Christ

by Jack Miles

  Jesus himself, though at home in Galilee, is Jewish rather than Galilean by birth, according to the two Gospels, Matthew and Luke, that give his genealogy. In both, Joseph, Jesus’ father, though resident in Nazareth of Galilee, is in fact an ethnic Jew tracing his lineage back to King David. (Joseph’s ancestral town is David’s own ancestral city, Bethlehem of Judah.) Many, if not most, historians suspect that this Jewish/Messianic genealogy was created after the fact; but for literary purposes, Jesus—who clearly regards Jerusalem as the center of the world—must be regarded as both religiously and genealogically Jewish. Even for literary purposes, however, to say that he is a Jew without giving any weight at all to his Galilean derivation is to miss something that at several points adds a crucial complexity to his identity.

  All this is an unavoidably laborious way of showing how very much the Gospel can suggest simply by noting that Jesus has stopped “near the land that Jacob gave to his son Joseph.” The New Testament is like a skin on every square inch of which the Old Testament is tattooed. The Gospel writers, in particular, cannot move a muscle without bringing some portion of the Hebrew scriptures into view. Recall that Jesus has just been acclaimed by the Baptist as the bridegroom of Israel and that what the divine bridegroom proverbially faced in his marriage to Israel was his wife’s promiscuity: her incorrigible habit of “whoring” after false gods. In the eyes of the Jews—and on this point, Jesus stands with them—Samaria represents schism if not heresy: religious “whoring,” self-righteously institutionalized and defiantly defended. This is the context in which Jesus finds himself unexpectedly deep in conversation with a woman who is both a Samaritan and living with a man who is not her husband. She is, in short, both a figurative and a literal adulterer.

  Jesus replied to her:

  “If you only knew what God is offering

  and who it is who says to you,

  ‘Give me a drink,’

  you would be the one to ask,

  and he would give you living water.”

  “You have no bucket, sir,” she replied, “and the well is deep. How do 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 sons and his cattle?”

  Jesus replied:

  “Whoever drinks this water

  will thirst again;

  but no one who drinks the water that I shall give

  will ever thirst again:

  The water that I shall give

  will become a spring of water, welling up for eternal life.”

  “Sir,” the woman said, “give me some of that water, so that I may never thirst again nor ever again come here to draw water.” (4:10–15)

  In a culture in which drawing and hauling water was women’s work, the well was a place where women, ordinarily kept secluded, could be seen in public and even addressed. At Genesis 29:11, the insouciant Jacob actually risks kissing a strange young woman at a well. If flirtation and gallantry always proceed by delicate double entendres, then the well is a place where anything said might have a second, concealed meaning.

  As we have seen in his conversation with Nicodemus, Jesus is given to speaking in theological double entendre. But what happens when he speaks his solemn variety of double meaning in a place where another kind is commonly heard? As a Jew, he has taken a socially unexpected liberty by speaking to the woman at all. When his plain opening line, “Give me something to drink,” takes poetic flight, what is she to think? What does he, who reads minds, expect her to think?

  Jesus asks the woman for water, but before she can give him any (Does she ever? How like the Bible not to bother telling us), he says that she should be asking him for “living water.” Although “living water” is a Greek expression for spurting water, water that bubbles out of a spring as if alive, does the woman really think that the spurting water Jesus says he can give her is spring water? Might she not find that interpretation, in the culturally permissive environs of a well, all too innocent a reading of what the Jewish stranger is hinting at? She tries once, flat-footedly, for a clarification, and then responds more cleverly, in a way that will do her no harm if the stranger is not flirting but can keep the ball in play if he is: “Sir, give me some of that water, so that I may never thirst again nor ever again come here to draw water.”

  Rather than continue speaking of water, living or otherwise, Jesus abruptly changes the subject: “Go, call your husband, and come back here” (John 4:16). Why is her husband’s presence required? To hear Jesus expound further on the subject of living water? It is as if Jesus, having heard the woman’s ambiguously flirtatious response to his ambiguously flirtatious overture, has read her mind and decided to shame her.

  The woman answered, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right to say, ‘I have no husband,’ for you have had five, and the one you have now is not your husband. You have spoken the truth.” “I see that you are a prophet, sir,” said the woman. “Our fathers worshipped on this mountain, though you people say that Jerusalem is the place where one must worship.” (4:17–20)

  Jesus makes a pointed comment about her personal life. Rather than either confirm or deny the charge, she makes a reference to the religious differences of the Jews and the Samaritans. Is she answering one change of subject with another?

  No, she is simply anticipating his next step. The fact that Jesus has read her mind alerts her to his being more than the average thirsty traveler. But if he is a Jewish prophet, then after upbraiding her for her marital infidelity, she expects that he will upbraid her nation for its religious promiscuity. In fact, she may detect that he has done so already. In Aramaic, the language that Jesus and the woman would be speaking, the word for husband, ba’al, “lord,” is also a word that may be used to refer to a foreign god. Whence the elaborate pun: “You, Milady, have had five milords” is the same as “You Samaritans have had five gods.”

