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This is a fairly well known, frequently studied and widely quoted bit of the Bible, which is why I came to it in the first place. I can’t pretend to be able to present some sort of coherent commentary on it, and if I tried to do that it probably wouldn’t be worth reading. Anyway, here’s some stuff that wondered into my brain when reading this …
This piece of Scripture is the meeting of Jesus with the Samaritan woman at the well, and is important for three essential things that we should know about Jesus. Firstly, that He associates himself with an extension of the salvation previously thought exclusive to the Jews, offering it to Gentiles, social outcasts and the oppressed such as the Samaritan woman who has engaged in adultery. Secondly, he refers to himself as the Messiah, the supplier of “water of life” that is inexhaustible, one who is “greater than Jacob”, in the woman’s words. Lastly, this is a key point in Scripture for an understanding of the Holy Spirit and its power in the daily life of a follower of Jesus.
Right, having summarised the obvious stuff, I’m just
going to focus on some points and images contained in this text
that grabbed me. Jesus is at the mountain that is the centre of
the Samaritan religion (derived from Judaism), their equivalent
of Mount Sion in Jerusalem — absolutely key and focal to
Samaritan tradition, to the perceived image of God and the
people’s spiritual and ‘national’ identity.
Yet Jesus, brought up in a culture with this key understanding
of a place as holy to God, talking to a person of highly
similar background, talks of the impermanence and
inessentiality of such holy places: The time is coming
when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you
actually worship the Father.
(verse 21)
The sanctuaries will not be used, the ceremonies that give Samaritan and Jewish culture life will give God worship — this is a stark and probably shocking image. To give a far more contemporary parallel for this sort of thing, I’ve got an Ordnance Survey map at home, of York and the surrounding area. Well, hurrah. What an astonishing fact. But every time you look at this map you can see the lines of what used to be railways. Tonnes of the things — and they all centred on York, coming from every direction. Yet today, there’s just three basic routes out of York. The extent of easy local travel that was once possible has been wiped out, and York is certainly no more a key location for travel around the country and the region — bypassed, inessential.
Jerusalem, Jesus says here, was once important as a source
of spiritual life and identity was once important, and still is
important historically, but it has been bypassed: God is
Spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and
truth.
(verse 24)
As Christians we have no special holy place, no essential ceremonies to worship him in but those we receive from God, from Jesus, in the Spirit. In our life with God (our ‘spiritual journey’, if you prefer), it’s way too easy to get hung up on special places, words or memories which made us feel ‘close to God’. I’m dreadful for it, and will probably continue to be in the future. But Jesus doesn’t want us to keep looking around these interesting past ‘holy’ places we’ve created, at least not if all we want from them is memory. We’ve got to stop taking detours and get on the main line. How to do that is simply to come to God, to Jesus, and ask to receive this “water of life” he can give. We may find ourselves directed to these past sites again, but in new and arresting ways.
Jesus did not discard Jerusalem — he went there and set in place the key moment of our faith. But we can’t travel unless we ask the Man in charge. And that’s the difficult bit …
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Last modified: 25th November 2005