23. But before the time for faith came, the Law kept us all locked up as prisoners until this coming faith should be revealed.
24. And so the Law was in charge of us until Christ came, in order that we might then be put right with God through faith.
25. Now that the time for faith is here, the Law is no longer in charge of us.
26. It is through faith that all of you are God’s children in union with Christ Jesus.
27. You were baptised into union with Christ, and now you are clothed, so to speak, with the life of Christ himself.
28. So there is no difference between Jews and Gentiles, between slaves and free people, between men and women; you are all one in union with Jesus Christ.
10. New Testament Exegesis: John 4:7–26
Jesus and the Woman of Samaria
This pericope describes a confrontation between Jesus and a woman of Samaria at Jacob’s well; the brief encounter encapsulates a cosmic drama stretching over millennia which is portrayed in the Bible story as a whole, from Genesis to Revelation.93 Recognizing that something out of the ordinary is afoot, the woman expresses surprise that a Jew should ask her for a drink. And not simply because she is a woman; everyone knows, it seems, that “Jews have no dealings with Samaritans” (4:9 NKJV). From the outset, dramatic tension arises out of the deeply ingrained religious differences between those two otherwise closely related peoples. By situating such a seemingly mundane interaction between Jesus and the Samaritan woman within that long history of ethno-religious rivalry, John creates a metaphor for past, present, and future relationships between Jews and Gentiles generally.
Jesus acknowledges the special status enjoyed by Jews in the eyes of God but when the woman recognizes Him as a prophet, Christ promises her that “the hour is coming and now is” when ancient quarrels between Samaritans who worship on Mount Gerizim and Jews who locate the Temple in Jerusalem will be superseded (4:23); a new faith, centred on the incarnational truth of the Word become flesh (1:14), will enable men and women of all nations to transcend physical boundaries and tribal allegiances by worshipping God “in spirit and truth”(4:24). In short, Jesus convinces this simple Samaritan woman that soon Christ will preside as “Savior of the world” (4:42) over a New Covenant creation already gestating within the womb of Old Covenant Israel.
Not all Christians, however, have been sensitive to the eschatological meaning and cosmological context of the story. Medieval and Reformation exegesis gave it a soteriological spin instead, highlighting the exemplary experience of an individual who is converted to Christ as the source of salvation. According to Craig Farmer, “the medieval exegetes portray a well-meaning but dimwitted woman whose intellect is gradually enlightened to an understanding of Jesus’ divine status.” During the Reformation, however, emphasis shifted to portray a proud, sassy woman who wilfully refuses to understand the significance of the “living water” which Christ offers to believers. Medieval commentators saw “the story as the progress of the carnal mind toward spiritual illumination,” reaching its climax when the Samaritan woman “comes to know who Jesus is.” Reformed commentators suggest that she is illumined only “when she comes to know who she is.” Self-knowledge of the sin and guilt she has accumulated through five marriages and her present irregular relationship was not generated by her own energies and initiative. Instead, the woman publicly acknowledges, it was revealed when Christ “told me all that I ever did”(4:39). In other words, the woman has no desire to partake of Christ’s spiritual water but, despite her opposition, “Jesus pursues and finally overwhelms her with his grace.”94
According to modern literary critics, there is a subtext to this narrative that departs significantly from such an innocently uplifting story of individual salvation. Reader-response criticism suggests that this tale draws upon “a recurring Old Testament story about a meeting between a man and a woman at a well” that would have been familiar to first century readers. Because the earlier stories “of such a meeting always result in the betrothal of the two characters, the reader is led to believe that this fourth instance will have a similar result.” Lyle Eslinger also contends that references to drinking water from a cistern, like the “living water” associated with Jesus, are double entendres which many readers will interpret as euphemisms for sexual relations. The reader is invited “to entertain carnal thoughts about Jesus’ motives and later his meanings.” Eslinger points out that Jesus’ command to the woman to go call her husband would make no sense had “she not been making sexual advances, had Jesus not understood them, and had the reader not understood both the woman and Jesus.”95 Then, when Jesus rebukes the woman’s carnal misconceptions by commanding her to fetch her husband, the theological point of the story finally emerges. The reader quickly learns not only that Jesus knows that the woman has no husband but that her chequered marital history reflects the spiritual confusion and moral ambiguity of the Gentile world which will be transformed by the coming of the Messiah.
