John 4:1–30
Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John (although Jesus himself did not baptize, but only his disciples), he left Judea and departed again for Galilee.
And he had to pass through Samaria. So he came to a town of Samaria called Sychar, near the field that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 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.
A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, ‘Give me a drink.’ (For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.)
The Samaritan woman said to him, ‘How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?’ (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.)
Jesus answered her, ‘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.’
The woman said to him, ‘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.’
Jesus said to her, ‘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.’
The woman said to him, ‘Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.’
Jesus said to her, ‘Go, call your husband, and come here.’
The woman answered him, ‘I have no husband.’
Jesus said to her, ‘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.’
The woman said to him, ‘Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshipped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.’
Jesus said to her, ‘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.’
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 said to her, ‘I who speak to you am he.’
Just then his disciples came back. They marvelled that he was talking with a woman, but no one said, ‘What do you seek?’ or, ‘Why are you talking with her?’
So the woman left her water jar and went away into town and said to the people, ‘Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?’ They went out of the town and were coming to him.
Ungodly religious hatred
There is no hatred so fiendish as religious hatred, nor any scandal so grievous as when people who profess to worship the same God and believe the same Bible live in open hostility to each other on the grounds of their religion. Yet that is how it was with Jews and Samaritans in the time of our Lord. The Jews worshipped Yahweh; the Samaritans professed to do the same. The Samaritans accepted the five books of Moses as the inspired word of God; so did the Jews. And yet for hundreds of years, except for a few brief periods when animosity died down a little, they lived in implacable hatred towards each other.
As is usual in cases like this, the trouble was rooted in the religious and political history of past centuries. According to 2 Kings 17:22–41, when the Assyrians deported the ten tribes of Israel, they filled Samaria with settlers from Babylon and the surrounding cities. These people had then been taught by an Israelite priest to worship Yahweh, but the worship of Yahweh as they practised it was horribly mixed up with the worship of the gods of their own native pagan religions: ‘They feared the Lord and also served their own gods’, as the historian puts it (see v. 41).
After the return of the exiles from Babylon, the Samaritans opposed the building of the temple and the wall of Jerusalem (Ezra 4:7–16), and eventually, in straight disobedience to the Scriptures, built themselves a temple on Mount Gerizim. It is understandable that the Jews did not like them. But the Jews, if technically correct, were no less bigoted; and so bitter did the rivalry between the two shrines become that around 129 BC the Jewish King John Hyrcanus captured the city of Shechem and destroyed the Samaritan temple. That merely stoked the fires of bigotry still hotter.
Round about the years AD 6–9 we hear of another outrage, this time perpetrated by the Samaritans against the Jews, though in retaliation for what we are not told. During the night they scattered human bones in the temple porches and all over the sanctuary. (See Josephus, Antiquities 18.29.) For people who believed that dead bones carry ceremonial defilement, it was an act of appalling desecration. Later still we learn that in[p 56] AD 52 some Jewish pilgrims from Galilee who were going up to Jerusalem to celebrate a religious festival were attacked by Samaritans on the Samaritan border and one or more of them were killed. The Jews then retaliated by a revenge attack on some Samaritan villages.2
In religious belief and observance, the Samaritans differed from the Jews (in addition to their veneration of the holy place on Mount Gerizim) in not accepting any of the Old Testament beyond the Pentateuch. They were scrupulous in their observance of the Pentateuch, other than in the matter of the ceremonies connected with the Jewish temple, and they attached great importance to their claim that they were descended from the Jewish patriarchs, which the Jews denied. In all things to do with religious observance the Jews counted the Samaritans as Gentiles, and regarded them as impure from the very cradle onwards, and as causing impurity. That meant, among other things, that a Jew would not use the same utensils as Samaritans for cooking and eating, and generally speaking would have as few dealings as possible with them.
Moreover, even when things looked quiet, it took very little to arouse the rancour against Samaritans that lay beneath the Jewish skin. On one occasion, when our Lord and his disciples were refused lodging in a Samaritan village because they were on their way to Jerusalem, two apostles responded with the absurdly exaggerated suggestion that they should call down fire from heaven on the village (Luke 9:51–56). Christ rebuked his disciples for their fanaticism and, quietly accepting the peevish slight of the Samaritans, went on to another village to find lodging.
