Fr. Stephen De Young:

After these things Jesus and His disciples came into the land of Judea, and there He remained with them and baptized.

So really “land” is probably not the best word, it should probably be country, remember, because he was in Jerusalem, which is in Judea. So he goes out of the city into the countryside of Judea. And the disciples, they’re baptizing people. And remember the beginning of the discussion with Nicodemus sort of involved baptism because he’s talked about being born again or born from above of water and the spirit, and that that was required if you’re going to enter the kingdom of God. And so now they’re going out and doing it, they’re baptizing.

Now John also was baptizing in Aenon near Salim, because there was much water there. And they came and were baptized.  For John had not yet been thrown into prison.

St. John is really bad about spoilers [Laughter], but St. John the Forerunner, he’s nearby baptizing. There’s a place with a lot of water. When you’re in the Judean desert, there’s not always enough water at hand to be baptizing people. So he’s got a place with a good amount of water and so people are coming to him and they’re being baptized.

Interlocutor: Why is he still baptizing?

Fr. Stephen: That’s what we’re just about to get into.

Then there arose a dispute between some of John’s disciples and the Jews about purification.

Now, what is this about? Remember when it says “Jews” in our modern English translation, what it’s actually translating is a Greek word for Judeans. So it’s basically, some of the people there come to John and this dispute, this argument starts. Why would there be an argument about purification? Remember in the Old Testament, in the Old Covenant there were all of these purification rituals and washings that happened at various times. Whereas what St. John the Forerunner is doing is he’s doing not even really a cleansing. He’s submerging you in not necessarily the cleanest water, right? And then saying you’re now purified of your sins. So this is what the debate is about.

Interlocutor: So you don’t need these other rituals anymore.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so that’s the dispute here that breaks out. So, I mean, they can kind of understand what St. John is doing as part of a purification rite. But the idea that somehow this one thing takes the place of all that, they’re having a problem with.

And they came to John and said to him, “Rabbi, He who was with you beyond the Jordan, to whom you have testified—behold, He is baptizing, and all are coming to Him!”

So they come to St. John and say, “Hey, remember Jesus who was over here. He’s over here baptizing. You got competition. He’s stealing your thing. You’re St John the Baptist, now he’s baptizing people, too”! This is intellectual property violation.

John answered and said, “A man can receive nothing unless it has been given to him from heaven.  You yourselves bear me witness, that I said, ‘I am not the Christ,’ but, ‘I have been sent before Him.’”

So he says, if Jesus is baptizing, that means he’s been called to baptize, just like I was. Which means what? That means I’m not going to get jealous because people are now going to be baptized by Jesus. He says, furthermore, “You heard me testify about him. Well, if you heard me testify about him, you heard me say that I’m not the Messiah, he is. Right. So I told you that this transition was happening, this was going to happen.” Then he uses this analogy:

“He who has the bride is the bridegroom, but the friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly because of the bridegroom’s voice. Therefore this joy of mine is fulfilled.”

So the friend of the bridegroom here, the nymphios, is sort of the equivalent in our modern day terms of the best man.

Interlocutor: So he’s not talking in generic terms, he’s talking about someone who actually has a role in ceremony.

Fr. Stephen: Right. He’s saying that he’s like the best man at a wedding. He’s not getting married to the bride. The groom is getting married to the bride. But as the best man, he rejoices at the wedding, at the marriage happening. So he’s saying his joy is fulfilled at the fact that the wedding is happening with Jesus. So who’s the bride here? The bride here is the people, the group of people that St. John was baptizing that they were putting together, right? He’s putting this group of people together not for himself, but for Christ. And so when he sees them coming to Christ, he’s happy. He’s not jealous or upset. He’s happy and overjoyed that this is happening because that’s what he wanted to happen.

Interlocutor: Is there a difference between… at this point, both Christ and John are baptizing people. Is there a difference for those people as to which one has baptized them?

