“The woman saith unto him, I know that Messias cometh, which is called Christ: when he is come, he will tell us all things. Jesus saith unto her, I that speak unto thee am he.”
We are continuing our study of the Gospel of John, but beginning next week we shall take a break from this study in order to bring our collective and individual attention to the Advent & Christmas seasons. We will return to the Fourth Gospel in Epiphany. So recall that last week I said we have reached a watershed in our study of John and this is it, that this Gospel is the narrative of the Sacrament of Love between Christ and his Bride; it is the narrative of the Nuptial Union between Christ and his Bride. Therefore my intention is that we focus upon our common destiny that is revealed to us in the Nuptial Mysteries of the Life of Christ in the Fourth Gospel. Recall as well that I have suggested that everything that occurs in this conversation between the Woman of Samaria and our Lord Jesus Christ ought to be read and understood as a conversation between the Bridegroom and his Bride. I would say, just as a refinement of that, that the conversation by the well is more the wooing of the Bride by the Bridegroom and the story ends with just what we expect from Holy Matrimony — the “gift and heritage of children.” That is, the relation of Matrimony between Christ and his Bride is effected by the Bride’s faith and trust in the Bridegroom and the outcome is progeny, that is in this case:
“And many of the Samaritans of that city believed on him for the saying of the woman…” John 4:39
Maybe it was the frank openness with which Jesus addressed the Woman’s theological speculation:
“I know that Messias cometh, which is called Christ: when he is come, he will tell us all things.”
Not, “He will be the best mind reader ever,” but “he will tell us the whole truth.” The same applies to what she said to the men of the city:
“And many of the Samaritans of that city believed on him for the saying of the woman, which testified, He told me all that ever I did.” John 4:39
The point she was making when she said that the Messiah, “when he is come, he will tell us all things,” and her word to the men of the city, “He told me all that ever I did” is not that Jesus merely tells us everything because he knows everything, but rather that he takes everything that is really real, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and he makes it right. She believed not that Jesus was a spooky mind reader, but that he was the Messiah, the Prophet-like-unto-Moses, who is the final embodiment of a sort of Jubilee – the Jubilee being the time when slaves and prisoners are freed, debts are forgiven, land is restored, work is to cease as we return to a sort of Garden of Eden experience as we live naturally and creatively with the creation. In one of Jesus’ sermons cited in Luke he declares:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, To preach the acceptable year of the Lord. And he closed the book, and he gave it again to the minister, and sat down. And the eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were fastened on him. And he began to say unto them, This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.” Luke 4:18-21
In her own way, from within her own horizon, with her own words, the Woman of Samaria is saying the same thing. This man brought fourth her sin not to shame her or to destroy her, but so that those sins may once and for all be destroyed and she may, as the pure bride, may enter into the happiness her true husband had prepared for her. The Scriptures were being fulfilled right before her eyes and she believed Jesus and he took her as his own Bride because she believed him.
But note this: the Bride is the Church and the Church is made up of both male and female. So when it comes to our relation to Christ we are all, male and female, feminine. This is worth paying attention to: Holy Matrimony between a male bridegroom and a female bride is given meaning by the nuptial mystery betwixt Christ and his Church. The relation of Christ and his Church is not grounded in Holy Matrimony; Holy Matrimony is grounded in the nuptial union between Christ and his Church. The reason Holy Mother Church is Mother is because she is the Bride of Christ. And as the Fathers of the Church used to say, “We may have God as our Father, because we have the Church as our Mother.”
This is how the narrative of the Woman and Jesus opens out:
Jesus said: “Give me a drink of water please.”
The Woman said: “You are a Jew and you ought not to be asking anything of me — a Samaritan. We ought not to be talking at all.”
Jesus said, essentially: “If you realized that I am God’s Gift, and what Gift I am, you could ask me and I would give you Living Water. And by the way, go fetch your husband.”
The Woman said, a bit stunned: “I have no husband.”
Jesus said: “That is true, you have had five husbands and the man you are with presently is not your husband.”
The Woman said: “Don’t get so personal. Let’s talk about religion. You are a Jew and so the center your life is the Temple. Correct? We center our lives on this Mountain. Who is right?”
Jesus said: “Be clear about this, what I offer you, comes from Israel: There is a future looming in which God’s will shall be done on earth as it is in heaven — ‘The hour cometh…’” But then, in his very next breath, Jesus radicalized that looming future by asserting that that hour has already fallen upon all mankind. “Those who truly adore God can only adore him in the Holy Spirit and in Truth… I am the Truth and the Holy Spirit is what I have previously called Living Water and I will give you the Holy Spirit if you believe me.”