The name ‘Samaritan’ was one of the most offensive and insulting epithets a Jew could hurl against another Jew. When Christ once said something that pricked, they lashed back angrily at him: ‘Are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?’ (John 8:48).
It is all a very sorry story, and not made any happier by the fact that the same bigoted and fanatical hatred has since shown itself a thousand times and more in Christendom. From it all there is one lesson that stands out clearly. Even if it uses the name of God or Christ, and busies itself with Jewish or Christian sacraments and[p 57] symbols, religion is no more a sign that its devotees are regenerate than politics or commerce are signs that those who engage in those activities are regenerate. Some politics are conducted honourably enough and stem from the highest of motives; some politics are filthy. But the fact that a person engages in politics, even of the better sort, is no sign that he or she is necessarily regenerate. And the same applies to religion. All people are not by nature saints, but all people are by nature religious. The wildest and most murderous head-hunter is generally religious, and devoutly seeks the aid of his gods before going to poison his enemy or murder the neighbouring tribesmen in their beds. His religious devotion is no sign that the man is regenerate. Constantine the Great, before he confessed conversion to Christianity, slaughtered his enemies in the name of his pagan gods. His so-called conversion meant that he went on slaughtering his enemies, only now in the name of Christ. There was remarkably little evidence of regeneration in that either, but a great deal of misunderstanding, and consequently of misrepresentation, of what true Christianity is. And the saddest thing of all is that for many people this misrepresentation is the only kind of Christianity they know. When life goes well with them, they are glad to do without it; when life goes ill, it has nothing to offer them anyway. And they reject the whole thing out of hand. How difficult it is to get them even to consider that there might be something better. But, difficult as it is, it can be done. Let us watch how the Master himself did it.
Christ chose Samaria
When Christ left Judaea for Galilee he chose to travel via Samaria. The text says he had to (4:4); but the necessity was not geographical, for he could have crossed the Jordan down south, travelled up the east side of the river and crossed back again north of Samaria. The necessity must have lain elsewhere. It lay in fact in his love for the Samaritans. They were his creatures as much as the Jews. Some of them had been hurt by life; all of them needed salvation. Their religious zeal and tenacious clinging to tradition could not bring them peace with God nor satisfaction in their worship of him. All of them needed to know of the gift of God, to discover what it means to worship the Father in spirit and in truth. The question[p 58] was, how could Christ reach them and get to their hearts? It was useless to start by standing in their public square and preaching; a Jewish preacher would have been given very short shrift in Samaria. And so, with the ingenuity and tact of love, he found another way.
The woman who came to the well
It was high noon when he arrived in Sychar, and being tired after his journey he sat down by the well. It was scorchingly hot, and there were very few people about. The disciples had gone off to get food, and while a few shepherds might at this hour of the day come and water their flocks (see Gen 29:7), the women of the village would not be coming to draw water until the worst heat of the day was over.
Presently there came footsteps. He had been waiting to hear them, and knew why they came at this unusual hour. This woman’s life had been sad and dissatisfying. She had had five husbands, and the man she now had was not her husband. We are not told why there had been so many husbands. Death may have taken some. Divorce in those days was all too easy for the man, and it may have removed others. But her craving for companionship and her longing for satisfaction were overwhelming. She had to have someone, even if he was not her husband. Perhaps this man was already married to someone else and they were really living in adultery. Or perhaps, while she craved for companionship, she was afraid this time to let her roots go down too deeply, and she shrank from the bond of marriage that had so often and so rudely been broken.
Yet living with a man who was not her husband was an unsatisfactory affair; it gave her no emotional security. All it did was to cut off all her friends. Now, whenever she came down the street, somehow everyone managed to be looking the other way until she had passed by; then she could feel their eyes following her. If she came to the well when the other women were there, they would move away without speaking and stand by in little groups until she had gone. She sensed what they were whispering under their breath. She had to come to the well, of course: thirst could not be denied its satisfaction, and water is one of life’s necessities. But she preferred to keep away from people as much as she could, and that is why she was coming at this deserted hour.[p 59]
She was taken aback a little when she saw a man sitting by the well; but he was not one of the local men. As far as she could see he was a complete stranger to those parts, and a Jew. He wouldn’t know who she was or anything about her, so she reached the well and began drawing water.