Fr. Stephen: Not at this point. We’re going to see in the Book of Acts, the next book up, that once the Holy Spirit comes, there ends up being a distinction. But at this point we’re going to see St. John in his Gospel is going to talk a lot about the Holy Spirit, but not in chapter 3. The Holy Spirit is still sort of a promise at this point. Remember, Jesus is going to baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire. Right now he’s baptizing with water, and the disciples, the way St. John was.

Interlocutor: That fire that you just mentioned, is that the purifying fire?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that’s the Holy Spirit. The presence of the Holy Spirit. Right.

So he continues and he said this before:

“He must increase, but I must decrease. He who comes from above is above all; he who is of the earth is earthly and speaks of the earth. He who comes from heaven is above all.”

So he’s making a distinction between himself and Christ again. He says, “I come from the earth, like Adam; I came out of the dust. When I die, I’m going to turn back into dust. Jesus is another category. He didn’t come from the ground. He didn’t come from the earth. He came from God. And so, he is above. He is above everyone, including me.”

“And what He has seen and heard, that He testifies; and no one receives His testimony.”

Now, seen and heard here is sort of metaphorical. The idea is when Jesus comes and speaks about God, it’s different than when St. John speaks about God. St. John the Forerunner is a prophet. God gives him a message to speak, right? He speaks for God, but he hears it from God, he speaks it. So it’s sort of hearsay, it’s second-hand, right? What he’s saying here is that what Jesus says isn’t second-hand because he is God and he’s been with God the Father since before the world began.

Interlocutor: So if God tells you something about God…

Fr. Stephen: Right, he’s speaking from his own original story. He’s speaking from his own experience. This is direct, not secondhand. What I say is secondhand, right? But what Jesus is saying is firsthand. It’s direct. And yet he says no one is listening to him.

Interlocutor: When he says no one, that’s really sweeping. Does he really mean no one or is he just being metaphorical?

Fr. Stephen: Well, he’s saying no one… I mean, obviously the people are going to him to be baptized. But what he’s saying is he’s saying no one understands what it is that he’s saying, right? No one is really understanding who he is and what he’s here to do.

“He who has received His testimony has certified that God is true.”

That’s not speaking about a particular person. That’s a general “he”. The person who receives Christ’s testimony…

Interlocutor: Whether there is such a person yet or not.

Fr. Stephen: Right, is saying that God is true. Which means, on the flip side, to reject Jesus’ testimony to who God is, is to call God a liar. Because in Christ, God himself is speaking. So if you believe Him, you believe God. If you don’t believe him, you don’t believe God.

“For He whom God has sent speaks the words of God, for God does not give the Spirit by measure.”

So when God sends someone, they speak for God. This “by measure” means God doesn’t say, “Well, I’m going to give this person a little bit of the Spirit. So 1% of what they say will be from God and the other 99% will be… or 30/70, or 50/50”. If someone is sent by God, then what they say comes from God.

“The Father loves the Son, and has given all things into His hand.”

So notice, “all things”. That means everything that exists. This is another one of the themes in St. John’s gospel, is that when he talks about the world and he talks about salvation, he’s not just talking about people or certain people. Well, not certain people, not even all people. He’s talking about God’s whole creation. And so when we heard a few verses ago that the Son has come, that the world might be saved through him, and that God has given all things to him, that means he’s here to save everything and everyone everything. This huge scope, again.

Interlocutor: So, all of the things that causes doubts and problems, like “if God is good, why does he make hurricanes?” get resolved at that point, right?

Fr. Stephen: Well, yes, it’s important to remember what we’re just talking about, too. The problem with the world is what? The evil deeds of human beings that bring about death. The evil deeds of human beings. That’s the problem. Christ comes as the solution to that problem, to save humanity, to save creation from the wickedness that human beings create. And so we can’t flip that and make it so that God is the one who causes all these bad things. And we sit as if we’re innocent and accuse him and say, “Why are you doing these things to us?” Whereas what St. John is saying is we do these things to each other and to ourselves. And God, who loves us despite that, has come to save us from our own self-destruction.

