4:43-54 Back to Cana: The Healing of the Royal Official’s Son; Faith and Miracles

4:43-54 Back to Cana: The Healing of the Royal Official’s Son; Faith and Miracles

2–4

From Cana to Cana: The Revelation of Jesus’ Glory

Although various divisions of the Fourth Gospel are possible and have been used in the commentaries,¹ it seems to me proper, after what may be considered the introduction (1:1-18) and the preparation (1:19-51), to regard ch. 2 as the beginning of the real story of Jesus’ self-revelation as it is described in the Fourth Gospel. A clear indication that this is so occurs in 2:11, which describes the miracle at Cana as “the beginning of the signs” that Jesus did. The main division that begins with 2:1 continues to the end of ch. 4, where a new break becomes visible. Important indications of the correctness of this division are that chs. 5 and 6 form a new unity and that the conclusion of ch. 4 returns to Cana (cf. 4:54), thus concluding this first great cycle, which begins at Cana, proceeds via Capernaum to Jerusalem, and thence returns via Samaria to Cana.

We are dealing here not only with an initial geographic outline of Jesus’ public ministry but also with an important initial characterization of that ministry: The beginning lies in the inconsequential region of Galilee, where the glory of the Son of man takes shape in the miracle of the abundance of wine (2:1-12). From there the line runs to Jerusalem, the center of Israel’s national and religious life, which Jesus as it were seizes at the heart in the cleansing of the temple, in the claim he lays on it as the house of his Father—and all this at one of the great feasts (2:13ff.)—and in his first encounter with Nicodemus. Nicodemus appears here as a representative of the Jewish government and scribal learning. Jesus confronts him with the necessity—which applies to everyone—of “being born from above” (3:1ff.). With this there is the first great testimony concerning the “heavenly things,” that is, the descent of the Son of man (3:11, 13ff., 31ff.). In ch. 4 follows the story of a very different but no less characteristic encounter,² namely that with the Samaritan woman (4:4ff.). Then there is the conversation between Jesus and his disciples about the harvest time that has begun (4:31ff.) and the arrival of the people of Samaria who confess him as “the Savior of the world.” This first great orienting cycle is then concluded with Jesus’ return to Cana in Galilee and the second miracle there (4:43ff.; cf. vs. 54). This second miracle, as we shall see, at the same time forms the link with the following section in chs. 5 and 6.

Various attempts have been made to characterize chs. 2–4 more specifically. In discussion of the prologue we have already noted the view³ according to which 1:35–4:42 is the elaboration of vs. 3 of the prologue (Christ as re-creator), while in chs. 4:43 through ch. 6 and chs. 7–9, respectively, vs. 4 and vss. 4f. of the prologue are further explicated. But however much the prologue manifests itself again and again in these chapters (cf., e.g., 3:19)—as in the entire Gospel—nevertheless such a schematic elaboration of its content in the text of chs. 2–4 (and 5–9) cannot be demonstrated.

Others look for the main line of 2:1–4:54 in the different reactions to Jesus’ conduct seen there.⁴ Although these reactions do furnish an important perspective for the intent of the whole (see the comments below on 3:1ff.), they do not provide the key to the understanding of the overall thrust of chs. 2–4. The (over)schematization of these reactions in this understanding of their significance is too artificial and forced to be credible, and the revelation of Jesus’ glory itself and not the reactions to it constitutes the all-controlling viewpoint from which these chapters are to be understood.

Here, in the first great cycle of the story, the contours of all the great themes that dominate this entire Gospel become visible—namely, the focus on the person of Jesus and the (“eschatological”) “hour” of the promised time of salvation. That hour has begun and has become present in him; it consists in the breaking of the boundaries established till now in the law of Moses, and it is revealed in the transcendent glory of the Messiah of Israel as the Son of man descended from heaven and as the Son of God sent by the Father. It is on the basis of this absolute significance of Jesus as the Christ and the Son of God that the critical and imperishable importance of the salvation granted by him comes to the fore in the words concerning the birth from above without which no one can enter the kingdom of God and of eternal life, which already in the present is possessed by those who believe in the Son. In this context, then, the various reactions of those who hear Jesus have their significance, though only in tentative fashion, while the antithesis that marks the later dialogues with “the Jews” still has not yet fully surfaced.

One can thus say that in chs. 2–4 the foundations are laid and the contours emerge that, ever more explicitly and intensively, determine the construction of all that follows.

2:1-11

The Wedding in Cana

This story ties in chronologically and materially with the preceding story, specifically with 1:50. The events occur “on the third day” (2:1) after the events narrated in 1:43-51 and make a start with what, in 1:50f., Jesus had offered in prospect as “greater things.” The role of Jesus’ disciples as witnesses of his glory (1:14, 51) and thus as founders of the coming church (cf. 20:31) is here initially but emphatically confirmed (2:11).