The Woman said: “Now you are scaring me. Let’s you and I get this clear: I am not a pagan. I know that Messiah is coming and when he comes, everything will fall into place. Our Poets have sung that even the crooked roads will bend themselves to please Messiah, and he will make sense out of everything — he will make everything right.”
Maybe that was the moment of truth for her? This is an enchanting conversation; the dialogue has such a natural feel to it, like what I would call “really good dialogue” if it were a film or a short story. It is so very unprocessed, so instinctive, like playing catch with your child — you toss the ball so she catches it and she tosses the ball back. And you get so much of her personality and his personality. That is part of the whole matter I suppose. Jesus has not come to save humankind in general, but each instantiation of humankind, each person who he has created with an inexhaustible potential for flowering into a specific person and each specific person somehow embracing all mankind. And that is true of Jesus himself, as well. He truly became one of us; he did not become generalized human nature, but rather another instantiation of a real human being, God’s own true human nature. But, as I said, this must be the moment of truth when she says with all her heart and mind that she absolutely knows that the Messiah is coming and she understood that Jesus was making Messianic claims: “I know that Messiah is coming,” and then Jesus responds:
“Jesus saith unto her, I that speak unto thee am he.”
At this point the author steps into the narrative and informs us that just then Jesus’ disciples arrived from the city with provisions and the Woman dropped everything, left the well, left her water pot, and dashed back into the city.
“Jesus saith unto her, I that speak unto thee am he.”
An exact, though awkward, reading of that last verse would be this:
“Says to her – Jesus [that is] – I am who am speaking to you.”
Now whether that phrase, “I am,” had for her the layers of provocation as it turned out to have later in the Gospel we do not know. What she certainly heard and what she went back into the village to say was that this man was making a messianic claims and she believed him to be Messiah. And she was convincing enough in her testimony to those who knew her quite well “many of the Samaritans of that city believed on him for the saying of the woman…” Please note how very different she is from others and also note that the reason for her difference is that she believed Jesus. Take for example, Nicodemus: he came to Jesus by night and Jesus revealed his mission and Nicodemus threw up one objection after another and continue to do so after Jesus makes it very clear that everything in life depended upon believing him. Nicodemus left the Light of the World, reentered the darkness, and made his way back to the Temple. He shows up two more times in the Gospel: in John chapter 7 Nicodemus makes a weak and ineffectual plea for fairness to Jesus among his fellow Pharisees and then in John 19 he and Joseph of Arimathea (a man characterized as a just and fair man in the other three Gospels) remove Jesus’ dead body from the cross, wrapped him in cloth and spices and placed him in a newly crafted tomb. That is the last we hear of Nicodemus.
The Woman of Samaria came to Jesus at the brightest time of day and though she raised objections, she ends believing Jesus to be Messiah. Unbidden, she raced back into the village, and regardless of her bad reputation, a large number of the Samaritans believed in Jesus that day because of her. And there are good reasons to think that those Samaritans really and truly believed in Jesus and as best they could continued to believe him. The people of Samaria drop off the Apostolic radar at this point until well after the crucifixion and resurrection. But it reappears in Acts chapter 8, after the persecution that followed the stoning of Stephen, most Christians, except of the Apostles, fled from Jerusalem. Philip went into Samaria and preached and began baptizing, but apparently he found a group of Christians who had been baptized only in the Name of Jesus — however they had not received the baptism that imparted the Holy Spirit. The Apostles Peter & John made that discovery when they went out to Samaria themselves to preach the Gospel. What is clear is that Samaria was primed to receive the Gospel of Jesus Christ and my point is that much of that openness is owned to the original openness of the Woman of Samaria in this Gospel.
I said earlier that the conversation between Jesus and the Woman of Samaria was the wooing of the Bride by the Bridegroom and the story ends with just what we expect from Holy Matrimony — the “gift and heritage of children.” That is, the relation of Matrimony between Christ and his Bride is effected by the Bride’s faith and trust in the Bridegroom and the outcome is progeny:
“And many of the Samaritans of that city believed on him for the saying of the woman…” John 4:39
I submit to you that one story here is of that man who plays it safe with the hometown crowd because that man believes he has a lot to lose. The other story is that of a woman who had little or nothing to lose, or what she had to lose she counted as worth nothing when compared to finding Jesus Christ, the Lover of her Soul, her true Husband, the God of the Universe. I dare say this is a good point of reflection for us all as we ready ourselves for a new Christian year, a holy, sacred Advent.
“Jesus saith unto her, I that speak unto thee am he.”