Interlocutor: So is this implying, I think it is, that nature is fallen too, as a result of human sin?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And that’s in Genesis 3, God says to Adam, “cursed is the ground because of you.” And that’s one of the themes that goes through, remember, Cain kills Abel, and Abel’s innocent blood goes into the ground and it cries out to God for justice because that innocent blood is now tainting the ground. And at the end of Deuteronomy, when God talks about blessings and curses on Israel, he says, “I set before you life and death, blessings and curses.” When he goes through the curses, he says, if you do wickedly, if you live wickedly and you reject my teaching, the first of the curses is that the ground beneath you will be like iron and the sky above you will be like bronze, meaning you won’t be able to get crops. You’ll be disconnected completely from the creation and unable to do anything.

So, yeah, that alienation of the different parts of creation from each other is a result of our sin. And this is what explains you know, you’ll see these icons of St. Seraphim of Sarov and his bear, wild bear. That’s what’s going on there. The reason animals attack humans is that they fear humans. Why do they have to fear humans? Well, because humans are predatory and violent. We’ll kill animals not just to eat them, but for no reason. So they should fear us. But a holy person, an animal doesn’t have to fear. And so when a person becomes holy like that, it’s like Adam and Eve in the garden, the relationship between them, not just to other people, but them and the creation around them is restored. So, St. Jerome could have a pet lion and St. Seraphim could be with this wild bear. And that’s the imagery that we see, like in Isaiah of the lion laying down with the lamb. But that fracturedness is the result of human sinfulness.

And that’s also not to go into this too much, but when we loop around at the end of the New Testament, go back to Genesis, that’s also a lot of what’s going on in the flood story, because we usually start reading the flood story in Genesis 6, verse 1, but it actually starts in the middle of chapter 5 in the middle of a genealogy. And when we’re reading a genealogy, it’s a whole bunch of names, “begat so and so”; we sort of skip over it. But in the middle of that genealogy, there’s something very important. When Noah is born, there’s a prophecy that his father says that through Noah, God is going to save the world and restore the land. Let the land, the physical land, harkening back to Genesis 3. And so, what’s happening in the Flood is not God gets angry at everybody. What happens in the Flood is human beings with their wickedness are destroying God’s creation. And God acts to save his creation and Noah and his family from humans, from humans. That’s why God is grieved that he created man. It doesn’t say God is grieved that he created the world, it says that he created man because man is destroying his creation with violence and wickedness and sin. And so, to save his creation, he wipes out…

And so, there’s an intimate connection there. And so Christ, by saving people, is also saving the whole of creation. He who believes in the Son has everlasting life.

“He who believes in the Son has everlasting life; and he who does not believe the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him.”

That “abides” really means “remains”. And that’s that similar image. Now, notice the one who believes, the one who accepts, the one who receives Christ has everlasting life. That’s not a future. The idea is you’re really alive now. You’re truly alive now because you’re connected to God. You’re sharing in the life of God because God is life. And that life has no end because you’re sharing it with God.

Whereas the person who does not believe will not see life. Meaning they’re not alive now. They’re not truly alive now. They’re breathing. They’re walking around. They’re sort of the walking dead, because they’re cut off from God by their wickedness. And so there’s not going to be some point in the future where they’re going to receive it, if they remain in that current state, their wickedness has cut them off from God, who is the source of life, whereas a person who’s abiding in God is connected to the source of life, and so their life never ends.

And this is going to get developed more as we’ll see later on, especially around when Jesus raises Lazarus, he’s going to come back to this idea and expand on it even more on what eternal life or everlasting life means.

Interlocutor: How strange is this world. Thousands of years they talk about Jesus, and just as he arrived to them, they reject him.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, part of what the apostles are trying to understand is how that happened. But in part, one of the answers is sort of the answer St. Matthew gives. Remember the Parable of the Tenants? Well, how could they kill their Messiah? Well, they killed all the prophets too. If you go back through the Old Testament, Israel is disobedient more than it was obedient and rejected God more than they accepted it. But once again, it’s important that this isn’t recorded for us so we could all sit and point a finger and be like “look at the Israelites”, but so we can look at ourselves and say…

Interlocutor: We’re now in the position of the Israelites.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, what’s my ratio of obedience to disobedience? It’s not all that great.