  Once the Samaritan woman knows what game is being played, she proves herself very nearly Jesus’ equal in playing it. She sees his religious allusion and trumps it. Her remark “Our fathers worshipped on this mountain, though you people say that Jerusalem is the place where one must worship” has an elegant edge, for Our in that sentence does not include the Samaritans alone but also the Jews and therefore also Jesus. Once upon a time, all Israel—the forefathers of the Jews as well as the forefathers of the Samaritans—worshipped here at Shechem, she correctly notes. Shechem is the place where Abraham, then still called Abram, built his first crude stone altar after being called to Canaan; it is the land that Jacob, Abraham’s grandson, gave Joseph, Abraham’s great-grandson; it is the town where Joseph is buried, his bones having been carried lovingly through the desert by Moses and Joshua. Perhaps most important of all, Shechem is the mountain where Joshua built the first national shrine in the promised land. On that occasion, after conquering Canaan, all Israel gathered for celebration and rededication, and Israel’s ardor and enthusiasm for God reached a peak that would never be attained again. “Our” Shechem, the Samaritan woman demurely hints, is the home of the old-time religion of Israel. It is “you” Jews who insist on transferring everything to upstart Jerusalem.

  Jesus responds both as a loyal Jew refusing to back down before the standard Samaritan claim and as God Incarnate on the eve of the moment when he will trump the claims of both Shechem and Jerusalem with a new covenant “in spirit and truth”:

  “Believe me, woman, the hour is coming

  when you will worship the Father

  neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.

  You [Samaritans] worship what you do not know;

  we [Jews] worship what we know;

  for salvation comes from the Jews.

  But the hour is coming—indeed, is already here—when true

  worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth.

  Such is the worshipper whom the Father seeks.

  God is Spirit, and those who worship him

  must wor
ship in spirit and truth.”

  The woman said to him, “I know that the Messiah … is coming; and when he comes, he will explain everything.” Jesus said, “I am, who is speaking to you.” (4:21–26)

  The Samaritans regard only Torah as sacred scripture, and the Messiah whom they await to this day is not a second David, an anointed king, but a second Moses, an anointed prophet. Moses foretold the coming of this prophet in Deuteronomy 18, a passage that the Samaritan woman quotes when she says “he will explain everything”:

  From among yourselves, from among your own brethren, the Lord your God will raise up a prophet like me. You must listen to him. This is just what you asked the Lord your God to do at Horeb [Mount Sinai] on the day of the Assembly, when you said, “Let me never hear the voice of the Lord my God or see this great fire again, or I shall die.” Then the Lord said to me, “What they have said is right. From their own brethren I will raise up a prophet like yourself. I will put my words into his mouth, and he shall tell them everything I command him.” (18:15–18)

  By his reply to the woman, Jesus assumes the identity of a second Moses or prophetic messiah more explicitly than he did when Philip characterized him (John 1:45) as “him of whom Moses … wrote.” But he goes a step further—the reader is allowed to notice, whether the Samaritan woman does so or not—when he replies to her in a strange sentence using the original name of God (Exod. 3:14). Translated above as “I am, who is speaking to you,” the sentence could just as well be translated “He who is speaking to you is I AM.”

  The woman believes Jesus’ claim for just the reason that Nathanael did: Jesus has read her mind and her past. Returning from Jacob’s Well (just outside town), she asks the townspeople, “Could this be the Messiah?” (John 4:29). They hurry out to see Jesus, he speaks to them, and many are persuaded that indeed he is: “They said to the woman, ‘Now we believe no longer because of what you told us; we have heard him ourselves, and we know that he is indeed the Savior of the World’ ” (4:42).

  Savior of the World, again, and not just, as Nathanael too narrowly called him, King of Israel. The Samaritans may consider themselves Israel, but they are well aware that the Jews consider them “the World”—that is, not Israelites but Gentiles. The struggle over “Who is an Israelite?” was the first century’s version of the fierce twentieth-century struggle over “Who is a Jew?” Salvation, Jesus has unapologetically told the woman, “comes from the Jews,” but in his view it evidently does not end with them. By making his first non-Jewish convert (Israelite yes, Jewish no), Jesus himself has taken a first, crucial step toward the creation of the universal jurisdiction that he sees prophesied for the Son of Man in the Book of Daniel.

  While Jesus speaks to the woman at the well, his disciples are in town buying food. When they return, they offer him some of it. His reply is a reflection on the paradoxical step he has taken by bringing his message to these schismatic Israelites before he has brought it with any clarity to the Jews. If the Samaritans are as good (that is, as bad) as Gentiles, then the divine bridegroom of Israel has made a preliminary overture to the human race, and the human race would seem to have accepted it. What lies ahead is daunting, but the time is ripe, Jesus says, and in any event, it is in this ironic way that God has decided to complete—and redeem—the labor that he began so long ago:

  My food is to do the will of him who sent me,

  and to complete his work.

  Do you not say,

  “Four months, then comes the harvest?”