From the beginning the story of the wedding at Cana, partly as a result of its dominant place in the Gospel, has enjoyed special attention and been interpreted in the most divergent ways, often symbolically, sometimes allegorically.⁵ Others have gone further and completely abstracted the miracle recounted here—as well as those to come—from history and viewed it as a story told to give expression to certain notions of faith. Still others believe that the Evangelist drew his miracle stories from a specific miracle (sēmeia) source in which all the emphasis lay on the value of the miracles as evidence, though he himself is said to have assumed a much more ambivalent attitude to miracles, a fact that is supposed to be manifest in the way in which he has edited or supplemented the miracle stories. He is said to have regarded only, or at least primarily, the spiritual significance that he ascribed to the miracles as valid.⁶

Whatever we think about the factuality of the miracles and however we spiritualize their significance, it is certain that by denying their historical significance or casting a shadow on them we do not do justice to the Evangelist’s intention. This is immediately evident from the conclusion of the first story, where the Evangelist himself describes the miracle as the “revelation” of Jesus’ glory. He thus echoes 1:14, where he described the glory of the only-begotten Son as having become visible in its existence as flesh, as human. Any suggestion that in the Fourth Gospel one can separate “flesh” and “glory,” history and revelation, violates the most specific aspect of that Gospel’s character. Miracle is neither parabolic story nor symbolic action. This will become evident in all sorts of ways, for example, when Jesus speaks of his “signs”⁷ as proof and witness that he has been sent by the Father (5:31, 36ff.) and, at the end of his dialogue with the Jews, precisely with a view to his miracles, he says “If I am not doing my Father’s works, then do not believe me. But if I do them (as you cannot deny), even though you do not believe me, believe the works” (10:37f.). Thus it is far from the truth to say that the miracles Jesus did do not play a decisive role in the christology of the Fourth Gospel.

But this does not mean that exegesis can end with mere acknowledgment of miracle as such, as supernatural event. This Gospel itself explicitly opposes that notion (cf. 2:23ff.; 4:48, etc.), and does so emphatically that by comparison with passages like 10:37ff. some scholars think they must speak of a certain ambivalence toward miracle in the Fourth Gospel. Whatever we think of this last point,⁸ a distinctive of the Fourth Gospel is its repeated linking of miracles with lengthy conversations focused on the meaning of the miracles in the framework of Jesus’ self-revelation as the Christ, the Son of God (so chs. 5, 6, 9, and 11). If one fails to see that connection and hence also the deeper spiritual significance of the miracles, then one has not “seen” the signs (6:26), and faith that rests solely on miracle “as such” has fundamentally forfeited its claim to that name (cf., e.g., 2:23ff.; 3:2 with 3:11f.; 4:48).

All this, in keeping with the Evangelist’s intention, confronts the interpreter with a double demand: on the one hand, to explain the miracle within a specific historical context, on the other to explain its intent within the framework of Jesus’ entire self-revelation. Scholars have often fallen short of this hermeneutical goal in interpreting this passage—where there is no interpreting dialogue, unlike most other miracle stories, and the interpretation of the miracle is thus on its own, so to speak.

The symbolic interpretation of this miracle has taken possession in such a way that the historical context of the miracle is either completely ignored or totally abandoned—for example, when scholars seek to understand it merely as a text form in which faith in the resurrection of Jesus is symbolically expressed.⁹ It has been easy to exchange the identification of the form for interpretation of the text. To the degree that the “theological” or “symbolic” interpretation asserts itself, to that degree the form of the text (which presents itself as historical) must surrender more of its rights and must be interpreted ultimately as a distinct literary genre.

But the cure for this disease cannot consist in the total elimination of every kind of symbolic interpretation of Jn. 2:1-11 and in saying, for instance, that one must be satisfied with what is “natural” and seek the meaning of the miracle solely in Jesus’ beneficent significance for daily life and in his power to bring about change in every situation of life.¹⁰ By doing so one too radically isolates the miracle at Cana and runs the danger of succumbing to the error of those who became fixated on the bread in ch. 6 and were told by Jesus that they “had not seen the signs” and should not work for the food that perishes but for the food that endures to enternal life (6:26f.).

Undoubtedly it is not always easy to mark the boundaries here.¹¹ Exegesis will always have to defend itself before the text and in light of the character of the Fourth Gospel. The secret of the text and its explanation, then, prove to lie, not in the skill with which the author supposedly conceals all sorts of deeper truths, but rather in how in this fundamentally sober narrative he highlights certain details of the historical situation above other details—no less interesting to us—that remain in the shadows or are left unmentioned as apparently irrelevant to the thrust of the narrative.

