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John 4

“These things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name” (John 20: 31).

In old Castile, northwest of Madrid, out on the arid, brown central Spanish highland, you may look toward the mountain range once toured by Robert Jordan and his muñequita, before his fictitious but nonetheless atoning, salvific, Christlike death, at the hands of Franco’s soldiers. The mountain range, high and in its own way majestic, looks very much like a woman asleep, so the Segovianos call her or it or the mountain “la mujer muerta.” As I and Robert Jordan and perhaps you also have found, it is a day’s long hard hike up into the Castillian mountains.

The Gospel of John is such a mountain range, high and lifted up. It challenges our endurance. It tests our orienteering. It measures our preparation and execution. There is an exacting and perfecting quality to this Gospel, similar to the exacting and perfecting character of fellowship at this church. With every cut-back trail, at every rest point, atop every lookout, with every majestic view, this spiritual gospel will address you in the midst of two crucial battles, those of dislocation and disappointment, with the good news of grace and freedom, with the ongoing need to choose, and—in choosing—to find the life of belonging and meaning, personal identity and global imagination.

I realize belatedly that the most lastingly formative aspect of my theological education, at Union Seminary in the City of New York, in the years of the Carter administration, was the preaching of William Sloane Coffin. In his recent collection of wisdom sayings, Coffin has a typically urbane, piercing word to say about hypocrisy. It is as close to the mind of Jesus in John 4 as I think you can come: “Generally we try to pass ourselves off as something that is special in our hearts and minds, something we yearn for, something beyond us. That’s rather touching.”

We all have at least two life stories, the one we publicize and the one we privatize. They both have meaning. Nor should one be eliminated or the other. In this chapter, following on the opening given in our lesson today, Jesus addresses the two biographies of a woman from Samaria. . . Go call your husband. . . I have no husband. . . You are right in saying you have no husband for you have had five husbands and he whom you now have is not your husband. . . As people and as a culture, we have more than one story to tell, more than one biography. Two biographies, like the woman at the well. Our best foot and then the other foot. The gospel this morning, a saving and healing truth for you, is that Jesus the Christ knows both biographies, all our stories, and loves us still.

“We put our best foot forward, but it is the other one that needs the attention.”

The Jesus of the Fourth Gospel is not easily blended with his counterparts in Matthew, Mark and Luke. Rather than projecting our own needs for uniformity out onto these ancient, holy, mysterious, puzzling and powerful writings, we first to listen to them. Listen. We need to let the Bible speak to us, as Robert McAffee Brown used to say. The Jesus of John 4 sees into others’ minds. He knows things without being told. He divines the secrets hidden in the heart. He stands alone and in public view with a woman, a Samaritan woman, a troubled Samaritan woman. This Jesus is guided along in a lengthy mystagogical conversation, full of riddles, double entendres, hidden meanings, mysterious silences. He offers living water. In none of this does one find a single correspondence with the earlier three quests for Jesus in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. John’s is an entirely different Jesus. So, asked a bright teenager in September, which is true?

And here is my answer. They all are. They all truly represent the actual historical experience of Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, which various little communities in his fledging church did have of him. All four are historically accurate. With accuracy they describe the Jesus known in the actual lives of the communities of Mark, forty years after Calvary; Matthew, fifty-five years after Calvary; Luke, sixty years after Calvary; and John ninety years after Calvary. They give us grace and freedom to sense Jesus, as they did, present among us, as He was among them. He is risen. He is not here. See the place where they laid him.

The account of the woman at the well provides one of two eyes needed to see. The other is the experience of Jesus, crucified and risen, which John knew and felt and preached. This Jesus, in 120 AD, knew his people. They felt his knowing presence. They felt his probing spirit. So do we. They faced his clairvoyant candor. So do we. They acknowledged his healing voice. So do we. A voice like no other—equanimous and serene. They sensed his love. They preached his love. They shared his love. Even across ranges of personal, intimate, generic confusion. And so do we. It is not the water of the well that slakes our thirst for salvation, but the water of eternal life. This water bathes both of our feet, both of our biographies, both the one we put forward and the one we hold back.

