort with a theological query!

In Spirit and Truth

The woman is still set in the ways of worldly religious thinking and seeing him as a man of God she wants to know how a Jew is prepared to declare worship in a samaritan area as acceptable It's as though he is giving the green light to the samaritan practice of worshipping somewhere other than the Temple. It's all quite strange and unexpected to her. To confound her even more, Jesus says that geography is utterly immaterial and that what really matters is that people should worship God in spirit and in truth rather than in a particular building. God decides what acceptable worship is, not people and with the arrival of Jesus God will reveal a new way.

What are we to understand by spirit and truth? It is the essence of the Christian life. God tells us the truth about Christ, then gives us the Spirit to believe in him and to serve him. Romans 12:1-2 is helpful.

Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual  act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.

Worship is about a person's very life - a body and transformed mind put at God’s disposal. The true believer is no longer bound by time or place for worship (verse 21). It is quite irrelevant whether you are sitting in synagogue, in the back seat of a bus, up a mountain, in an aeroplane or at a football game. The Christian is able to worship God wherever he or she is.

The reason why a special church building is no longer relevant is because of the Holy Spirit. He resides within the believer so that wherever we are there he is also, and at all times and in all places there is access to God. There is no need for a Jerusalem Temple. The curtain to the Holy of Holies has been torn.

Today
We are the body of Christ, and therefore the modern equivalent of the Old Testament Temple (and the Tabernacle before that) - the place where God dwelt amongst his people, and so there are implications for our Church services.

A Church building is just a building. The worship that we offer at a Sunday service is no more significant than anything else we do at any other time. We must be careful not to think in terms of worship being a wholly corporate act, that in the main consists of communal singing and prayer, and the act of communion. It is too easy for us to fall into the trap of placing Pharisaic-type traditions in front of true worship.

“Acceptance of Christ as the truth – this opens the door to spiritual reality," says David Jackman, “Knowledge of Christ moves us from religion to reality, from external to heart experience, from ignorance to truth.”

Knowledge
Note that it is an objective knowledge and not a subjective feeling. How many church services major on the second and relegate the first? A church eldership in my town published what they called a communiqué in 2000. In it they said their fellowship should be committed to giving everyone “the opportunity to have an experience of Christ.” What it should have said was, “…come to a knowledge of Christ.” That is the Biblical line - worship is a matter of truth of knowledge revealed by the Spirit. Christianity is not mysticism, but faith based on evidence that God intervened in history to reveal the objective truth about himself.

Christ Unmasked
Jesus completes the lesson for the Samaritan woman in verse 26. “I who speak to you am he.” That last bit ('am he') is literally "I am" and echoes God's revelation of himself in Exodus 3 as the redeeming God, Yahweh.

Now there is clarity and the woman, having found the living water of knowing Christ, leaves her jar of physical water to witness the truth about the promised Messiah to her community. In doing so she draws water not just for herself, not just for Jesus, but for many people.

A quotation from Malcolm Muggeridge:

"I may, I suppose, regard myself, or pass for being, a relatively successful man. People occasionally stare at me in the streets - that's fame. I can fairly easily earn enough to qualify for admission to the higher slopes of the Inland Revenue - that's success. Furnished with money and a little fame even the elderly, if they cared to, make partake of trendy diversions - that's pleasure. It might happen once in a while that something I said or wrote was sufficiently heeded for me to persuade myself that it represented a serious impact on our time - that's fulfillment. Yet I say to you, and I beg you to believe me, multiply these tiny triumphs by a million, put them all together, and they are nothing - less than nothing, a positive impediment - measured against one draught of the living water Christ offers to the spiritually thirsty, irrespective of who or what they are." (from Living with Style)

The Jewish Samaritan divide

The Samaritans only accepted the Pentateuch as Scripture, so they did not recognise David’s building of the Temple in Jerusalem. Their expectation of a Messiah came from Deuteronomy 18:15-18. He would "be the second Moses, revealing the truth, restoring true belief and renewing true worship." Imagine the woman's shock when Jesus says she is speaking with the Promised One in person. "I that am talking to you. I AM"

Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal
The place where Jesus meets the Samaritan woman is situated between Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal. At the end of his leadership Joshua assembled all the tribes of Israel at this place and challenged them to serve God and God alone after he was gone. In Deuteronomy 11 verse 26 onwards, God says,

'See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse - the blessing if you obey the commands of the Lord your God that I am giving you today; the curse if you disobey the commands of the Lord your God and turn from the way that I command you today by following other gods, which you have not known. When the Lord your God has brought you into the land you are entering to possess, you are to proclaim on Mount Gerizim the blessings, and on Mt Ebal the curses.'

You can find a list of the curses in Deuteronomy chapter 27. When Israel crossed Jordan and possessed the land, Joshua took them to this same location between Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal where Jesus meets the Samaritan woman, having half Israel stand on Mount Ebal and half on Mount Gerizim, and he read out the law, both the curses and the blessings. At the end of his leadership too, Joshua assembled all the tribes of Israel at this same place and challenged them to serve God and God alone after he was gone.

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