1, 2 The dating, “and on the third day,” with which the story begins, is a test case for all that we have said about the story so far. Some scholars believe that it is rooted in the confession that “Jesus is the Christ” in that “the third day” alludes to the day of resurrection and marks “salvation from the predicament of death.”¹² But in two respects this interpretation ignores what may be considered especially characteristic of the Fourth Gospel. First, it apparently understands the “glory” of Christ as referring from the beginning to Jesus’ future exaltation, whereas in this Gospel we are above all dealing with the glory of the incarnate Word, that is, with the revelation of the glory (brought “down” from heaven, as it were) of the only begotten of the Father. And second, it wrenches the words “on the third day” out of the retrospective historical context in which the Evangelist obviously intends them to be understood.

There is, therefore, more plausibility in the attempt to link the “days” of ch. 1 (vss. 29, 35, 43) with the “day” of 2:1 to form a connected whole by adding them up. But this, too, poses large problems.

The outcome is a period of six days in 1:29-42 (or seven if we assume an additional day distinct from that of vs. 35 in vss. 40-42¹³). Thus one comes in 2:1 to the seventh day and can thus speak of “the Johannine week of introduction.”¹⁴ And one can, of course, link this with a symbolic interpretation—according to some a parallel to the week of creation (cf. 1:1),¹⁵ according to others a designation of the day in 2:1 as “the day of the Lord, the day of the Epiphany.”¹⁶

Others, however, advance numerous objections to this notion of a creation week: “The sixth day, the high point of the days of creation in Genesis 1, is conspicuous by its absence. The seventh day … the day on which God ‘rested,’ now becomes a wedding day on which Jesus gives orders to fill six jars with five to seven hundred liters of water.…”¹⁷ Furthermore, in 2:1 a new beginning is made, which can hardly be intended as the last day of the first week. And John 1 itself already embraces seven days, 1:1-18 being the first day, “the day on which light shone in the darkness.” 2:1 thus speaks of the eighth day, the first day of a new week, the day of “the first of the signs.” Thus one comes to a distinction between “the two first Sundays” in 1:1-18 and 2:1-11.¹⁸

But the artificiality of all this is obvious: 1:1-18 is clearly not a first week; it is the prologue that precedes the story, that is, the days. And we can hardly interpret as the first day of the new week what 2:1 calls “the third day.” If on top of all this we also have to factor in the prescriptions of the Talmud according to which wedding days were restricted to certain days,¹⁹ then the whole picture becomes even more complicated.

In view of these rather dubious constructions one has to face the question whether the Evangelist, if he in fact wanted us to engage in all this “counting,” could not have furnished us with less ambiguity.²⁰ We therefore take the position that there is not sufficient ground to ascribe to “the third day” any other meaning than that it serves to establish a direct historical and material connection between the story that follows and what has taken place two days earlier between Jesus and Nathanael.

The same sort of questions arise in connection with the place indication, “Cana in Galilee.” The name Cana has from ancient times been translated as “ownership, possession,” and scholars have linked with this the idea that in the Fourth Gospel Jesus’ disciples are called “his own” (cf. 1:10ff.; 4:44; 10:1ff.; 13:1ff.). In Cana, Jesus’ possession, the true people of God, becomes manifest (cf. vs. 11). The addition “in Galilee” is said to confirm this because in John Galilee is the birthplace of the new people of God. What we are said to have here is a transition, one that is also visible in wine made of water from Jewish water jars.²¹

The text itself, however, furnishes not a single point of contact for such an explanation of “Cana.” The case is rather that here—as with the time indication—it is the narrative in 1:46-51 that gives to the place indication more than merely geographic significance. Like Nazareth, Cana is an insignificant place in Galilee, one from which, in Nathanael’s opinion, nothing good can be expected. Still it is precisely this “Cana in Galilee” (which it is called again in vs. 11)—the place, moreover, where Nathanael himself came from! (21:2)—where the revelation of Jesus’ glory begins. Undoubtedly this place indication bore considerable meaning for the Evangelist: the first main division of the gospel story begins and ends in Cana, and the end explicitly recalls the beginning and emphasizes Cana’s location in Galilee (4:43ff., 54). This is clearly done not with any idea that in Cana Jesus’ “possession,” the true people of God, becomes visible (cf. 4:44) but rather that, against all expectation (cf. 7:52), the starting point of Jesus’ public activity lay in the despised region of Galilee (see the comments below on 4:54).

As to the wedding that took place on the third day at Cana, at this point we learn only that the mother of Jesus was there and that Jesus and his disciples had also been invited. The extreme sobriety with which the situation is thus depicted at once discourages as irrelevant any attempt—no less frequently made for all that—to give it somewhat more historical, biographical, or psychological color. Nathanael came from Cana (cf. 21:2), and we may conjecture that that was the reason Jesus and his disciples came to the wedding.²² The words “his disciples” obviously refer to the persons mentioned in ch. 1; here already we have the general expression that elsewhere in the Gospel refers to the twelve known from tradition (cf. 6:67; 20:19, 24). They play no role in the story, however important their presence as witnesses was both for themselves and for the later church (cf. vs. 11).