But he knew. There was nothing he did not know about her. He knew her longings and cravings; he knew the bitter disappointments and disillusionment; he knew how life had mocked her. And what is more, he knew that, in spite of all her Samaritan tradition, religion had proved hollow and empty, unhelpful and utterly unsatisfying. But given her present ideas on what religion was all about it would be difficult to see how religion could possibly have healed her wounds or satisfied her heart. He must find a way of bypassing her religion and getting to her heart. If he could satisfy her at that level, the transformation in her life would be so evident that the whole Samaritan community would become aware of it, and perhaps many of them would seek the same satisfaction for themselves. How then could he get to her heart?
Opening the conversation
It was now a little past noon, and the stones round the well where he was sitting were baking hot like an oven. He was very thirsty, and the thirst was no accident. He had come a long way to meet this woman, a long way indeed when we remember who he was. The distance from being the Word who was in the beginning with God to being the Word made flesh who could feel thirsty after a morning’s walk, was a distance immeasurable. But the distance had been covered, and now this was to be the meeting place between this deeply dissatisfied woman and God.
Because they both were human, she and Jesus shared a common, basic, physical thirst.
He waited for her to fill her pitcher. ‘I wonder if you would give me a drink’, he said.
The woman looked up and gasped with amazement. ‘But you’re a Jew. What are you doing asking for a drink from me when I’m a Samaritan?’
No Jew would normally have asked her for a drink, however thirsty he was. It would have been driven deep into his mind by his[p 60] rabbinical teachers that Samaritan women were in a permanent state of defilement, and that any food or drink they touched was defiled and defiling. It was nonsense of course, for the Samaritan women were just as particular about keeping the Mosaic laws of hygiene as the Jewish women were. This cruel and wicked nonsense had burned deeply into the hearts of Samaritan women a sense of injustice at being socially rejected as if they were personally filthy. But that was religion, and she had come to take it for granted.
Was this Jew really asking her for a drink of water? It was too astounding to take in, and in her astonishment she apparently gave him none. He did not mind, for with his request he had got past the wall that for centuries had divided Jew from Samaritan. Her very astonishment showed it. And dimly, perhaps without her consciously being aware of it, the sense that she was respected as a human being, and that she was needed, had begun to register in her heart. In expressing surprise that he should ask water from her, she had made it so easy and natural for him to reply without giving offence that he was sorry that she had not asked water from him. ‘If you knew the gift of God,’ he answered, ‘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).
The gift of God
Of course she did not know the gift of God, and he did not expect her to. She did not even know who he was, let alone what this gift of God was that he was talking about. She probably felt that God had given her remarkably little in her life except disappointment and sorrow, and as far as religion went, it seemed to her that it was more concerned with what she had to give God. If you wanted a priest to pray for you, you had to pay him. When you sinned and needed forgiveness, you had to pay for that too with a sacrifice. You had to tithe and pay regular dues. And even when you had paid everything they asked, no one was prepared to give you any assurance that you would definitely be saved. She had never heard that the heart of true religion is not what we give God but what he gives us; that there is a gift of God to be had simply for the asking, free and for nothing, but a gift without which it is impossible to worship God satisfactorily.[p 61]
There are still millions like her. Perhaps they have never read the words of the New Testament: ‘For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast’ (Eph 2:8–9). Or even when they do read them, perhaps the concept is so foreign they do not take it in that salvation is a gift to be received. They think that it is something to be deserved and paid for, at least in the currency of good behaviour.
Still, you might have expected the woman to have said, ‘Gift? Has God really got something he wants to give me? I didn’t know. But if he has, then give it to me, please.’ But no, she didn’t. Like so many others, she heard the words, ‘you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water’, but it did not occur to her that this was an invitation to ask for the living water there and then. Besides that, she was puzzled by the term living water.
‘Sir,’ she said, ‘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).
So the well was deep, and he apparently had nothing to draw the water with. If only she had known he didn’t need her bucket. He could have done a miracle and quenched his thirst without rope or bucket or even a well. It was herself, not her rope and bucket, that he needed. Had it not been so, he need never have become physically thirsty. The physical thirst was but the result of a far deeper and more wonderful thirst: the need of God for his creatures. That is why he had waited for her to come, and why he had asked her to get the water for him. In a sense he had been waiting for her since time began.