Grace During Dislocation

Young soldiers in their first year of service, at home or abroad, know about the dislocation that comes with growing up. So do their parents and aunts and uncles. Young women and men settling in at college for the first year know about the dislocation that comes with developing that second identity, that real self, yourself. At mid-life a man finds that he is ready to make up his mind to change his mind. Dislocation is mainly, but not only, the work of salvation for youth. Ask the eighty-year-old who sells her house. Or the ninety-year-old who keeps his. Salvation is not a matter of chronology, only, but of ontology and theology and psychology.

Our lasting health will rely in part on grace uncovered during dislocation. That John’s Gospel emerges out of the tide, the great sea change, of dislocation is itself a profound affirmation of grace. If this community, disoriented and discarded and dismembered amid Jews and Gnostics in 120 AD, could receive courage in change, then so can we. We need not fear change. You need not fear change. For down in the depths of dislocation, John discovered grace.

The most pervasive social change of the last thirty years, across our culture, lies in the rearrangements related to gender and to sexuality. The social distance between me and my grandfather is dwarfed by that between my grandmother and my daughter. My grandmother learned to drive using a buggy whip and sitting behind a team of horses. My daughter flies across the continent week by week. Elsie was born thirty years before she gained the right to vote. Emily rocks the vote. Gramma was one of a very small percentage of women to graduate from college. Emily runs the place. Elsie raised children, cooked meals, supported the church, and listened. My daughter works, leads, earns, and speaks. Women are still undergoing the tears and strains of pervasive social dislocation. Nor is feminism finished. Nor is equality achieved. Nor does freedom fully ring, not for women in America nor certainly for women around the globe.

Yet with this righteous dislocation, every bit as necessary as that which liberated John, has come an undertow of anxiety, much of it related to our understanding of sexuality. Sex, physical genital intimacy, is not what it used to be. And women are still largely paying the bill. In the great sea of sexual dislocation, certainly alive in the text of John 4, is there any grace to be found?

What are we teaching our children about sex? Do we happily and strongly affirm the covenant of marriage? Do our sentiments and advisements short of marriage lead, for the most part, to preparation for healthy marriage? Across the gender divides, can we still be responsible not only to but also for one another, without yet patronizing or prevaricating? Why are young men so largely absent from our churches?

I have no word of the Lord on this, but what insight I have I share.

You are a grandfather or grandmother. With rosy cheeks and a smile, before dinner, you may recall a harvest moon, an evening of affection, with gentle hints at what chivalry can mean, did mean, will mean.

You are a mom or dad. Books with information can be bought and shared. But priceless and purchasing power is what comes next. Your sense of gratitude for life. Your honest joy, happiness, and pleasure in intimacy. Your witness to the vulnerabilities of such closeness. Your conviction that God made humans as sexual beings and means to help us as sexual beings to become as humane as possible. Then stop. Look. Listen. Listen. Listen.

You are an aunt, uncle, teacher, neighbor, youth counselor. Bless you. Do you realize that you are, in trust, safe space and trusted freedom for younger person who may need to rely on you?

You are such a youth. Remember these five things: You are made in the image and likeness of God. You are precious. You know the difference between loving someone and using someone. You need not be afraid to stand apart from the crowd. You have right to sense how you are feeling, what you are thinking. Does this seem right to me? Does this feel right for me? If you make a mistake, well, remember forgiveness, consider what you have learned, shake the dust from your feet and move ahead. And you can also, if the moment is right, quote Anne Lamotte: “No is a complete sentence.”

You are a church on East Avenue. Say this: “Jesus is among us, speaking and healing. His grace tells us that the Word became flesh, that we are made in God’s image, that physical pleasure and sexual intimacy are God’s good gifts, that we can live with integrity, that we can become self-aware, that we can learn from but not be defined by our mistakes, that the covenant of marriage provides the best and surest and healthiest and safest location for sex amid the great dislocations of our time.”