So long as the meeting at the well is received as a betrothal type-scene, the reader expects the Samaritan woman to be “united in a spiritual or symbolic marriage with Jesus.” But by the time the disciples return with food and Jesus refuses to partake of what becomes the “betrothal meal” in earlier stories, the narrative is pointing “in the exact opposite direction.”96 The unexpected denouement leads another scholar to present the story, not as a betrothal type-scene, but “as a literary depiction of ancient hospitality.”97 Unfortunately, such exclusive reliance upon deconstructionist techniques of literary criticism reproduces the limitations of medieval and Reformation exegesis; it misses the eschatological expectations that the story excited among first-century readers.98 The last days of Old Israel were in their not-too-distant future but are now long past. Nevertheless, these literary critics point us in the right direction by reminding us that the full meaning of John 4 cannot be understood apart from the expectations of its first-century audience.
When no betrothal takes place, first-century readers, led to expect that Jesus will become the bridegroom of the Samaritan woman, realize that the story is not yet finished. In proclaiming the arrival of the Messiah, the Samaritan woman prefigures the Church, but Christ’s bride-to-be is left waiting by the well for the eschatological moment when Old Covenant Israel finally gives birth to the New Covenant creation. When Jesus meets the woman of Samaria at Jacob’s well Christ’s ministry has barely begun, the time is not yet ripe for the consummation of a betrothal type-scene among the Gentiles. Indeed, later still, as he looks into the face of death, Jesus tells his followers to take heart in the midst of the suffering to come, likening Israel to a woman in labour; she “has sorrow because her hour has come; but as soon as she has given birth to the child (paidion), she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a human being (anthropon) has been born into the world” (16:21). Even then, in the looming shadow of the Cross, the consummation of the betrothal between Christ and his bride lay in a future that was to entail suffering as well as joy.
Jesus tells the woman that “the hour is coming” when the intractable antagonism between her people and the Jews will be overcome in a higher unity “in spirit and truth.” But until then, he says, you will continue to “worship what you do not know.” “We,” on the other hand, (i.e. Jesus and his fellow Jews) “know what we worship.” For the time being, at least, “[s]alvation is of the Jews” (4:21–23). To put it plainly, the Old Covenant with Israel must run its course before the New Covenant creation can be inaugurated.
Rudolf Bultmann insists that verse 22 of this pericope “is completely or partially an editorial gloss.” In his view, because John has already declared that Christ “came to His own and His own did not receive Him”(1:11), it is “clear that the Evangelist does not regard the Jews as God’s chosen and saved people.”99 Such an interpretation obscures the way in which “the term ‘Jew’ is slowly redefined throughout the Gospel of St John, until by the end of the Gospel it means something different from wha
t it meant at the beginning.”100 In fact, already in verse 23, John suggests that a simple equation between “Jews” and the “true worshipers” who already “worship the Father in spirit and truth” is no longer valid.
Still, when Jesus met the woman of Samaria “the Jews,” as a corporate entity, had not yet rejected Him; certainly, they had yet to define themselves definitively by their collective rejection of Christ. This pericope records and reflects the dawning awareness that the incarnation of the Logos compels a profound shift in the meaning of “Jewishness.” Significantly, while Jesus identifies the word ‘Jew’ with ‘we’” in his conversation with the woman of Samaria, by chapter 8, of the Gospel of St John, Jesus is referring to “Jews” as “you.”101 Henceforth, who are the true “Jews”: those who accept or those who reject Christ as the Messiah? Either way, as CK Barrett observes, “John never doubts that it was to [the Jews] that he came, or that they were his own” people. For that reason, Jesus tells the Samaritan woman that Israel was elected to a true knowledge of God so that “at the time appointed by God, salvation might proceed from Israel to the world.”102 At that moment, which came with the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in AD 70, carnal Israel’s own unique privilege was dissolved and lodged instead in a New Jerusalem of the spirit.