It is not that the all-sufficient and all-satisfying God lacked something before we were created, and depended on us to fill some need. God is never driven by needs as we are; he never gets thirsty like we do. He never has to come to any well. And yet, by the deliberate choice of his sovereign will, he chose to need us. From the unfathomable deep of his infinite resources he made us, to satisfy the need he had chosen to have. While the human race stayed with him, all our wells were immeasurably deep and our thirst quenching resources infinite. But since we forsook him to go our own independent way, none of our wells has ever been more than pitifully shallow.[p 62]
Our need for something deeper
‘Living water?’ she said. ‘Where are you going to get living water from? Are you greater than our father Jacob who gave us this well?’ The question was not meant to sound ludicrous. She probably took the term living water to mean running water, for in places such as Leviticus the term for running water is living water (14:6). And if he was not going to use water from the well, she could not see where he was going to get any running water from around there. And moreover, that well was to her something marvellous. She could not imagine why anyone should ask for any better water than it supplied. It not only went down deep into the earth, it also went back deep into history all the way to the patriarch Jacob. He was the greatest saint in the Samaritan religious galaxy, and to think that she was actually drinking water from the well out of which that great saint had once drunk made her feel good somehow.
What actual good it did her beyond quenching her thirst is difficult to see. She might regard the well as a holy well; but the water was nothing more than ordinary water. Jacob’s cattle, as she herself remarked, had drunk of the well, with no noticeable effect on them beyond quenching their thirst. As a well of ordinary water, it was admittedly a tremendous social benefit, and Jacob had done a praiseworthy deed when he donated the well to the community. And let it be said, for it deserves to be, that in spite of all the scandals that can be told about religion, it is religion that has been at the forefront in providing social services and relief for the poor, the hungry and the ill. But although social relief is a valuable and necessary result of true religion, it does not lie at the heart of satisfying worship. We will need to go deeper than that.
Again the question was, how was he going to get across to this woman what the real living water is? All her life, religion for her had meant simply doing the material duties of life in the best way you could. It meant being a good mother to the children, being loyal to your husband, not telling lies, not gossiping too much, observing all the food laws and hygiene regulations taught by the priests from the Bible. And, like using your best china for special meals, it meant getting water, for drinking purposes at least, from the holy well of Jacob. How could she be brought to see the difference between religion at this level and the living water of a personal relationship with God at the deeper spiritual level?[p 63]
Jesus said to her, ‘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.’ (4:13–14)
He did not mean to imply that once a man or woman has had a taste of personal fellowship with God it so satisfies them that they never feel any desire to have another. Indeed, there is a sense in which once a person has tasted what it means to have fellowship with God it becomes the dominant desire of that person’s life. He meant that once we have received the living water from Christ we have the source of satisfaction within us and are never again dependent on external sources of satisfaction, which, because they dry up, or are difficult to reach, or else are completely unattainable, leave us constantly dissatisfied. ‘But the water that I will give him’, Christ added to explain the reason why we would never thirst again, ‘will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.’ Living water indeed, because it was a life: the life of the Spirit of God, given by Christ to those who ask.
Living water springing up from a spring within; not a feeling that comes stealing over us in church, or when we’re admiring a splendid sunset, but a new life implanted within us and remaining there permanently. Living water that springs up naturally; not ecstatic emotions that have to be worked up or induced by a kind of Christian mantra. Living water from a spring that runs deep, its source being the very life of God, the life of eternity; a spring that therefore never runs dry, even in days of severe and lasting emotional drought, because it is basically not an emotional but a spiritual thing.
Obstacles to a relationship with God
A light came into the woman’s eyes. She had seen something in what Christ had said that obviously attracted her and made sense. Was she about to ask him for the gift of God and receive it? ‘Sir, give me this water,’ she said, ‘so that I don’t get thirsty any more, and don’t have to come all this way here to draw water.’
We heave a sigh of disappointment. Would she never understand that he was not talking about literal physical water? But Christ was[p 64] not discouraged. She had sensed that there was something very attractive in what he said, and she had asked for it, even though she did not understand properly what it was. It gave him the opportunity of pointing out what was in fact not only the greatest obstacle to her receiving the living water, but also to her understanding what it is.