3 As a result of this lack of detail, the presence of Jesus’ mother and the conversation she conducts with Jesus has received all the more attention. Her name is not mentioned; only her relationship to Jesus is important. What she says to Jesus, “they have no wine,” is the first thing the Evangelist says about the wedding feast. It is evident from Jesus’ negative response that Mary thus appeals to him for help. Her directions to the servants in vs. 5 shows that she has unlimited confidence in his capacity to provide that help. How she could entertain such confidence in her son’s abilities is not explained. The Evangelist evidently assumes that his readers knew enough of Mary and her unique involvement in Jesus’ person and work to be able to understand such an initiative on her part. In any case, it is that special relationship and that knowledge of Jesus’ “secret” that enables Mary to fulfill a role in the story that emphasizes the nature of Jesus’ action and self-revelation.²³

4 But it does so negatively because Jesus—not without some sharpness—rejects her (indirect) appeal to him as invasive of his responsibility and hence as not pertinent: “Woman, what have I to do with you? My hour has not yet come.” In the social context of the time the address “woman” was in itself certainly not hard or impolite (cf. Mt. 15:28; Lk. 13:12; Jn. 4:21; so also in other Greek writings). But as the address of a son to his mother it is not common and may seem distant and impersonal. It is true that on another occasion, when there could be no question of such distance, Jesus again addressed his mother as “woman” (19:26).

But here this form of address is accompanied by rejection: “What have I to do with you?” The expression is Semitic and occurs often in situations in which failing to mind one’s own business, so to speak, is considered objectionable.²⁴ Although in itself it need not contain anything offensive, materially it has the intent of a sharp reprimand. The fact that Jesus addresses it to his mother serves to show therefore how much is at stake for him here. And it is precisely in regard to her that he had to observe sharply the boundaries of his authority (cf. Lk. 2:49f.).

In that connection “my hour has not yet come” is of special importance. The saying occurs over and over in John (cf. 7:30; 8:20; 12:23; 13:1; cf. 16:21; 17:1; cf. also 7:6, 8). As a rule the coming of this “hour” refers to the beginning of Jesus’ suffering, his going to the Father, his glorification, and many interpreters understand it thus here. Some think particularly of the hour of Jesus’ death and regard the subsequent miracle as a sign of the forgiveness of sin through Jesus’ blood.²⁵ But Jesus’ “hour,” as a reference to the end of his earthly career, embraces the fullness of his glory, of which his death is only a part. Others, therefore, think that “the hour” in 2:4 refers to all this future glory. This hour never came during the life of Jesus, and in vs. 11b there is said to be only prophetic mention of Jesus’ glory. In this way the Evangelist is said to have warned his readers that the full significance of Jesus’ glory must be sought not in his miracles but in his subsequent glorification by the Father.²⁶

But all this pays too little attention to the setting of the saying here. It is hard to see what a reference to the hour of Jesus’ departure could mean as a reply to Mary’s appeal for help. After all, she did not in fact have to wait that long before Jesus acted. The reference here is not to the hour of Jesus’ departure but to the hour of the beginning, of the breakthrough of the revelation of his glory on earth and in the flesh, and it is therefore arbitrary, in my opinion, to speak of vs. 11 as an anticipation of Jesus’ future exaltation. All that is at issue here is that Jesus cannot seize this hour, that is, this beginning, beforehand—even if his own mother urges him to do so.

This is not to say that for every deed Jesus had to wait, as it were, for a certain cue from God; rather, that he was conscious that the great moment at which the Father called him to this revelation of glory had not yet come. Hence what comes sharply to the fore here, precisely at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, is his awareness that his life was subject to a certain calling that he had to fulfill at God’s direction (cf. 4:35), an awareness that one can describe in the entire framework of this Gospel both as Jesus’ messianic self-consciousness and his consciousness of his divine sonship.²⁷ Meanwhile the “not yet” also implies that what Mary asked of him was not something that in itself lay outside that order²⁸ but was something for which she had to await the time.

5 Mary conducts herself in accordance with both realities. She understands that she must await his time, but also hears a promise in his negative answer. And in her own way she prepares the way for fulfillment of that promise by telling the servants: “Do whatever he tells you” (as Pharaoh told the Egyptians in relation to Joseph when the famine came in the land, Gn. 41:55).

By saying this Mary plays her exemplary role in the story. When it comes to the hour of the fulfillment everyone must stand back. No human being, not even Mary, enters into that hour. But that does not condemn faith to inactivity. When, sometime soon, the hour of fulfillment arrives, then everything will have to be at Jesus’ disposal. Without the faith represented by Mary, Jesus “cannot” do any miracles (cf. 2 Kg. 4:3ff.).