11. Ecclesiology Reading Blocks
First Reading Block
1. John Wesley, “Catholic Spirit,” in Albert C Outler, ed, John Wesley’s Sermons: An Anthology
Reading this sermon, John Wesley was clearly a great preacher. It is also obvious that his congregation must have been sufficiently well-educated to follow a complex argument. This sermon explores the relationship between Christ’s commandment to love one’s neighbour as oneself and the need to protect every individual’s liberties of thought and expression in matters of religion. Accordingly, “none can be obliged by any power on earth but that of his own conscience to prefer this or that congregation to another, this or that manner of worship.” He rejected the age-old principle that every member of every English household belonged to the Church of England in their parish. In the end, Wesley’s libertarianism subverted the institutional foundations of Christendom, generally, and the English Volkskirche, in particular.
2. “The Mystery of the Church,” Chapter 1 of Dogmatic Constitution of the Church Lumen Gentium
This document portrays the Roman Catholic Church as “the Light of nations.” But it strangely neglects to describe or explain the relationship between the Church, the Holy Spirit, and the various nations of mankind. Instead all nations, tongues, and peoples are dissolved into one “human body.” While “various members and functions have their part to play” in that trinitarian Body of Christ, there “is only one Spirit who, according to His own richness and the needs of the ministries, gives His different gifts for the welfare of the Church.” By moulding all its members “in the likeness” of Christ, the Church proclaims the kingdom of Heaven on earth. At the same time, the Church shrinks from exercising its rightful dominion over all the peoples of the earth, seeking refuge instead in a futurist eschatology premised on the defeatist notion that its members do not reign with Christ over a new creation but remain pilgrims in a strange land.
3. Brian E Daly, SJ, “Old Books and Contemporary Faith: The Bible, Tradition, and the Renewal of Theology”
This piece is an interesting contrast with Wesley’s “Catholic Spirit.” Daly observes that “the Enlightenment’s stress on the autonomy of critical human intellect” has led people to downplay or remain ignorant of the importance of the Christian classics found in patristic and medieval writings. He wants to rescue Catholic ecclesiology from what Lubac regarded as “the bitter fruits of individualism.” He rejects “the literalism and polemical rationalism” that nineteenth century scholastic theology deployed in its continuing battle against the Protestant Reformation and its foundation principle of sola scriptura. By returning to the patristic well-springs of the Church’s understanding of the gospel, Catholics can renew “the community’s rule of faith, which is distilled from Scripture and leads through the obscure thickets of its meaning to the way of Christ.”
4. Hans Küng, “The Church of the Spirit.”
This piece appears to be another post-Vatican II expression of Christian defeatism. At first, when Küng describes the Pentecostal “pouring out of the Spirit” as “the signal for the beginning of the eschatological event,” he seems to be taking a preterist position. Preterists certainly would agree that the “Spirit is God’s eschatological gift with which the community…is blessed in the last days.” Christ provided repeated assurances that the eschatological event “must shortly take place” (Revelation 1:1). Two thousand years later, Küng is still waiting for the other shoe to drop. The last days may have begun, they have even been “fulfilled,” but, in his view, they “have not been finished and consummated.” For that outcome, we will simply have to wait for “the end of time.” Meanwhile, the Church will remain a lonely pilgrim in a strange land.