Interlocutor: Especially when we say we have seen the true light.

Fr. Stephen: Right. We’ve received far more, we now know Jesus, so we’re even more accountable and are we really doing any better than…

Interlocutor: I think that’s in the Old Testament too, that the Jews are more… one of the reasons that they get in trouble so much is that more is expected of them. They have a relationship with God.

Fr. Stephen: Right. God has revealed Himself to them.

Interlocutor: He revealed himself to them. He told them what they should do and they don’t do it. The Assyrians or something like that don’t have that responsibility.

Fr. Stephen: Right. They have a lower bar. Yeah. They’re still held accountable for what they do, but it’s more accountability.

Interlocutor: Right. And then we’ve got still more accountability.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So, chapter 4, we’re going to have another one of Jesus’ discussions, another conversation.

Therefore, when the Lord knew that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus made and baptized more disciples than John

And then we get this sort of parenthetical statement which St. John likes to do in his Gospel:

(though Jesus Himself did not baptize, but His disciples),

So he wants to clarify. Why would he be clarifying that?

Interlocutor: Well, this is part of the question I was asking, and gee, I’d rather be baptized by Jesus than by John, but between John and, say, St. Peter, well ok…

Fr. Stephen: Well, and part of it is we’ve already seen in these first three chapters that St. John has tried to differentiate Jesus’ baptism as sort of a greater baptism than that of St. John the Forerunner’s. So we can’t really have that starting yet. That’s still being held on the field. So he clarifies here. It was really his disciples who are doing the baptizing.

And this brings up the point that I’ve always thought about that there were some poor people who got baptized by Judas. Yeah, that would not be great, before he betrayed. Because it doesn’t say eleven of the disciples, it just says his disciples, so that means Judas too.

Interlocutor: The disciples baptized in Jesus’ life?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, the disciples did.

Interlocutor: Well, it changed. Baptism changed. But there was baptism. Starting with St. John the Baptist, St. John the Forerunner, he started baptizing and then the disciples baptized.

Interlocutor: John didn’t stop baptizing after Jesus.

Fr. Stephen: No, he kept baptizing.

Yeah, but so… and this is another thing in St. John’s Gospel because he’s so clear that Jesus is God. “When Jesus knew that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus made more disciples than John.” So Jesus is there. His disciples are baptizing and Jesus is now aware of what the Pharisees are doing and thinking. So the Pharisees now have heard that Jesus is becoming more popular than St. John. Which means what? Which means they’ll probably now start considering him a threat. So Jesus knows that they know this. He knows that they know.

He left Judea and departed again to Galilee. But He needed to go through Samaria.

Because it’s in between the two. He’s journeying up the road and he has to go through Samaria.

So He came to a city of Samaria which is called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph.

This is referring back to, in the Book of Genesis, that Jacob had given to Joseph this particular piece of land.

Now Jacob’s well was there. Jesus therefore, being wearied from His journey, sat thus by the well. It was about the sixth hour.

So it’s about noon. It’s the heat of the day. This well, by the way, is still there. It is still there today. It’s near Nablus and there’s a church built over it. The well is inside the church. You can go and see it. And this well had a number of very interesting, sort of legendary stories attached to it in Jewish folklore.

Interlocutor: Isn’t it in the Old Testament?

Fr. Stephen: It is mentioned very briefly in the Old Testament, but the stories that got attached to it become very impressive. And I’m going to tell you one of these stories because it’s going to become a little important in understanding the conversation that’s about to ensue. One of those stories that’s found in one of the Targums. Now, the Targums, what’s called the Targums, are early Aramaic translations of the Old Testament. So after Israel and Judah were both destroyed and Judah went into exile in Babylon, because Aramaic was the language used by the Babylonian empire and then by the Persian Empire after them as their primary language, the Jewish people in exile all grew up speaking Aramaic. And so, we find out in the book of Ezra that even when they came back from exile and they tried to read the Old Testament in the Hebrew, nobody could understand what they were saying because they only knew Aramaic at that point. And so that created this problem.