God is Spirit. True fellowship with him must therefore be at the level of spirit. Even to understand, let alone enjoy, the things of God one must first receive the Spirit of God (see 1 Cor 2:10–16). But it is precisely at this level that sin has blocked and broken all the channels of communication. How can one have fellowship with infinite holiness while sin is still unrepented of and unforgiven? How can you enjoy worshipping God if you are not certain that he has forgiven you, and are not sure whether in the end he will receive you or cast you into hell? Multitudes try to, as she likewise had tried to; but the whole thing was nothing but a wearisome duty. Living with a man who was not her husband had taught her that, however exciting and interesting it seemed to be at times, it was never satisfying. True love and fellowship even at the human level demand security. How can you admire and love a man if you are never sure whether at the end of the week you will still be his wife or whether he may by then have rejected and divorced you? Yet there are millions who try to love and worship God without being sure whether, when life ends, he will accept them into his heaven or banish them for ever.
Facing our true sinful identity
Until this woman had been made to face the fact that she was a sinner, until she had been brought to repentance and had received forgiveness and the assurance of the eternal security of God’s acceptance, there was little she could know or understand about the living water of fellowship with God in the Holy Spirit. Yet to have faced her with her sin at the outset would have made her put up all of her psychological defences; made her feel that she was being criticized for not being good enough, and given her the impression (quite false, of course) that she was being told that she would have to be a great deal better before she could merit salvation. And if a Jew had told her, a Samaritan, that she was a sinner, she might well have slapped his face. But now she was interested in this living water, whatever it was, and had asked for it. Admittedly she did not yet understand[p 65] what it was, and she was asking for the wrong reasons. Yet even the wrong reasons were understandable. The well at Sychar was a long way to have to come for ordinary water; and when life is going wrong emotionally and one is not in fellowship with God, the chores of life seem ten times the burden they are when one’s spirit is free and glad. What if she could be brought to confess her status as a sinner herself? Forgiveness and salvation would make even the chores of life easier.
‘So you would like this living water, would you?’ said Christ. ‘I tell you what; just go and call your husband, and come here.’ Momentarily the woman hesitated; but then she recollected that he was a stranger and would know nothing about her. There was no need then to state the full facts and to get involved in long and embarrassing explanations. ‘I have no husband’, she replied. Strictly speaking it was true; but it was only half the truth. Really it was a cover up. But then who would want to expose a painful sore such as she had to the eyes of a perfect stranger? Yet half the truth could not do for Christ. He already knew the full truth. And if ever she was to be sure of the love of God and know security in her relationship with him, she would have to know that he knew it all. No use covering up and living in fear that one day he might find out the worst and reject her because of it.
So Christ must tear away the bandage and reveal the wound, and it was going to hurt. Notice with what infinite grace he did it. There was no open rebuke for not telling all the truth. Twice over he commended her for the fact that what she said was accurate, although she knew, and he was about to show that he knew too, that it was the nicely calculated accuracy of her phrase which she had hoped would cover up the full truth. ‘You have expressed it quite well,’ said Christ, ‘in saying that you have no husband; for you have had five husbands and the man you now have is not your husband; it is exactly as you say.’ There was no denunciation, no tirade against sin, no criticism. But the facts were there. Sandwiched between two commendations for accuracy, but there all the same: naked, bare, exposed, ugly and unpleasant.
Worship in spirit
The woman looked uncomfortable and confused. How did he know? Whatever could she say? He must be a prophet. No good trying any[p 66] further cover up. Her mind was racing. A prophet meant religion. What could she say about religion to cover the embarrassment of the moment? Ah, he was a Jewish prophet. She knew what she could say to turn the pressure off herself a bit. ‘Sir,’ she said, ‘I can see that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshipped in this mountain; and you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.’ What a lot she could have gone on to say, if only he had started to argue the old controversy. She could have argued from the book of Genesis that Abraham had built an altar near there (12:7) and so had Jacob (33:20). She certainly could have shown, she felt, that the Samaritans were not so wrong as the Jews made out and that the Jews ought not to be so dogmatic, but ought to be prepared to let other people be right as well as themselves.