Life is good. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. This is the ringing affirmation of the Fourth Gospel. Physical life, in all its panoply of intimacy and estrangement, is good.

Freedom Following Disappointment

Now that we have come to chapter 4, we need to name and regret a biblical disappointment. If we are going to read John at all, and hear the gospel of John together, then we need to be honest about a scriptural disappointment. As with all of our lives, the Bible itself, the very Word of God, does nonetheless harbor disappointments. Hear the good news: there is even freedom following religious disappointment.

Sometimes our great strengths occasion our most glaring weaknesses. If John is the Bible’s great strength, it would then be possible that here too we might find great weakness. And we do.

Oh, I give no ground with regard to the truth of Scripture. The Bible is freedom’s book, the pulpit is freedom’s voice, the church is freedom’s defense. It is also occasionally true that the Bible is a holy disappointment. Nowhere in Scripture is the height of Christian freedom more powerfully depicted than in John, and yet, at the same time, nowhere is the Bible more of a disappointment.

This gospel is anti-Semitic, at least to our ears after 1940. It was composed in the white heat of one small group leaving a synagogue in order freely to worship what the synagogue could only understand as a second God. It was the charge of ditheism, though denied and controverted, which moved John’s little church out into a free and frightening future. So the Gospel of John speaks roughly of its Semitic mother religion, of its own tradition. The living water is meant to surpass the dead water of Jacob, of Jacob’s well. Notice the way the writer refers with oral scare quotes to “the Jews,” like Robert E. Lee calling Yankees “those people.” Notice the dismissive explication, here and elsewhere, of Jewish rites. Notice that even though salvation is from the Jews, his own people “received him not.” Notice Jesus saying, “All who came before me are thieves and robbers.” We have an obligation to notice. And to regret, to express contrition and compunction. These words from this gospel have done immeasurable harm, from Augustine to Luther to the Third Reich to today, and that is a spiritual disappointment. As Christianity puts its best foot forward, it is really the other one that needs attention. We have two biographies ourselves. That of persecuted, and that of persecutor. Of all religious bodies, we have the most work to do with regard to anti-Semitism.

How are we to find freedom following such spiritual disappointment? By facing facts, by learning from our experience of success and failure, by moving ahead: The fact is that Christianity has been pervasively guilty of latent and patent anti-Semitism and the Gospel of John has been one of its sources. We have and can learn from this failure, by carefully monitoring our use of religious language. And we can move ahead. John is guiding us toward a global vision, an ecumenical spirituality, a universal Truth, a global village green, space for grace and time for freedom. And our Jewish brothers and sisters can teach us to continue, with Jacob, to wrestle with God.

In 1978 Jan and I had dinner with Elie Wiesel in the home of Robert Mcafee Brown. Wiesel survived the death camps and spent 10 silent years in Paris before writing Night. Its pathos, its witness, its question, its challenge need to stay before this generation as well:

Where is God? Where is He? The third rope was still moving, the child was still alive . . . For more than half and hour he stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him full in the face. He was still alive when I passed in front of him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet glazed . . . Behind me I heard the same man asking: Where is God now? . . . and I heard a voice within me answer Him. . . . Where is He? Here he is—He is hanging here on this gallows.1

These things are spoken that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name.

This week you can choose to grow in faith, and so find a fuller part of your second identity. This week you can choose to grow in love, and so open a fuller part of the world’s imagination.

Faith is personal commitment to an unverifiable truth. It involves a leap.

Faith is an objective uncertainty grasped with subjective certainty. It involves a leap.

Faith is the way to salvation, a real identity and a rich imagination. But it does involve a leap.

Now is the time to jump.

All of us are better when we are loved.

Notes from Raymond Brown’s Lectures on John

Union Theological Seminary

Spring 1978

March 30, 1978: The Samaritan Woman

We turn now to the longer narratives. Here John is at his best. Against the many theories of multiple sources, we also must mention the remarkable, flowing nature of the longer narratives. Until now, John has dealt with disciples, Jewish believers, and Nicodemus. Now the disciples are spectators.