And so very early on, they started translating the Hebrew into Aramaic. The thing is, with the Targums, they not only just did a translation the way we would today, but they also added in little bits of at first clarification where they thought something needed to be explained or tell them where something was, “Oh, this is over by here”, these sort of little marginal notes. And as they were copied, those notes sort of grew and grew until there are whole stories now in the Targums that weren’t there originally.

And so, one of those is about the origin of this well. And it has to do with when Jacob had the vision of the ladder. We talked about it last time because Jesus made reference it with the angels ascending to say in heaven at Bethel. He named it Bet-El House of God because he saw the ladder there. So the story is that it says in Genesis that he made an altar there and worshipped God, and he called the place Bethel. Well, this continues in the Targum that he made that altar out of twelve stones, which represented the twelve tribes of Israel, even though he hadn’t had any of his twelve sons yet. And that once he made it out of those twelve stones, miraculously, the twelve stones merged into one big stone representing the nation of Israel, even though that was way in the future. And then, miraculously, that stone, that one big stone sank into the ground, and not only did it just sink into to the ground a little, it went all the way down and became the center of the earth. So you can see sort of symbolically there, they’re saying Israel is the center of the creation. And then after it sank, water came up out of the out of the hole, and it sprang up in the air for seven days. Well, actually for six days, and the 7th day, the water settled back down and rested on the Sabbath. So they constructed the well around this water. That’s how the well came to be.

So that’s sort of the legendary story for the Targums. And we’ll see in a second why it’s important to know that folktale.

A woman of Samaria came to draw water.

So this is a Samaritan woman. We’ve talked a little bit about, I think about the Samaritans before. The Samaritans are people who are ethnically mixed. After the northern kingdom of Israel was destroyed by the Assyrians, the way the Assyrians kept order in their empire and kept people from rebelling is that when they took over a new piece of territory, they’d deport about 90% of the people who were there and send them to some other place in their empire and they take people from some other part of their empire and then bring them and put them there because someone will fight for their own land: “This is land that my father and my grandfather and my great grandfather owned. And you try to take it from me, I’ll fight back.” But if you go and give me some land somewhere my family has never lived, I’m a lot less likely to fight for that land. And so, this was part of their strategy for how they would… and so that happened…

Interlocutor: And there’s another aspect of that, too, and that is most of these people believe that their god was attached to that place. So, if you are taken away from the place, then you lose your God and you have to adopt the God in this new place. It doesn’t necessarily like you for being there.

Fr. Stephen: And the Assyrians believe that if they conquered you, they had conquered your God. That means our God is better than your God because we just beat you.

Interlocutor: They actually took idols as prisoners, right?

Fr. Stephen: Right. So that happened in the northern kingdom of Israel. So there were some ethnically Jewish people, Hebrew people who were still there, very few, but there were some who were still there. But then most, this huge group of Gentiles, of Assyrians from another part of the empire got moved in. They lived alongside each other; they married each other.

And Samaria was the city that was the capital of the northern kingdom. So these people were settled in the area of Samaria around there, and so they became known as the Samaritans. And so they developed their own sort of religion that was like Judaism, but somewhat different. There’s what’s called the Samaritan Pentateuch, which is another version of the Torah with a lot of things sort of tweaked and changed. In some ways, it’s sort of similar to the way a lot of the biblical stories are changed in the Quran, where all of a sudden Ishmael is the good one and Isaac is not important. It’s the same kind of thing that they did where they have Jacob in common, but then when you get to they repudiated the line of Judah completely because of course, that wasn’t part of their heritage. So they kind of edited it to make themselves the…

Interlocutor: There’s still a few hundred Samaritans.

Fr. Stephen: There are a few still. They built a temple during that period on Mount Gerizim, which is going to be mentioned here in a minute. That temple at Mount Gerizim where they were worshipping, they said this is the real temple that one in Jerusalem’s phony.

Interlocutor: It wasn’t necessarily, or was this a site that had been holy in Israel before the Assyrians?