  Well, look around you, I say, look at the fields.

  Already they are white, ripe for the harvesting.

  (John 4:34–35)

  Having stopped at Shechem just for food and drink, Jesus ends up staying on for an extra two days. He surprised the Samaritan woman by telling her to go and call the husband he knew she did not have. She may have surprised him when she went and called the entire town. His disciples, surprised in their turn to see him speaking to her alone, can only be the more surprised as he lengthens his stay and turns what could have been merely a momentary indiscretion into a potential scandal.

  The conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman is, as already noted, the longest conversation that God has with any woman in all of scripture. That she is not a Jew, that they are alone together, that they are meeting at a well, that she is a woman of whose checkered marital career he is fully aware, that he speaks to her in deliberate double meanings, that she responds to him intelligently and almost playfully, that he is known to approve of marriage, and that John has just acclaimed him as a bridegroom—all these factors taken together make this scene as suggestive in its way as John’s earlier proclamation of Jesus as the Lamb of God. Jesus is a bridegroom without a bride. The Samaritan is a woman without a husband. If we apply to those facts alone the rule Since everything insignificant has been left out, assume that everything kept in is significant, what results?

  What results is the distinct suggestion of promiscuity on his part. Israel’s “whoring” was a metaphor for its interest in other gods. The corresponding “whoring” for God would be interest in other peoples. Promiscuity is just the right word for what Jesus’ disciples see in his behavior in Shechem. Whatever role they expect him to play, they expect him to play it for them—faithfully for them rather than promiscuously for them and for others as well. If the scene at the well gains in dramatic interest from the potential sexual promiscuity flickering within it, it is God Incarnate’s religious promiscuity that, by the end of the scene, has become the real scandal—not hers but his.

  WHO DO HIS DISCIPLES THINK HE IS?

  As Jesus leaves Samaria for Galilee with his disciples, who do they think he is? To judge only from the little that they themselves have said about him, they think he is the Messiah; but they have heard first the Baptist, then Jesus himself, and then the Samaritans assign him other roles, for a total of seven, in the following order of appearance:

  Judge

  Lamb of God

  Messiah (Son of David and adopted Son of God)

  Son of Man

  Temple

  Bridegroom

  Prophet and Lawgiver (a second Moses)

  1. and 2. Judge, Lamb of God. The Baptist has proclaimed Jesus in the contradictory first two of these seven roles. He has acclaimed him as the divine miller with his winnowing-fork in his hand, who will separate the wheat from the chaff, saving the wheat and burning the chaff. Then, he has hailed him as the Lamb of God, who will “take away” rather than punish the sin of the world, the image evoking a reconciliation of mankind with God but one that comes, disturbingly, by way of human sacrifice.

  3. Messiah (Son of David and adopted Son of God). Jesus’ early followers do not resolve the contradiction between judge and lamb, with its hint of tension between God’s relationship to Israel and his relationship to the world, but instead embrace Jesus in his third role: Messiah. At his baptism, a voice from heaven quoted Psalm 2:7, in which God adopts David, the King of Israel, as his son:

  You are my son;

  this day have I begotten you.

  Andrew, who left the Baptist to follow Jesus, tells his brother, Peter: “We have found the Messiah” (John 1:41). Philip tells his friend Nathanael: “We have found him of whom Moses, in the Law, and also the prophets wrote” (1:45). Nathanael acclaims Jesus as “King of Israel” (1:49).

  4. Son of Man. Jesus, though willing to be acclaimed as Messiah, introduces a fourth, evidently more comprehensive role: Son of Man. The phrase itself means simply “human being,” but Jesus enlarges its meaning by predicting: “You will see heaven open and the angels of God ascending and descending over the Son of Man” (1:51), alluding to a passage in the Book of Daniel (7:13–14) in which God gives “one like a Son of Man” jurisdiction over the whole world.

  Readers of the Gospel know from John’s prologue, as the disciples do not, that Jesus is God Incarnate. Readers of the Gospel also know, however, as the disciples again do not, that the Devil exercises a
degree of physical control over Jesus that bears comparison with the physical control that Rome exercises over Israel. Ultimate power may rest with God, but in many external matters the Devil seems to be allowed to have his way. Though deftly quoting Moses to the Devil and easily overcoming all the Devil’s temptations, Jesus nonetheless does not humiliate or unambiguously defeat him. Just why he does not—whether because he lacks the power or the will or because he has a plan that somehow includes tactical self-restraint—even the audience cannot guess.

  5. Temple. Returned from the desert and the Devil, Jesus seems determined almost immediately to act out his first role, that of divine judge. He enters the Jerusalem Temple as if to cleanse his ancestral “House” with refiner’s fire and cleaner’s lye. But then, asked to prove his authority over the Temple, Jesus speaks, unexpectedly, of its destruction. None of his hearers quite understands him when he says, “Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19), but the line lodges in their minds. Breathtakingly, Jesus has substituted his own body for the central, physical object of the Jewish religion—and then predicted its immolation.