Thread by @JamesBejon

THREAD: #Social #distances in John 4.1–44 (Part III).

For Part II, click below. Otherwise, please scroll down and join me on a journey through Samaria.

https://twitter.com/JamesBejon/status/1252366875821871105

As we pick up the story in 4.19, Jesus is deep in conversation with a Samaritan woman.

Back in 4.9, Jesus’ statement struck the woman as culturally inappropriate (‘The Jews have nothing to do with the Samaritans!’),

then they seemed audacious (‘Are you greater than our father, Jacob!?’),

but it is now clear Jesus’ statements deserve to be taken seriously.

‘I see you are a prophet’, the woman says. (‘*The* Prophet’ would probably have been better.)

The woman has sought to hide her marital status (or lack thereof) from Jesus.

But Jesus has now exposed it.

The woman’s reaction to Jesus’ statement is noteworthy.

It is not the reaction of a woman who has been convicted of sin (cp. Peter’s ‘Depart from me, for I am a sinful man!’).

The woman seems to view herself as a victim of a sin-filled past rather than an active participant in it.

And, since the text of Scripture portrays her response to Jesus positively (e.g., 4.39), I believe we should accept her assessment.

At any rate, if the Samaritan woman has been married and divorced five times, then five different men have divorced her. And the man she is now with has not even bothered to marry her.

If, therefore, Jesus’ statement is an indictment on the woman of Samaria, then it is a greater indictment on the *men* of Samaria.

Participant or not, the woman (in 4.20) seeks to steer the conversation onto a different and more academic subject.

‘Where should we worship?’, she asks. ‘Here in Samaria, or in Jerusalem?’.

Jesus does not, however, allow the conversation to be derailed.

That is not to say Jesus suddenly becomes a religious pluralist. (The Jews, he says, do indeed have a knowledge of the truth, which the Samaritans do not: 4.22.)

But what ultimately matters is not where people worship,

but how and who they worship.

At about that time, the disciples return.

Meanwhile, the woman returns to her city.

That Jesus has been in conversation with the Samaritan woman both surprises and confuses the disciples.

Had they overheard Jesus’ conversation with the woman, they would no doubt have taken a low view of her statements.

‘Poor thing!’, they would have said.

‘She doesn’t even realise Jesus has *spiritual* water in mind!’.

Yet the disciples are about to exhibit a similar lack of insight themselves, and that after many months in Jesus’ company.

‘I have food to eat which you do not know about’, Jesus says to them,

which the disciples take to refer to physical food.

Jesus, however, has something quite different in mind.

When Jesus refers to ‘his food’, he has in mind the object of his spiritual hunger--what sustains him, what drives him, what fuels him in his labours,

namely the ‘completion’ (τελ- plus lots of vowels) of his appointed work.

Exactly what is entailed in that work Jesus does not say.

But, in 4.35, Jesus continues to speak about it by means of food-related imagery insofar as he associates his work with the harvest cycle.

A sower typically has to wait for four months before he sees any results from his labours.

Yet the seed Jesus has sown, he says, has already begun to bear fruit.

And he is right. The Samaritan woman is even now back in her hometown, where she has begun to tell others of Jesus’ words (4.28–30).

And, in the days to come, Jesus says, the disciples will reap a harvest they have *not* sown.

In Scripture, for one party to sow and another to reap is typically a curse on one of them (cp. Job 31.7–10).

The Israelites are promised ‘vineyards they did not sow’ in Canaan, which is a curse on the Canaanites (Deut. 6.11, Josh. 24.13).

And the Israelites are later told they will *not* be able to reap what they have sown (due to their exile: Deut. 28.39, Mic. 6.15), which is a curse on *them*.

Yet, here, sower and reaper alike rejoice (4.36), since they are part of one and the same labour.

The reapers in question are clearly the disciples (4.38),

who will reap a harvest on the day of Pentecost, i.e., on the day of the barley harvest.

But who is the sower?

The sower, I believe, is Jesus--the one who will sow not only in tears (like the prophets), but with his whole life.

Like a grain of wheat, his body will ‘fall into the earth and die’.

And yet, precisely because it does in fact die, it will ‘bear much fruit’ (12.24).

As such, Jesus is not merely *a* prophet (per the Samaritan woman’s statement), but *the* Prophet--the one who will embody in his life and ministry the prophets’ many long years of sorrow, mockery, and rejection, even to the point of death (Matt. 21b).

And that death is the event which the text of John 4 ultimately anticipates (4.34).

In the days to come, Jesus will again find himself outside a city...

...at the time of harvest,

at the sixth hour of the day,

in the presence of a woman (and the absence of his disciples).

He will again thirst for water (19.28),

and his ‘hour’ will truly come (4.23, 7.30, 12.23)...

...as he announces the completion of his great work with the triumphant words, ‘It is finished’ (τελέω) (19.28).

And, soon afterwards, waters of life will flow, not from the ‘side’ (כתף) of Ezekiel’s temple (Ezek. 47), but from the side of Jesus’ body.

THE END.