Fr. Stephen: There are some things that happened in the Book of Genesis there and near there, but it’s kind of a stretch. It’s within their territory and it’s mentioned and of course, the editing of the Samaritan Pentateuch it becomes much more important to do that. But, yeah, it wasn’t considered by the Jews, for example, to be a holy site that had been stolen from them. They didn’t think it was particularly special.

Now, when the Jews first came back from exile and Babylon, they got along fairly well with the Samaritans for a couple of centuries. They actually viewed Judea and Samaria and Galilee as sort of all together, being the Hebrew people, the people of Israel. But the Samaritans, during the revolution, the Maccabean Revolt, when the Jews sought their independence against the Greeks, the Samaritans didn’t join them. And they believed the Samaritans basically were collaborating with the other side. And so that starts this enmity. And so you start getting propaganda on both sides. That’s where they start denouncing each other’s temples. They start attacking each other. And that escalates until around 150 BC, John Hyrcanus, who was the king of Judea at the time, destroyed the temple on Mount Gerizim. He invaded Samaria and destroyed it and would not let them rebuild it.

Interlocutor: Is there anything left?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, they found remains, but it has not been rebuilt to this day. The Romans wouldn’t let them rebuild it either, but the Romans came in and they just sort of maintained the status quo. But there’s all this bad history and bad blood now between the Samaritans and the Jews. And at this point in the first century, for example, Josephus, who is a Jewish historian who lived in the first century, when he writes about the Samaritans, he says they have no Jewish blood in them whatsoever. He says they’re just a bunch of Gentiles; they’re no good. Now, we know that’s not true because we’ve done DNA testing now in the present day with modern day Samaritans that they do have Jewish blood. Not pure, but they are descended from Hebrews. But at that point, from the Jewish perspective, these aren’t even half-breed people. These are just a bunch of fake Jews. They’re trying to claim our religion, claim our culture, claim these things, but they’re no part of us whatsoever. So, there’s this hatred between the two.

So now Jesus is in one of their villages, passing through, and this woman, who is a Samaritan who lives in the village, comes out to the well to draw water. It’s also important going forward that we notice that she’s coming to draw water at noon, which is not the time you would normally want to bring big, heavy jugs of water to get it, at the hottest point in the day. Normally, this would be done in the morning, usually very early in the morning before it started to become hot. So the fact that she’s coming out here by herself is a tip off culturally that she’s alienated from the other women in the village, that she’s not coming at the time they would have come. She’s coming at a very non-desirable time, meaning she probably couldn’t; she’s avoiding the bigger group of people in the village. So:

A woman of 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.

So they’re on this long journey, they make this stop. The disciples go to find food for everybody. She comes to draw water. He says, “Give me a drink.”

Then the woman of Samaria said to Him, “How is it that You, being a Jew, ask a drink from me, a Samaritan woman?” For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.

So she tells us Jews and Samaritan have nothing to do with each other. Remember, Samaritans in the Jewish mind are Gentiles. That means they’re what? They’re unclean. You can’t eat with them. So you especially couldn’t take something from them and drink it, right? That would make you unclean. So she’s kind of shocked. She’s sitting there. It’s like, “Why are you talking to me? What’s going on here? Is this some kind of setup? Are you trying to get me in trouble? Is this some kind of setup?”

Jesus answered and said to her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, ‘Give Me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water.”

So it’s another case of Jesus trying to draw her now into the conversation, right? He says, “If you knew what the gift of God was, if you knew who I am, who asked you for a drink.” He doesn’t say, you would have given it to me right away. No, he says, “You would have asked me for a drink. I would have given you living water.” Now, living water we’re going to see is going to mean something more than this, but in the common parlance, the common speech, at the time just meant running water. Running water as opposed to stagnant water that’s just sitting there.

Interlocutor: Stagnant would be in the well, right.

Fr. Stephen: And in general, if you’re going to get water just out in the world, you want to try and find running water. Running water is going to be fresher and purer than water that’s sitting there with mosquitoes and whatever else you find.

The woman said to Him, “Sir, You have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep. Where then do You get that living water?”