But there was no escape down the road of that old controversy. The Saviour was not prepared to argue the question. He could have shown her with divine clarity and force of argument that the Samaritans had been wrong all these centuries in opposing and refusing Jerusalem and clinging to Mount Gerizim. But how would it have helped her, even if he had won the argument and extorted from her a reluctant admission that he was right? For one thing, by the time the argument was finished, she would have attained her purpose of getting away from the question of her personal need and sin. And secondly, suppose he had proved that Jerusalem had been all the way along the right place to worship in—going to the right place, though important, had never even in those past centuries been the heart of the matter in true worship. Much less now, when even Jerusalem was going to reject its Messiah and God, and God was going to allow the Romans to destroy the temple in Jerusalem and move the question of worship on to an altogether higher plane. Yet he would not, even for the sake of winning this woman to faith, pander to the wrong ideas of Samaritan worship and pretend they were right, or else that it did not matter whether they were right or wrong. God had ordained that salvation should come via the Jews; and the Jew sitting there in front of her was her Saviour. It was important that she be reminded that she could not look in any direction she pleased for salvation. Salvation is a gift, but we can only have it from the Saviour God has provided. Jesus said to her,
Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You[p 67] 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)
She must have felt that things were beginning to close in on her. She had tried to get away from the subject of her own need and the unsatisfactory state of her own life before God by raising the question of worship. She had meant to discuss it at the impersonal level in terms of the historical and denominational controversy; and here the subject of worship, which she herself had raised, had brought her directly back to her own personal relationship to God. She could scarcely say now that she wasn’t interested in the subject of worship. And what he was saying was so obviously right. Samaritans and Jews both believed that God is spirit; there was nothing she could dispute about that. And he wasn’t saying the all-important thing about worship was the place you worshipped in, and that place must be Jerusalem. So she couldn’t argue about that either. If God is spirit, it certainly sounded right to say his worshippers must worship him in spirit and in truth. But what exactly did it mean? And what did he mean by talking of true worshippers? Whatever he meant he seemed to infer that not all the Jews up in Jerusalem were necessarily true worshippers, which was some comfort to her at any rate. But she had never come across things put this way before. What did it all mean? She could not make it out.
But we have less excuse than she had for not knowing what it meant. He was not saying that all those who until this moment had worshipped in the temple in Jerusalem, or in Samaria for that matter, had been false worshippers in the sense that their worship had been hypocritical. But it had not, generally speaking, been the real fullblown ideal thing that is worthy of the name of worship.
A yachtsman may play at model yachts on the pond in the back garden with his six-year-old son in the hope that his boy will early on in life get interested in yachting, so that, when he grows up, he will join his father in sailing real yachts round the world. But if he’s a yachtsman at all, or if he’s a father at all, he could not be happy to see his son grown up to manhood and still content to play at model[p 68] yachts on the garden pond. At that stage his father would want his son to go in for the real thing, or nothing.
Jewish symbols with the temple made of literal stone, and their Samaritan counterparts, were only intended as models pointing forward to the real thing. God is spirit: how could he forever remain satisfied with a puff of incense, some pretty coloured robes, and a woolly lamb as a sacrifice? He must have the real true thing. And the real true thing will be the thing that corresponds to the reality of his own nature: ‘God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.’
At this point we cannot help remembering what our Lord told Nicodemus in his long conversation with him: ‘That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Don’t be surprised when I tell you, “You must be born again”’ (see 3:6–7). To enter, or even to see, the kingdom of God we must be born again; not just improve, educate or religionize our flesh, but receive a new life of a different order by being born of the Spirit.
Now once more the same thing is being laid down in the area of worship. To worship God acceptably we must worship in spirit. That does not mean that when we go to church we should try to ‘enter into the spirit of the thing’, as people say. It means receiving the gift of God, the living water—the Holy Spirit, in fact—so that we can know and understand the things of God. It is impossibly unsatisfactory and unsatisfying to try to worship someone you do not really know; and Scripture points out that humans, apart from receiving God’s Holy Spirit, have no means of knowing God.
For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. . . . The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. (1 Cor 2:11–14)
Knowing God
It is important that we try to grasp what this means, for we can easily deceive ourselves here. We can enjoy the grandeur of a sunset, the[p 69] colour of a butterfly’s wings, the ecstasy of music; and because we recognize that all these and similar things are the good gifts of the Creator, we may think that this is what Scripture means when it talks about knowing God. But that is not so. We may know a lot about God at certain levels without knowing God.