6 This is evident from what now, suddenly, dominates the scene, the now-mentioned six stone water jars.²⁹ Stone jars were used especially for ritual purposes.³⁰ The capacity of these jars was very considerable: a metrētēs is almost 40 liters, so the six jars altogether would hold 480 to 720 liters. These jars had been placed there in accordance with the Jewish rules of purification, for example, for rinsing the hands before and after every meal. Others think here of the prescribed purification bath before conjugal intercourse. Whichever is correct, in the context of this miracle story only the general function of the jars and their enormous capacity are significant. What was lacking at the wedding was wine, not water, the water of the law. The jars needed at the wedding to meet the requirements of the law were requisitioned to remedy what threatened to turn the wedding feast into a big disappointment—the lack of wine. If there is a clear hint anywhere for the understanding of the meaning of a miracle, then surely it is here, in the manner in which the Evangelist quantifies the capacity of the “vessels of the law” in order to enable the reader to measure by that standard the abundance of what Jesus Christ provided.

7, 8 Meanwhile, the idea that it was the sight of these enormous water jars that suddenly prompted Jesus to think that “his hour had come” and drove him to his initiative is not expressed in so many words here. We are denied any psychological insight into Jesus’ messianic consciousness. The Evangelist immediately brings us face-to-face with the miracle itself, which manifests itself first in the authority with which Jesus tells the servants to fill the jars. And only when that instruction has been strictly (“to the brim”) complied with does his command (“now draw some out”) become the announcement of the “hour” of the fulfillment, in which people can draw from the abundance as much as they want (cf. Is. 12:3). For now there is wine as plentiful as water, indeed as plentiful as all the water of purification, which has flowed continually but cannot take away the sin of the world (cf. 1:26f.).

From that point on the emphasis lies not so much on the quantity but on the special quality of the wine provided by Jesus. He has it confirmed by the steward of the feast, who is the most qualified person present. But because the steward does not know what has happened, he is also unsuspecting and hence the most objective judge and witness.

The parenthesis in vs. 9, “he did not know where it came from, though the servants who had drawn the water knew,” is not intended, as some interpreters suggest,³¹ to pose a “spiritual” contrast between the steward, who does not know the secret and thus becomes a type of so many unbelieving Jews (cf. 1:48; 3:8; 4:11, etc.), and the servants, who supposedly have understood it. It is intended rather—as the context indicates—to highlight the objectivity of his judgment of the wine. The statement that the servants who had drawn the water did know the origin of the wine is intended only to remove all misunderstanding or doubt about what they offered their “chief” for his evaluation. The entire description is intended to render unquestionable the genuineness of the miracle. It is on account of his unbiased ignorance that the steward of the feast addresses not Jesus but the bridegroom as the person solely responsible for the wine supply and makes known his astonishment at the course of action that has been followed. He does this as one who knows the customs followed at weddings, that the best wine is normally served first and later, when the guests have had a few drinks and are in a good mood, the lesser wine.

10 The steward’s comment to the bridegroom is certainly not intended as a reprimand. It is rather a compliment on the quality of the wine now being served. The steward undoubtedly speaks out of ignorance, since he does not know where the wine has come from. But in spite of himself, on the basis of what he does know, he describes precisely what has happened. With this statement—“You have kept the good wine until now”—the Evangelist ends the story as a perfect characterization of the situation that has come into being with Jesus’ coming and work.

On the basis of the undeniable depth of this concluding statement, it does not seem difficult to sketch, in its general significance, the place and intent of the narrative as the opening story of the revelation of Jesus’ glory—and to distinguish it from all kinds of historicizing and psychologizing additions on the one hand and allegorizing interpretations on the other. What seems dominant is the salvation-historical perspective, the perspective of the divinely appointed “hour” of the revelation of Jesus’ glory. All the emphasis comes to lie on that divinely appointed time as a result of Mary’s premature pressure. In this way Mary herself represents the role of believing Israel, which impatiently awaits the breakthrough of the promised salvation but must await the moment when “the time is fulfilled,” when the “fullness of time” has come (cf. Mk. 1:15; Gl. 4:4). Corresponding with this is the pronouncement of the steward to the bridegroom: “You have kept the good wine until now.” The “now” is the breakthrough initiated by Jesus, just as he himself, having first said “not yet” to Mary, at the decisive moment says to the servants, “Now draw some out.” For at that moment the water has become wine and the hour has come (cf. 4:23; 5:25).

This transformation of water into wine also determines the nature of this breakthrough in time. The motif of abundance of wine often occurs in prophecy as characteristic for the glory of the coming kingdom of God (cf. Is. 25:6; Am. 9:13, 14; Jr. 31:12ff.; cf. also Gn. 49:11), as it does also in Jewish visions of the future.³² But also in Jesus’ own preaching “new wine” is the symbol of the time of salvation that has come and is still to come (cf. Mk. 2:22 par.; Lk. 22:18, 30). Joy and a festive meal, specifically a wedding meal, are naturally associated with this motif of wine (cf. Mk. 2:19; Mt. 22:2).³³