She says, “Where are you going to get running water? I don’t see any red water out here, even if you’re talking about the well, you don’t have a jug, you don’t have a bucket, you don’t have a cup, you don’t have anything. How are you going to give me water?” And remember, these are the same kind of questions remember when he was talking to Nicodemus, right? He said, you must be well, “Can I get back into my mother’s womb and be born again? How does that work?” It’s the same kind of thing. It’s like, “Well, how are you going…?”

“Are You greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well, and drank from it himself, as well as his sons and his livestock?”

Why would she ask that? But living water remember, is flowing water. Remember what happened according to that legend, when Jacob gave them the well? It was springing up, right? So she’s saying “Are you better than him that you could make it spring up again, because you don’t have a bucket to go down and get it. Are you going to make it come up?”

Jesus answered and said to her, “Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life.”

So, He says to her, “You come and you get this water every day, and then the next day you’re thirsty again. You’ve got to come back and get more.” He says, “The water I’m talking about isn’t temporary. It isn’t just satisfying your temporary need. It’s something that satisfies you permanently. And the way it satisfies you permanently is it becomes a fountain, a well inside of you. It doesn’t just spring up for seven days like Jacob’s, but forever.”

The woman said to Him, “Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw.”

So she says, “That sounds like a good deal, not having to come here to get water every day. I’ll take it, yeah, if you’re offering. Sure.”

Now, Jesus changes the subject:

Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come here.”

The woman answered and said, “I have no husband.”

Jesus said to her, “You have well said, ‘I have no husband,’ for you have had five husbands, and the one whom you now have is not your husband; in that you spoke truly.”

So, He says, “Yeah, that’s true. You don’t currently have a husband. You’ve had five in the past, but right now you’re just living with someone.”

Interlocutor: And this is probably why she’s embarrassed to come…

Fr. Stephen: This is why she’s coming at noon, because the other women in the village, of course, would have known that she’s a disgraced person. But we have to remember the civilization we’re talking about at the time. She did not go out and marry five people and then divorce them. Because women could not file for divorce. She had five different men marry her and then send her away five times. And now this man won’t even give her the dignity of marrying her. He’s just using her. Sometimes this is taken to be Jesus saying, “Oh, you’re a sexually immoral person.”

Interlocutor: Yeah, I’ve always taken it that way.

Fr. Stephen: Right. But Jesus acknowledging what her life has been up to this point.

Interlocutor: So she’s had an awful life.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Which has not been good. We were talking about darkness in the chapter before. She’s living in darkness. She may be here at noon to draw water in the light, but this has been a very dark and sad and lonely road in life that she’s been living and that she’s trapped in.

We were talking about the problem being human, sinfulness leads to death. She is immersed in that.

The woman said to Him, “Sir, I perceive that You are a prophet.”

So he tells her what her whole life has been like. “Oh, I see. You were a prophet.” And now she’s going to decide to change the subject because she doesn’t want to talk about that anymore.

Our fathers worshiped on this mountain

Because this village is right at the base of Mount Gerizim. So she’s pointing to our ancestors worshiped on this mountain.

“and you Jews say that in Jerusalem is the place where one ought to worship.”

So she decides to ask him a theological question. “Oh, you’re a prophet. Let’s stop talking about me. I have some religious question maybe you can answer for me. We worship here, you worship there. Who’s right?”

Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe Me, the hour is coming when you will neither on this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, worship the Father.”

Now, this is a veiled reference to the destruction of the Temple, at Mount Gerizim, already the temple’s been destroyed.

“You worship what you do not know; we know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews.”

First he says, “Well, this question you’re asking is not going to be relevant for much longer. This is not really an important question anymore.” But then he does say what is correct. He says, “Actually, the Jews are right,” Jerusalem was, the temple there was the place where God there was to be worshiped. But he also acknowledges that they were worshipping God. He just says, you were worshipping without knowledge. You didn’t know, you didn’t understand. The Jews had the knowledge and had the understanding.

“But the hour is coming, and now is,”

So there’s that, that what you were talking about, Peter, it’s coming, it’s future, but it’s also already really here, because Jesus is here.

“when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father is seeking such to worship Him.”