Let us take an analogy. We have much in common with dogs and they with us. We enjoy a good walk, so do they. We like beefsteaks, they like beefsteaks. If your dog sees you eating a beefsteak, his interest is immediately aroused. He has a good idea of the gorgeous feelings that are at that moment tickling your palate and stomach, for he too has a stomach and a palate that understand beefsteaks. But the dog would be a very foolish dog if he imagined that, just because he could enjoy a beefsteak, he knew all about you. Take him into your study and show him your favourite oil painting, and at once he is lost. He cannot see anything in this curious object that you seem to be getting all excited about. He may bark if he sees you getting very worked up, but you shouldn’t imagine it means that he has seen anything in the picture. Presently he will give the whole game away by trying to smell the picture; and when that does not yield any sensible result, he will try licking it. In the end, not making head or tail of it, he will get bored and give up on it completely.
However much you try to teach him to do little human tricks like sitting up or shaking hands, he will never understand the interest humans have in pictures nor in a thousand and one other human things. Vast areas of your personality are forever unknown territory to the dog. He will never know you in the full sense of that word, unless the impossible happens and you devise some way of imparting to your dog your human spirit.
And so it is with us and God. Enjoyment of God’s handiwork in nature, enjoyment of human affection and genius, will tell us a lot about our creator. But that is not knowing God in the scriptural sense of the term. For that we need to receive the Spirit of God. Without him, says Scripture itself, the things of God will appear foolishness.
Indeed, this is the reason why many who have been brought up to regular attendance at some Christian place of worship, either keep attending simply out of a sense of duty or decency, or else abandon it[p 70] altogether. It is all such a frightful bore and makes no sense. If they manage to keep attending, they will clamour for the sermons to be less about the Bible and more about politics and social responsibility; for they understand topics of that sort, and they seem relevant. Jacob to them, as to the Samaritan woman, will seem to have reached the height of spiritual attainment when he gave the local village a new waterworks; but prayer and Bible-reading they will dismiss as irrelevant. It is very understandable. The real fault lies not with them, but with whoever it was that admitted them to membership of a Christian church and urged them to try and worship God without making sure that they had first received the gift of God and been born again.
How then do we receive this gift and on what terms? The example of an actual conversion will make it clear. Here is the Apostle Paul telling us what conversion to Christ meant for him and particularly how it revolutionized his worship.
Look out for the dogs, look out for the evildoers, look out for those who mutilate the flesh. For we are the circumcision, who worship by the Spirit of God and glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh—though I myself have reason for confidence in the flesh also. If anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless. But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith. (Phil 3:2–9)
Worship in truth
But there is another mistake with regard to worship that Christ’s words will save us from. We are to worship not only in spirit, but in[p 71] spirit and truth. God is not the projection of our psychological states nor of our intellectual concepts. He is a reality: the Great Reality, the Truth. And he has manifested himself and shown us the truth of what he is like by sending his Son, the Word of God, into our world, where he died as the Lamb of God to take away the sin of the world and rose again from the dead. Worship, in order to be true, must be a genuine response to this revealed truth.
There is a danger with some, of thinking that ‘worshipping in spirit’ means having ecstatic experiences that are unrelated to Christian doctrine and to the great facts of salvation. Indeed, some will take the words of Paul out of their context: ‘the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life’ (2 Cor 3:6), and misinterpret them to mean that, so long as a person is having ‘spiritual experiences’, doctrine does not matter. They may even say that serious reading of Holy Scripture is not necessary and that doctrine is a positive hindrance to ‘spirituality’. That of course is a deception. Worship in the Spirit of God will always conform to the truth of God. A person who, for instance, professes to be worshipping in spirit, and yet rejects the doctrine of the blood and sacrifice of Christ, is not worshipping according to truth. He is not worshipping the reality that is God and the reality of the historical manifestation of God in the person and work of Jesus Christ. He is worshipping some concoction of his own imagination. By contrast, Jesus invites the woman to worship God as he really is.
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)
The woman's response
It was noon when the conversation started, and how long they had been talking we are not told, for what we have is no more than a summary of what passed between Christ and the woman. Certain things, however, stand out prominently in the conversation: God has a gift of living water, which she could have if she asked for it; she must confess to her status as a sinner and repent; God is seeking her, longing for her to become one of his real worshippers. It was not a question of her fathers and their traditions, nor her denomination[p 72] or religious buildings or practices: it was a question of her and her personal response to God.