But we need to bear in mind the uniqueness of the salvation-historical (or “eschatological”) character of the present narrative. This applies, notably, to the so-called messianic wedding motif, which is made central by some interpreters.³⁴ Although in John, too, Jesus is once depicted as a bridegroom (3:19), there is not a single hint in this wedding story that Jesus is acting as host or bridegroom (cf. Mk. 2:19; Rv. 19:7; 21:2, 9; Is. 62:4ff.). The events associated with the wedding remain completely in the background. Jesus is not the host here; he is the wine, more specifically the “good wine” reserved until now (vs. 10). In this regard there is here a striking resemblance with the multiplication of the loaves, surely also intended as an “eschatological” meal, where, according to the traditional story taken over by John, Jesus is the host (cf. 6:11), but where in the ensuing discussion with the Jews all the emphasis is shifted to Jesus as the bread, the true bread come down from heaven, as later he is the (divinely promised) “good Shepherd,” “true vine,” and “true light” (10:14; 15:1; 1:9; 8:12; see also 4:10ff.; 7:37ff.).³⁵

All this serves the concentration on the person of Jesus as the Christ that is so characteristic for the Gospel of John. All that has been promised by God and held out in prospect in a profusion of images and concepts is fulfilled in Jesus,³⁶ it all lies enclosed in him, and it can therefore only be known in its realization and concretization from him—sometimes even in a totally unexpected way (cf., e.g., 6:51). Here, in the story of the first sign, which determines the shape of all that follows (see the comments on vs. 11) all the emphasis lies on the fact that in him is given the fullness of God’s gifts in their joy-full, world-illuminating, and life-giving meaning, entirely in keeping with what was said in the prologue of the glory of the light as a fullness of grace and truth from which the church may draw grace upon grace (1:14, 16). And all this is meant here, as a clear reflection of 1:17, as the new “good” and “true” that puts the old dispensation entirely in the shadow. In the place of the law given through Moses (the Jewish rites of purification) grace and truth in all their fullness have now come through Jesus Christ. In this light Mary’s statement, “They have no wine,” as a statement about the regime of the law, gains a still deeper meaning. At the same time, in this focus on the person of Jesus as “the good wine, kept until now” lies the criterion of what this fullness of joy and salvation holds and means for Israel and the entire world: the rejection of every manner of life and every kind of future expectation that does not have its all-sustaining foundation in his person and work (cf., e.g., 6:26f.).

With this exegesis we distance ourselves from other explanations that either (a) interpret the story of the miracle at Cana on the basis of a very different thought world, that of Hellenism, or (b) proceed from the assumption that the Old Testament background yields much more for the fundamental meaning of this miracle (as the opening story of the entire Gospel) than has been given above.

a) For the Hellenistic approach scholars refer to parallels in the Hellenistic religious world, whether more philosophical or more folkloristic. For instance, we are referred to Philo, who speaks of the Logos as “God’s wine-pourer and feast-leader”³⁷ and says of Melchizedek, as the type of the Logos, that he gave to the souls “wine instead of water.”³⁸ The more folkloristic “motif of the Dionysus legend” has been accorded more attention and support as the background and possible genesis of the miracle at Cana.³⁹ Thus, according to Bultmann, this miracle, which he calls “the miracle of the epiphany of God,” is linked with the legend that on the day of the Dionysus feast, that is, January 5 and 6, the temple springs in Andros and Teos poured out wine instead of water, and empty jars set up elsewhere in the temple proved to be filled with wine the following morning. In the early church this link with the Syrian Dionysus cult can, according to Bultmann, still be seen in the dating of Jesus’ baptism on January 6 and the reading of the pericope of the Cana miracle on the same day.

On religio-historical grounds alone serious objections have been advanced against this interpretation.⁴⁰ The reading of the story of the wedding at Cana on January 6 “cannot be documented before the second half of the fourth century.”⁴¹ The motif of changing of water into wine occurs nowhere in the Dionysus legend. Hence it is not possible that the miracle of the Cana wedding was first ascribed to Dionysus and later attributed to Jesus, as Bultmann believes.

Some scholars have argued—not that the legend was transferred to Jesus, still less that Jesus was identified with Dionysus—but that the miracle story was an independent counterpart of the legend, born of dialogue between the Christian church and the Dionysus legend. “When the church presents Jesus, like Dionysus, as the wine-dispenser, it makes clear the claim that the fullness of life can only be found in the Crucified.”⁴²

But apart from the lack of any historical connection with a miracle performed by Jesus, the whole idea that the overture of the revelation of Jesus’ glory in the Fourth Gospel is patterned on (the antithesis to) a pagan mystery story is irreconcilable with the entire construction and thrust of the Gospel itself. The story itself points in a totally different direction (see the exegesis above), and the thrust of what follows this opening story (the cleansing of the temple, the dialogue with Nicodemus, later the running confrontation with Judaism at the great feast in Jerusalem) is so clearly set against the background of the Jewish religion that the search for a starting point for all this in the adoption of or confrontation with purely pagan motifs seems a priori a method that cannot lead to the desired goal.

