Good day! Step into my classroom. Let’s take walk through the fields of Samaria, then onto Corinth, on a journey I recently took with my class.
. . .
We begin in the 4th Chapter of John’s Gospel. The text is Jn 4:3-26.
Jesus is on a journey. He leaves Judea and sets out for Galilee. He takes a route that will pass through Samaria. In Jesus’ day, the Jews and Samaritans were somewhat like Protestants and Catholics during the worst period of their shared history. They shared a similar religious lineage but passed through a period of deep dispute – theological, political, military – and, as a result, became deeply adversarial to one another. For this reason, whenever Jews had to journey between northern and southern Israel, they took a circuitous route to avoid passing through Samaritan villages. Kind of like the way Catholics will drive past Protestant Churches, or vice versa, without ever going in.
But in this scene, Jesus heads directly to a Samaritan town called Sychar. Sychar is situated near a piece of land that the patriarch Jacob had given his son, Joseph. There is a well there that Jacob and his sons had dug and drank from. To the Samaritans, for good reason, this was a holy well.
Jesus’ disciples had gone into the village to buy food, so He comes to this well, alone. Tired from his journey, he sits down. It’s about noon.
A woman from Samaria comes to draw water. Jesus says to her, ‘Give me to drink.’ He speaks with the same unusual authority he displayed when he first stepped into Simon’s boat (cf. Lk. 5:3) along the sea of Galilee, on the morning of one of his first miracles.
The women is surprised and responds, ‘How is it that you, being a Jew, ask of me, a Samaritan woman, a drink?’
Jesus replies and says to her, ‘If you knew the gift of God and who is the one saying to you ‘Give me to drink,’ it is you who would have asked him and he would give you living water.’
The woman says to him, ‘Sir, you have no bucket and the well is deep. Where will you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us this well and drank from it himself, along with his children and his livestock?
Jesus replies, ‘Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again. But the one who drinks of the water I give will never thirst. The water I give will become in him a spring of water welling up into eternal life.’
The woman says to him, ‘Give me this water, that I might not thirst and no longer come here to draw water.’
Jesus says to her, ‘Go call your husband and return here.’
(We wonder: why does he ask this?)
The woman replies, ‘I have no husband.’
Jesus says, ‘You have spoken well to say I have no husband. For you have had five and the one you have now is not your husband. In this you have spoken truly.’
(And so we see: Jesus is drawing this woman upon a path of truth and he is showing her that he knows her heart, frail and broken though it may be. The woman recognizes in this knowledge an indication that Jesus is a kind of prophet.)
So she says to him, ‘Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain. And you say that Jerusalem is the place where one must worship.’
Jesus says to her, ‘Believe me, woman, an hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know. We worship One whom we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. But an hour is coming, and is now here, when true worshippers will worship the Father in Spirit and truth. For the Father is searching such worshippers.’
‘God is Spirit. And those who worship Him must worship Him in Spirit and truth.’
Jesus is describing a kind of communion between God and human souls in the Spirit that has never been revealed before. It is not easy to understand. The woman herself cannot understand. So she replies:
‘I know that the Messiah is coming, he who is called the Christ. When he comes, he will announce everything to us.’
‘I am,’ Jesus says to her, ‘the one who is speaking to you.’
This moment is a staggering revelation, a theophany. In one sentence Jesus reveals, to this Samaritan woman, his identity as the Messiah – the first time He has done so in John’s Gospel. He also reveals His divine nature – for ‘I am’ is the name God gave for Himself to Moses: “This is what you will tell the Israelites: I AM has sent me to you.” (Ex 3:14). The novelty of this revelation confirms the weight of Jesus’ teaching here.
What is this weighty teaching?
. . .
As is our practice in Lectio Divina, having surveyed the text as a whole, we zero in on a single, central verse to ponder. Let’s choose this one:
“God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in Spirit and truth.” Jn 4:24
Jesus speaks of God as Father (Jn 4:23) and as Spirit (Jn. 4:24). He says, here and elsewhere, that to be in relationship and to worship God is not first about ritual sacrifices or praying in certain places (like a Temple). It’s about praying and seeking God in Spirit and truth. God is Spirit and one must worship him in Spirit and truth.
How does one worship in Spirit and truth? Is there another passage which illuminates this question?
The second part of this phrase is straightforward. We know that by ‘the truth’ Jesus means God’s Word. “Consecrate them in the truth,” he prays to the Father on the last night of his life, “Your Word is truth.” Jn 17:17. So right worship must somehow be illuminated by God’s Word.
But what does He mean by worshipping God in Spirit?
Paul has an insight for us, in 2nd Corinthians, when he writes of the close communion that takes place between the soul and Christ, a communion in Spirit.
All of us, he says to the Corinthians (which means all of us, too):
“All of us, gazing with unveiled face on the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, as from the Lord who is Spirit.” (2 Cor 3:18)
Look deeply here. Paul is describing the communion between Christ and the soul in the Spirit. In the Old Temple, the holy of holies used to be veiled from the people. But in Christ’s notion of the Temple (which is not a place. . . not Jerusalem. . . not a mountain. . . it is the human heart) we are given to gaze, with unveiled face, on the glory of the Lord. On the Lord who is Spirit, as both Jesus and Paul say. As we do so, we are transformed into the image of the Lord, from glory to glory, by the Lord who is Spirit.
To put Paul’s idea above more succinctly: We who gaze on the glory of the Lord, who is Spirit, are transformed, as we do so, into His own image.
This is worship in the Spirit. This is communion in the Spirit. To gaze on God who is Spirit and to be changed into what we gaze upon. It is as when a small fire, being brought into the presence of a larger fire, joins with it. But, with the soul, this joining happens through a gaze. The soul, in the Spirit, gazes upon God who is Spirit, and, like a candle tipped towards a roaring fire, the soul becomes like the Spirit it contemplates.
…
“God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in Spirit and truth.” Jn 4:24
Jesus, you reveal the Father as Spirit. You have also revealed that God is a consuming fire (Deut. 4:24; Heb. 12:29). You draw my soul close to the Father as Spirit – to God as fire – that I might become like Him, that I might be transformed into His image. This is the fire you “have come to cast upon the earth (Lk. 12:49:) May it be to me according to your will. Amen.
