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.
8 / Two Blessings
John 6
“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).
Our New Testament was formed around questions that needed good answers in the life of the early church. The letters of Paul provide such answers to such questions. Will those who die before Christ returns be saved? Thessalonians. How do we teach those who have faith to live in ways that become faith? Corinthians. Must a Gentile become a Jew in order to become a Christian? Galatians. How are we to think about Jesus Christ? Romans. Is there a joyful way to live through conflict? Philippians. Does faith involve what one owns? Philemon. Paul writes his answers in the years 50–58, and he does so with no reference to Jesus. No parable, no teaching, no life incident, no birth story, no healing, nothing. On what does he rely? On the cross and resurrection, and on the spirit, and on his own experience and reason.
Some decades later the church had more questions. These found responses in the Gospels, narrative responses that used traditions about Jesus to answer questions of the day. How are men and women to relate? What is the place of children? Can we have any guidance about money? How and for what are we to hope? Who shall not have and who shall have authority? Does the Old Testament count at all? In answer to these issues and questions the churches of Mark and Matthew and Luke recalled what they could, many years later, of sayings about and a few sayings of Jesus. The Gospels were formed in the church, for the express purpose of answering saving questions.
John comes along many years later. He plays the old tunes, but in a new way. Did you ever hear Louis Armstrong play some of the patriotic hymns? Or Ray Charles sing the national anthem? It is the same, sort of. It is like Mark Trotter said about his 100 year old axe: “It is still the same axe, my grandfather’s axe. It has just had many different handles and many different heads. But it is the same.” Sort of.
So here in chapter 6, John plays the same traditional music, to a jazz beat. He relates again the well traveled tales of miraculous feeding and salvation on the sea. A new manna and a new Jonah. But listen to his horn, with a New Orleans kick; to his piano, with a little bit of the blues.
He has something new to emphasize about two fish and five barley loaves. He has something new to report about a boat and a storm and a dark night. He has two blessings to deliver! The Fourth Gospel is really a stitched-together series of sermons which emerged in a church that found freedom following disappointment and grace amid dislocation. He himself is gracious and free. If the earliest Christians could be free savingly to apply their tradition to new times, we can too! Two blessings are ours today, as well.
Freedom Following Disappointment
Sometimes churches, groups, even families need the discipline of serious editing. Here is a young man’s confession: “In pain and with great disappointment I finally let go of my family. Everything among and between us had become toxic. Everything I tasted and touched had become a kind of poison. It was all unhealthy. I tried for years to help but my help was not helpful. There are just so many times you can cringe and cry when those you love make terrible, costly, irreparable mistakes, after you have warned and cautioned and cajoled. So the best, the very best thing I could do for all was to leave. And I did.”
And in that disappointment is when and where he found freedom.
Grace During Dislocation
In John 6, food carries memory. The feast of Sukkoth, in Judaism, an autumn meal consumed under a partial roof, symbolizes a meal with memory. Surely the feast of Passover, with its herbs and vegetables and spices and questions conveys memory in a meal. One of three great meanings of Holy Communion is remembrance. Holiday meals, Thanksgiving and Christmas, are meals laden with memory, more laden with memory even than with calories, if that be possible.
I turn again to Marcel Proust, whose thousands of print pages burst forth from the memory of a long lost moment of tea and Madeleine cakes, the cakes swirling dreamily in the tea. Meal and memory.
The other day, because I had some coupons, I stopped at the Subway to by sandwiches for my class lunch. Fewer came to lunch than I had thought, so, later in the afternoon, the extra tuna sub did beckon sufficiently to be consumed. Somewhere in the late afternoon of a non-descript autumn Monday, I found myself slowly and a little guiltily enjoying an extra sandwich.
Did you ever find yourself just sort of in a strange reverie, carried along by an avalanche of physical memory, occasioned in a simple meal?
When