b) A totally opposite direction has been taken by those who have searched for the background of John 2 in the Old Testament, in, that is, the motif of the messianic wedding. The redaction of the story is said to show all sorts of striking points of resemblance with those of another opening story in the Israelite history of salvation, one in which the idea of the wedding is also said to be central, namely that of the establishment of the covenant on Mount Sinai as it is described in Exodus 19–24 and further explained in the Targum Pseudo-Jonathan. Following through on suggestions from A. M. Serra, B. Olsson, in a very extensive monograph on Jn. 2:1-11,⁴³ attempted to understand the entire story against what he calls the “Sinai Screen.” He bases this link on various expressions and phrases in Jn 2:1-11 that occur more or less in the same form in Exodus:

Jn. 2:1: on the third day

Ex. 19:11, 16: the third day

Jn. 2:2: Jesus was invited

Ex. 19:20: The LORD called Moses … and Moses went up

Jn. 1:12: Jesus went down to Capernaum

Ex. 19:24f.: Moses went down the mountain

Jn. 2:5: do whatever he tells you

Ex. 19:8: all that the LORD has spoken we will do (cf. 24:3, 7)

Jn. 2:11: he manifested his glory

These terms do not occur in the Masoretic Text or the Septuagint, but do in the Targum.

Jn. 2:11: his disciples believed in him

Ex. 19:9: so that the people may believe you forever

Olsson further refers to the purification motif, which plays an important role in the covenant establishment story (Ex. 19:14ff.) and is represented in Jn. 1:19ff. by the baptism of John, the revelation of Jesus as the Lamb of God, and the Jewish water jars.

The story of the wedding at Cana is to be understood, Olsson says, against this Sinaitic background. Jewish tradition often speaks of the Sinai tradition as the Lord’s marriage to Israel. It would not be too “farfetched, from a Sinai perspective, to allow events at a village wedding to carry a message of something that, according to the narrator, replaces the old wedding at Sinai.” On this basis Olsson believes he can uncover a number of hidden allusions in the story. For example, the wine does not function as an eschatological symbol but (in the light of the “Sinai Screen”) stands for the law, which is now replaced by something new; the disciples are the people of the New Covenant, already manifest in the obedience of the servants; the miracle is therefore the fundamental “beginning” because the Son transforms the old into the new; and from this new perspective Mary’s role can also be understood, etc. Olsson does not regard this as allegorical interpretation. What we have are “allusions” that reveal deeper backgrounds to the initiate. The story is “a symbolic narrative with many allusive elements.”⁴⁴

This lengthy citation of Olsson’s views is motivated by the fact that in the more recent literature there is a clear tendency to find everywhere in the New Testament hidden allusions not only to the Old Testament but also to the Jewish Targums and the liturgical readings of the synagogue. Now there certainly is an important element of truth in this approach. In the Fourth Gospel we again and again encounter expressions that are clearly reminiscent of all kinds of Old Testament stories and statements, though they are not directly cited as such. Perhaps we may say that there is here a playing with the “sacred language” (in, e.g., vs. 5) to which the ears of the first readers were probably better attuned than those of today’s church.

But it is something very different to find in these sometimes extremely vague allusions the real key to the understanding of the intent of the text. That 1:14-18 is shaped by the events on and around Sinai seems to me obvious (see my comments above). The reference to Moses and the giving of the law is explicit. But to say that the story of the Cana wedding can only be understood in light of a number of highly dubious allusions that one must discover by close comparison of the two texts would be to attribute to the Evangelist an artificial method of telling a story, a method that cannot be made plausible. Following B. Lindars one may ask:

Is [the Evangelist’s] intention lost if the supposed allusions to the Sinai narrative are missed? If they are essential, why has he not taken the trouble to make his point plain?… The text must be allowed to make its point for what it is in itself. In fact this kind of interpretation is far more likely to distort the author’s meaning than to elucidate it. There is simply no firm evidence that the New Testament writers were accustomed to work in this way.⁴⁵

In a few general terms vs. 11 describes the meaning of the preceding narrative. By speaking of the “beginning” of the signs the author tells his readers not only that the miracle at Cana was the first in a series, but also that it was the opening act of a much larger work, the foundation and pattern for everything that follows.⁴⁶

The word “sign”⁴⁷ which is characteristic for John (just once, in 4:48, linked with “wonders”⁴⁸) has the meaning “miraculous act,” in keeping with the use of the word in the Septuagint (especially in the combination “signs and wonders”), usually as a reference to the miracles and mighty deeds by which Israel was led out of Egypt and by which Moses was legitimized as one sent by God (e.g., Ex. 8:4ff.). Therefore, in distinction from both general use of the Greek word and our word “sign,” use of this word in John does not refer primarily to a deeper or symbolic dimension of meaning but to miracle as a sign of authentication or legitimation. This is not to deny that the miracles that Jesus performed were also manifestations of his glory and that they materially disclosed the character of his coming and work (as was pointed out in the story) and sometimes served as symbols thereof. But even where that is the case, the sign is a miraculous event and not a parabolic story or a symbolic action in which the reference is only to a deeper or higher reality.⁴⁹

