I who speak to you am He

 

 Therefore, when the Lord knew that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus made and baptized more disciples than John (though Jesus Himself did not baptize, but His disciples), He left Judea and departed again to Galilee.  But He needed 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.  Now Jacob's well was there.  Jesus therefore, being wearied from His journey, sat thus by the well.  It was about the sixth hour.  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.  

 

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.  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."  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?  Are You greater than our father Jacob, who gave us this well, and drank from it himself, as well as his sons and his livestock?"  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."  

 

The woman said to Him, "Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw."  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 who you now have is not your husband; in that you spoke truly."  The woman said to Him, "Sir, I perceive that You are a prophet.  Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, and you Jews say that in Jerusalem is the place where one ought to worship."  Jesus said to her, "Woman, believe Me, the hour is coming when you will neither on this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, worship the Father.  You worship what you do not know; we know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews.  But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father is seeking such 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" (who is called Christ).  "When He comes, He will tell us all things."  Jesus said to her, "I who speak to you am He."

 

- John 4:1–26 

 

Yesterday we read that Jesus and His disciples came into the land of Judea, and there He remained with them and baptized.  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.  Then there arose a dispute between some of John's disciples and the Jews about purification.  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!"  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.'  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.  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.  And what He has seen and heard, that He testifies; and no one receives His testimony.  He who has received His testimony has certified that God is true.  For He whom God has sent speaks the words of God, for God does not give the Spirit by measure.  The Father loves the Son, and has given all things into His hand.  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." 

 Therefore, when the Lord knew that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus made and baptized more disciples than John (though Jesus Himself did not baptize, but His disciples), He left Judea and departed again to Galilee.  But He needed to go through Samaria.   Here Jesus has attended the first Passover Feast given in John's Gospel (there will be two more as the Gospel covers stories of subsequent periods in Jesus' earthly ministry), and His disciples were baptizing in Judea.  But now we are given notice that the Pharisees are keeping a wary eye on Jesus.  John the Baptist was a very renown figure in his own time, and highly regarded as a holy man by the people.   At this point, however, Jesus is eclipsing John in terms of numbers of people who are following Him.  So He is going back to Galilee, away from the center of power of the Pharisees in Jerusalem.  Samaria is the region to the north of Jerusalem, and is between Judea and Galilee (see this map).

So He came to a city of Samaria which is called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph.  Now Jacob's well was there.  Jesus therefore, being wearied from His journey, sat thus by the well.  It was about the sixth hour.  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.  My study bible comments here that the Old Testament doe snot mention Jacob's well, although Jacob did dwell in this area (Genesis 33:19).  It says that wells were significant because of their rarity and their value in desert life.  Therefore, wells came to be a symbol of life itself (Psalms 36:9-10, 46:4; Isaiah 55:1).  This well continues to be maintained as a shrine to this day, and pilgrims can drink from it.  That Jesus is wearied from His journey reveals to us His complete humanity.  The sixth hour is noon.   In the tradition of the Church, this woman came to be known as St. Photini (the "Illumined One").

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.  My study bible explains that the Samaritans were a mixed race people and traditional enemies of the Jews.  Although they worshiped the God of Israel, and were also awaiting the Messiah as did the Jews, they accepted only the first five books of the Old Testament (the Pentateuch or Torah) as their Scriptures.  They had built their own temple on Mt. Gerizim, which was destroyed by the Jews in 128 BC.

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."  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?  Are You greater than our father Jacob, who gave us this well, and drank from it himself, as well as his sons and his livestock?"  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."   Living water, used as a phrase in the ordinary sense, means fresh and flowing water.  That is, from a stream or spring rather than from a pond or cistern.   Christ uses this terms, my study bible says, to mean the grace of the Holy Spirit that leads to eternal life (John 7:37-39).   This gift, it says, not only remains in a person, but it is also so abundant that it overflows to others.  The woman misunderstands what Christ is saying, and she asks Him, "Are You greater than our father Jacob?"   In the Scriptures, Jacob is a "type" of Christ.  Jacob received the vision of the divine ladder (Genesis 28:12), which Christ fulfills.  (See also this reading and commentary for more on the divine ladder.)   Moreover, just as Jacob gave this well for earthly life, now Christ gives to the world the well of the Holy Spirit for eternal life.

The woman said to Him, "Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw."  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 who you now have is not your husband; in that you spoke truly."  The woman said to Him, "Sir, I perceive that You are a prophet."  As Jesus understood that she was living with a man without being married, and also knew of her long list of husbands, this woman perceives that Christ is a prophet.  As the Samaritans accepted no prophets after Moses, the one prophet they expected was the Messiah, who was foretold by Moses in Deuteronomy 18:15-18.  My study bible points out that Christ's insight into people's hearts, which is reported many times in the Gospels, underscores His divine nature.

"Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, and you Jews say that in Jerusalem is the place where one ought to worship."  Jesus said to her, "Woman, believe Me, the hour is coming when you will neither on this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, worship the Father.  You worship what you do not know; we know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews.  But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father is seeking such 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" (who is called Christ).  "When He comes, He will tell us all things."   My study bible says that if Jesus was truly the expected Prophet, then He could settle this historical argument between Jews and Samaritans about where worship was to take place.  But Jesus refuses to answer the question on this very "earthly" basis, and instead elevates the discussion to the manner in which people ought to worship.  More importantly, Christ turns the attention to the One whom we worship:  to God.   As my study bible frames Jesus' teaching here, the Father is worshiped in spirit -- that is, in the Holy Spirit -- and in truth -- that is in Christ Himself (John 14:6), and according to Christ's revelation.  When Jesus reveals that God is Spirit, it is an affirmation that God cannot be confined to a particular location.  Those who receive the Holy Spirit and believe in Christ, my study bible tells us, can worship God the Father with purity of heart.  Salvation is of the Jews is an affirmation that true revelation of God comes from Judaism.  It quotes St. Athanasius the Great:  "The commonwealth of Israel was the school of the knowledge of God for all the nations."  Even more importantly, here Jesus testifies that the Messiah, who had been prophesied among Jews, had now risen from among the Jews.  While the gift of salvation in Christ is to all nations, my study bible explains, it has come from within Judaism, as the Gospels testify.  The hour that Christ says is coming refers to the death and Resurrection of Christ, and to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, which inaugurates the worship of this new covenant, in spirit and in truth.

Jesus said to her, "I who speak to you am He."  This phrase is literally translated from the Greek as "I AM [in Greek, ego eimi/εγώ εἰμι], who speak to you."  A theme which will be returned to in this Gospel, "I AM" is the divine Name of God, as given to Moses in Exodus 3:14.  Jesus' use of this Name indicates a theophany, or revelation of God.  The use of this Name by a mere human being was considered to be blasphemy, and was punishable by death (see John 8:58, Mark 14:62).  But, as Jesus is Himself divine, the use of the Name here reveals His unity with the Father and the Holy Spirit.  We are to understand that Christ is God Incarnate.

If Jesus is God, as witnessed by His utterance of the Divine Name of God, the I AM, then what are we to make of the Scriptures themselves, which tell us about Him?  Is not all of Scripture a revelation of God?  Jesus reveals Himself to this woman of Samaria, as she's called in John's Gospel, and at the same time, we're given echoes of revelation that extend all around us as we read, for the Scriptures also are inspired and given by God in order to reveal God to us.  The same is true of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ.  He is born in the flesh in order to reveal God to us, to manifest to us.  As John says in his Prologue to this Gospel:  "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth" (John 1:14).  To behold His glory, in the flesh, as one of His disciples, is to be one to whom God was revealed in God's manifestation of divinity in this world.  John also speaks here of theophany; that is, a revelation of God.  In the Greek, theos is God, and -phany comes from the word phainein, which is literally from the term "bring to light," and means to show, reveal, or manifest.  So Jesus, as the Word Incarnate, chooses to "show Himself" even in His divinity to this woman who seems like the last of all possible candidates for such a revelation.   Surely it is a sign that the Gospel, another revelation of God (and of the Word), will go out to all the world.  But it truly redefines for us -- and especially redefined for Christ's contemporaries and those of every century to follow -- to whom that revelation belongs, and for whom it occurs.  For she is the least of these personified, in some sense.  She is a woman, she is a despised foreigner, she is a person with whom no Jew (and particularly no Jewish male) would normally ever be having a conversation with, and especially when unaccompanied by others.  Not only is she a woman, and a Samaritan, but she's also one who's had a string of husbands and is living with a man to whom she's not married at all.  All of this is potentially scandalous for His time and place.  And so importantly, Jesus knows all of this about her.  So why her?  Why is He talking to her and revealing to her not only His own divinity, but even the Holy Spirit which will be given (the "living water"), and also the manner in which God must be worshiped under the new covenant He brings ("in spirit and in truth")?  Why her?  She is precisely an example of the "least of these" whom Christ has come to serve.  Jesus breaks just about every social taboo of His time and milieu to speak with her.  She is an infinite blank variable of a type that we can continue to "fill in" through any stereotypical example we can find in our own world, our own time, our own place, our own lives.  She is the least likely person with whom we might be in contact, whomever that might be.  All we have to do is to fill in the category of the last person with any "currency" in a group; she's basically that person.  This great theophany or revelation of God, within the entire Book that is a revelation of God, reveals to us something so significant about God that we might miss it although it is here in plain sight, as revelations of truths about God so often might be missed if the examples in the Gospel are anything to go by.   It reveals to us that God knows no boundaries when it comes to God's creatures, that whatever limits we might put on God and God's word and God's love and the eligibility of our fellow beings for that love and that word will always be off.  It tells us that when we see a person who is some sort of scandal to us, that God just might appear out of nowhere seeking to reach right into that person and claim that one for God, just as this one will become known as St. Photini in the Church.  The reason for her name, "the Illumined One" will become more clear in tomorrow's reading.  In that grand landscape that is the reality of the heart, with so much hidden in it, God might just reach in to find exactly the stuff that is capable of returning God's love, and so returning one who was lost back to God.  And that is something we can never ever lose sight of.  Because if we are truly Christ's disciples, we also must understand how much effort is put in simply in order to reach us.  If that is not a humbling thought, consider how likely it is that Christ would reach to you or to me wherever we are, in the quiet of the moments we give up on our own way, or come to terms with our own limitations.  For that is a love that never, ever stops and knows no limits in its efforts to reach me and to reach you.