Samaritan interlude: there is a possible historical basis for this material. The story may be a parable for the story of the conversion of Samaria. There is nothing in the other gospels about Samaria. Therefore, this story is probably an integral part of the self-understanding of the Johannine community.

Question: Was this Samaritan influx the straw that broke the camel’s back of relations with Judaism? Ditheism? Further, in chapter 8, Jesus is called a Samaritan. So, this may be autobiographical. 4:4 by the way is not meant to be geographical. Sychar: Mount Gerizim was the central place for northern worship. Jacob’s well was given to Joseph, the Samaritan hero. (In Steven’s Acts speech they are buried in Gerizim.) This recalls the meeting of Isaac and Rebecca. The question, then, is a very natural one. Where is the true God worshipped?

How far should one press this symbolism? The sixth hour would have been about noon. (RB doesn’t think much of this). The conflict between Jews and Samaritans is also recorded in Sirach (a great rabbinic text). Again: RB thinks that there were Samaritans in the community of the fourth gospel. The dialogue is very carefully built up. Here as elsewhere in John’s writing there is the enactment of the challenge to believe: you must be open to the gift that only he can give.

“Living waters” refers to flowing waters (7:38–39). But all of this terminology also refers to the Law in Jewish and Samaritan thought, and in Wisdom. Jesus is also speaking of himself as the living water (as in Chapter 6). Food and bread are also wisdom symbols. Jesus is all that the Old Testament says about God. Wisdom, Law, and Word are all found together in the intertestamental works. All this is still true, the gospel argues, but now it is tied to Jesus. Both sides use the same language, except one embodies it in a person, and the other in the law.

At a second level, the symbolism of the Old Testament here also interprets the sacraments of the community, baptism in particular. He uses the same language to refer to two different things. John may here be worried about the community having too static a notion of what they do sacramentally. Therefore he ties in community action with things Jesus did in his own life. Jesus’ talk with the Samaritan woman is concomitant with his talk with people in John’s community.

John never argues purely polemically. He wants in the end to say something meaningful to the community. Purpose and direction are both inward and outward for John. (A crucial point lightly touched). At first he wrote against outsiders, but second he wrote about the nature of their own life. Give me this water. . .”

4:18—The husbands depict the wife as not only Samaritan, but also one who even for Samaria is below par. Of course Jesus knows exactly what type of woman she is. But this is no problem to grace, if the woman will come to the Son of Man. “I can see you are a prophet.”

The heart of this scripture is the question of where God shall be worshipped. This again is reminiscent of Steven in Acts. God is not worshipped in a particular place. This is a break from Jewish Christianity and from Paul. Jerusalem has no longer any importance. There is a replacement theology at work in this gospel. God is Spirit. So we must worship God in spirit and in truth. You cannot worship Him unless you have His spirit. Both Jerusalem and Gerizim are out, not for worship by those “begotten from above.” Here again we have the conflict and contrast between the flesh and the spirit. This relativizes all the other questions.

The final author wants people to know that the Samaritans, though accepted, neither provide basis for nor constitute the heart of the group, the community. Their theology—John’s theology—is preserved through Judaism, and is a fulfillment of its promises.

This is no crude notion of baptism. Individuals must still confess Jesus as the Christ.

Now the disciples arrive. They have had nothing to do with this. The disciples did not convert the woman. (Perhaps this means that the disciples did not start John’s community). There is a remarkable role given to the woman here. Do others resent this? In Asia Minor in the late second century the Montanists do have female spirited prophets, which is opposed to the practice of the rest of the church. Does this have some roots in John’s time? The debate over the status and role of woman goes a long way back in time.

Interchangeable symbols: food and water. Here the harvest is already taking place. The harvest follows immediately. Not so much “one sows and another reaps.” Maybe so with John the Baptist. But here, the woman sowed but the disciples will reap. Is the Samaritan belief positive? Maybe they are sign types: we know this is the savior.

1. Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Hill & Wang, 1960) 62.