One of the things I don’t like that they did here in the Orthodox Study Bible, and they should have known better because they should have read St. John Chrysostom about this verse, is that Spirit and Truth here should be capitalized. Spirit and Truth here should be capitalized because we’ve already seen, remember, in the first chapter of St. John’s Gospel and we’re going to see later in St. John’s Gospel where Jesus is going to come out and say on two different occasions, “I am the Truth.” The truth, like life and light are ways of referring to Jesus and the Spirit should be obvious, the Holy Spirit.

And so, a lot of times when people try to interpret this, they’ll go off of these digressions about, “Well, Jesus is making a contrast between in the past you had to go to the temple, to this one place to worship, but now you can worship God anywhere.” As if there weren’t synagogues all over the world at this time already. The contrast Jesus is making is what he just said. He said, “The Jews are worshipping who they know you are worshipping who you do not know. The time is coming now here when the true worshippers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in Truth.” Meaning, now the true worshipers, because in Jesus, because Jesus is there now God is fully revealed. It’s fully revealed as the Holy Trinity who God is the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is now revealed through Jesus who has come into the world. And that’s a revelation that neither the Jews nor the Samaritans had before.

The Jews had more knowledge than the Samaritans, but now the fullness of the knowledge of who God is has come in Jesus.

Interlocutor: I’ve always been kind of troubled by this “worship in spirit and truth” with no explanation of what that means. It always sounded troublingly vague. Now I understand that it’s not vague at all.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And then the next:

“God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.”

To truly worship God, you have to worship the triune God. Meaning that now both the Samaritans and the Jews who try to continue in their old way of doing things are now both not truly worshiping God because now he’s been fully revealed. And if you reject that, what St. John the Forerunner said, if you reject the testimony that Christ brings to who God is, the triune God, if you reject that, then you’re rejecting God completely.

So, you can’t say, “Well I’m holding to God, it’s just an older idea of God or these are all the same God.” St John, he’s going to be even more clear later, but he’s already clear here, if you reject the revelation of God that comes in Jesus, you’re not worshiping God at all. You’re not worshiping God at all if you reject Him.

The woman said to Him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ).

Interlocutor: Would Samaritans be thinking that too? Well, that’s a surprise.

Fr. Stephen: Well, notice:

“When He comes, He will tell us all things.”

So do you notice a difference there in what the Messiah is going to do? He’s not going to be a king, nothing to do with the Romans, nothing to do with the kingdom. He’s going to tell us all things. Because, remember, the Samaritans only accepted their version of the Pentateuch, which ends with the promise that there’s going to be a prophet like Moses. And the word Torah, we translate it “law” in English a lot, which is St. Jerome’s fault because he translated it as lex in Latin. But in reality, Torah means teaching. This is the teaching that God gave through Moses.

And so, the Samaritan idea of who the Messiah is going to be is not based on David, who they want nothing to do with anyway. It’s not about King David. Jerusalem is King David’s city and all that. It’s not about King David. It’s patterned after Moses that a prophet is going to come, right? So she goes from, I see that you are a prophet. Now she’s going, “Okay, now I think you’re the prophet who’s going to tell us all, teach us everything,” right? So she understands what Jesus just said to be they had more knowledge than you, but now I’m bringing the fullness of knowledge. That’s how she understands it, because she’s saying, oh, are you then the prophet, you’re going to now tell us the rest, the rest of the Torah? You’re going to now explain everything, bring us the full revelation of God.

Interlocutor: But doesn’t this mean in St. John’s scheme of things that this woman is righteous? Because she isn’t completely there yet, but she’s starting to recognize who Jesus is.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And this is, of course, St. Photini, who will later be martyred.

Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am He.”

So notice Jesus doesn’t come in and say, “By the way, I’m the prophet and teacher who your people have been expecting,” but He gets her there. She comes to understand that that’s who he is, by being drawn in. And yes, this means this woman, this is part of the… in terms of the Gentiles, in St. John’s Gospel, even though she’s a Samaritan, even though she’s lived this kind of dark life, when she sits there and she encounters Jesus and talks to Him, she ends up recognizing Him. She ends up recognizing him.