5. Georgia Harkness, “The Work of the Holy Spirit,” in Thomas A Langford, Practical Divinity Vol 2.
Harkness distinguishes the work of the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament from the “new life in the Spirit” found in the New Testament. She suggests that “Ezekiel’s vision of the revivification” of Israel from its spiritual death in the valley of dry bones was not fulfilled until the coming of Christ. At Pentecost, the “Church came into being through the life-giving work of the Holy Spirit.” She agrees with John Wesley that the Holy Spirit has moved the Methodist church “not to form a new sect, but to ‘reform the nation, particularly the Church [of England?], and to spread scriptural holiness over the land.” One wonders whether, in hindsight, Wesley would admit to a grave defect either in “God’s design” or in his understanding of the voice of the Holy Spirit.
Second reading block
1. Samuel Wells, God’s Companions: Reimagining Christian Ethics chapter 5, “Incorporating”
This is an interesting piece on the theory and practice of baptism within the church. The author examines the significance of this initiation ritual both from the perspective of the church and from that of the candidate. He reveals the trinitarian nature of baptismal transformation: stripping, washing, and clothing, each of which itself has three dimensions, body, mind, and spirit. Wells helps this abstract formula come alive through the effective use of anecdotal evidence. His stories capture the psychological intensity of the baptismal experience. My only (perhaps unfair) criticism is that he does not deal with the covenantal aspect of baptism or the parallels/differences between baptism and Old Covenant circumcision.
2. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “The Call to Discipleship,” in Discipleship
Finally! A piece by Dietrich Bonhoeffer which — instead of issuing orders of the day — actually helps me understand a fundamental theological issue! He does an excellent job of showing how the original experience of Christian discipleship illuminates the perennial conundrum of faith and good works. He explains “the reality contained in the following two statements, both of which are equally true: only the believers obey, and only the obedient believe. The chapter is particularly effective when he considers the implications of his analysis for the pastoral care of those affected by “loss of faith.” In the end, however, Bonhoeffer’s idealist perspective and his abstract individualism prevent him from delving into the institutional and historical dimensions of the relationship between faith and good works.
3. William T Cavanaugh, “Church,” in Scott and Cavanaugh, The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology
Having just been immersed in Barth’s ecclesiology, I found a breath of fresh air in this piece on the political theology of the church. Cavanaugh discusses “the political marginalization of the church” by those who accept “the end of Christendom…as the proper separation of the church from worldly power.” I was surprised, however, to find that Cavanaugh makes no mention of Barth in his discussion of modern theologians who “endo
rse the relative autonomy of politics from theology and make the influence of the church on politics indirect.” Barth struck me as being one of those who staked “a claim to influence the state only through the activities of Christian citizens in civil society.”
4. Rowan Williams, “Mission and Christology,” JC Jones Memorial Lecture, 1994.
Here we have Rowan Williams at his verbally adroit best. His task is to establish a subtle brand-name differentiation between his progressive style of post-modern Anglican “pluralism” and the materialist brands peddled by Third World Marxist philosophers such as Roy Bhaskar (“one of the most intellectually sharp and original presences in modern British political thought.”) Williams contends that “in a society like ours, in a pluralist and privatised environment,” talking about mission “is a rather strange and subversive thing to do.” Williams appears to believe that the appearance of a multiracial, increasingly non-Christian society in England is something that Anglicans in particular are bound to accommodate without demur much less resistance. In 1994, he was confident that he could sell his vapid universalist version of Christianity in the marketplace of ideas. How has that worked out? Well, so far, the Marxists and the Muslims seem to have increased their market share.
5. Sergius Bulgakov, The Comforter
This piece was a real disappointment for me. I assumed, based on the Russian name, that the author is an Orthodox theologian and that, as a consequence, I might encounter a novel perspective on the nature of the church. No such luck! Judging by this chapter, Bulgakov is the Rowan Williams of Russia. Or perhaps the early Dietrich Bonhoeffer, since towards the end of this piece he gives a mini-disquisition on the relationship between faith and works which echoes the chapter on “Discipleship” discussed above. There’s not much to disagree with here given the level of abstraction on which the author writes. Not much intellectual boldness is required to “affirm the fact of history, with its new and constantly changing aspects, with its creative diversity, which is inexhaustible.” Except that it seems in short supply here.
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