There came at length a lull in the conversation while Christ waited for her to make her response. Would she now personally ask him for the living water and receive the gift of God? ‘Ah well,’ she said, after a pause, ‘we can’t be sure about these things can we, any of us, not now? Of course, I know that one day the Messiah is coming, and when he comes he will explain everything to us.’
Millions have said the same thing since; for it seems to be one of religion’s fixations that you can know nothing for certain now. It even enshrines itself in some prayers. Having asked God for this and that and the other, they add, ‘and at the end, everlasting life’. But why ‘at the end’, why not now? Eternal life is not some remote thing that perhaps we may obtain when this life is done. ‘Eternal life’, said Christ, ‘is knowing the true God, and Jesus Christ whom he has sent into our world’ (see 17:3). It means knowing them now in the sense of having a living personal relationship with them now. Yes, of course, the relationship having begun here on earth will continue for all eternity; but it must begin on earth if ever it is going to exist in eternity. Why else did Christ come into our world? Why else was he in Samaria sitting by the well talking to this woman at all, if, when all is said and done, the verdict must be, ‘But of course we cannot know anything for certain in this life’?
So she said, ‘I know that the Messiah is coming, and when he comes he will explain everything to us.’ But even in this remark there was hope, for it seemed to imply that when Messiah did come and explain everything she would believe him. What if her eyes could be opened to see that Messiah had not only already come, but was this very moment sitting by her side talking to her, and that the words she had been listening to were Messiah’s explanations? Suppose he said, ‘I am the Messiah’, would she be able to take it in? She had noticed that he was a Jew; it was the very first thing she had noticed. Would her old religious prejudices allow her to accept even the Messiah, if he was a Jew?
But the difficulty had been overcome already. Had he not troubled to come and seek her? Had he not, tired and thirsty with his travelling, asked her, to her great amazement, for a drink of water? And had he not spent all this time talking to her, a woman, when[p 73] many a Jewish rabbi would have regarded it as a waste of time and beneath his dignity to discuss theology with a woman? And had he not spoken to her, knowing all about her, when even her fellow townswomen snubbed and avoided her? He could say it now, and he would say it in a way that would tug deeply at her heart. Jesus said to her, ‘I who am speaking to you am Messiah.’
What did she say? We are not told. And how little can be told of what goes on in a human heart when for the first time a person wakes up to the fact that the words she hears, and has heard many times, or has read many times in Scripture, are the words of the living Christ who is standing before her heart, personally seeking and waiting for her personal response of faith.
But just at this point the disciples arrived back with the shopping. They were dying to know who the woman was, and what on earth Christ was doing talking to a woman anyway. Mercifully they had the sense not to intrude with any tactless questions, though they did not get much chance to; for the woman suddenly got up and went hurrying back to the village.
‘Is that your water jar?’ said one of the disciples to another. ‘No,’ he said, ‘it must be that woman’s.’
‘Lord,’ they chorused, ‘that woman has gone and left her water jar.’
The woman's confession and witness
It was a very natural thing that the Samaritan woman did, when in the joy and wonder of her experience of Christ she forgot her water jar. She had come to the well, deeply dissatisfied with life, at an hour when she might avoid meeting her fellow townspeople. But Christ had told her of a well of living, permanently satisfying water that he could place within her: the satisfaction of having and enjoying eternal life here and now, through a personal spiritual relationship with God. And evidently the woman must have asked for and received that satisfaction. She did not say it in so many words, but actions speak louder. She suddenly got up, hurried off into the town, and went to the people there and urged them to come and meet Christ.
Obviously something had happened. When she came to the well, she was trying to avoid the townspeople; now she was seeking them[p 74] out. She had avoided them because they disapproved of her irregular behaviour, and she was ashamed or resentful. Now she was admitting she had been wrong, and she said to her fellow townspeople, ‘Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did.’
Everything? What our Lord had told her about her personal life was the very irregularity which her neighbours objected to. Yet what she would formerly have resented anyone criticizing, she was now admitting. Somehow the pain and resentment had gone. Confession of her wrong was now transformed by the wonder of having discovered a Saviour who had known all about it without being told. He had not excused or condemned her past life, rather he had made her face it. Yet he had made her feel that even while she was still a sinner God loved her and valued her. In the strength of her newly found relationship with God, confession was comparatively easy.
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