Here the significance of the miraculous sign is that it is “the manifestation of his glory” (cf. 1:14), which had earlier been proclaimed to the disciples as “greater things” (1:50f.). Of that glory they now witnessed the first realization. Only the disciples are mentioned here even though Jesus’ self-manifestation also extended itself to others who were present and also called them to believe. But the disciples are mentioned because they were those who had been with him from the beginning as officially appointed witnesses of his glory (cf. 15:27). Here at Cana, having seen his self-manifestation, they “believed in him,” even though their faith has been mentioned earlier (cf. 1:50). “Believing” means here that more and more they learned to understand the person with whom they had to do; it was faith, therefore, that did not stop at astonishment over his power (cf. 2:23ff.) or at the expectation with which they had approached him. It is faith in Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God, in the sense in which the Evangelist meant to strengthen the church he was addressing (20:31). Of that church the disciples, as witnesses of Jesus’ glory, came to be not only the founders but also the first representatives.

2:12-22

Jesus at Jerusalem, the Cleansing of the Temple

In vs. 12 we have a transitional passage in which Capernaum is mentioned as the new base of Jesus’ activity. “After this” is not intended to make a direct connection with what happened in Cana. Mt. 4:13 and Lk. 4:31 also mention Jesus establishing himself in Capernaum. Apparently the Evangelist here refers back—briefly—to this precanonical tradition, in which it is a given that during his activity in Galilee Jesus operated—at least for a time—from a base in Capernaum (cf. Mt. 9:1).⁵⁰ It is striking that at this point also his mother and brothers are mentioned (see, however, texts like Mt. 12:46f.; Mk. 3:31f.; Lk. 8:19f.). Capernaum plays no special role in the Fourth Gospel (cf., besides 4:46, also 6:17, 24, 59). Jesus’ mother is not mentioned again until 19:25-27, and his brothers are mentioned again only in 7:3ff. Besides furnishing general orientation, 2:12 also prepares for the remainder of the story. But everything is stated with the greatest possible brevity. The reader’s attention is immediately directed to what follows, events foreshadowed in the concluding words: “and there they stayed for a few days.” If the correct reading is “they” (and not “he,” as some important manuscripts have it), the reference is, of course, to Jesus and his disciples.

In the extreme succinctness of the transition we again come to know the character and purpose of the Fourth Gospel. It does not aim to give a complete account of the life of Jesus. As a rule the chronological viewpoint has only marginal significance. The author assumes that the reader has sufficient general knowledge of the tradition as background for understanding the events that he has selected.

13 The introduction to the story that now follows explains Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem: “the Passover of the Jews was at hand.” “The Jews” are mentioned here (as in vs. 5; 5:1; 6:4; 7:2; 19:14) not to distinguish them from the nationality of the readers but to describe the Passover and other Jewish customs celebrated by Jews but now abandoned by the Evangelist and his readers. Jewish feasts are occasions for Jesus to go to Jerusalem several times in this Gospel (6:4; 7:2; 10:22; 11:55; 12:1). There, at the Jewish geographical center and at the high points of the religious life of the Jewish people, the great confrontation between Jesus and the Jewish leaders takes place.

What is primarily at stake in the story that now follows is the all-controlling significance of the temple. By placing the story of the “cleansing” of the temple immediately after the story of the first manifestation of Jesus’ glory, the Evangelist now in a most fundamental way poses for the reader’s consideration the critical significance of Jesus’ coming and work. In conjunction with the conversation with Nicodemus, which follows in ch. 3, we have in this journey to the temple the first great confrontation with “the Jews,” which is concerned with authority over the temple and the “knowledge” of the Jewish scribes (cf. 3:2, 11; see pp. 97ff. above).

The first question in regard to this passage is always where to place this event historically: as the Synoptics do, just before the last Passover before Jesus’ death, or as John does, during a (much) earlier Passover? The idea that we are dealing here with a repetition of precisely the same action at the same location and with the same attendant question concerning Jesus’ authority, though not intrinsically impossible, nevertheless seems highly improbable.

If, then, the event must go in one place or another, there are weighty arguments on both sides.⁵¹ An argument for the Johannine version could be that the Synoptics mention only one Passover and one journey to Jerusalem, leaving no other place to put the story. John, by contrast, demonstrates that he has a much more differentiated knowledge of Jesus’ conduct at the Jewish festivals. Another argument could be that a cleansing of the temple where John locates it would be Jesus’ initial reaction to the “worldliness” of the activities around the temple rather than a reaction occurring the last time he was in Jerusalem.⁵² Another matter of importance is the precise time indication, “the forty-sixth year,” in vs. 20, which seems to argue more for the earlier Johannine dating than for the later Synoptic dating.⁵³ In any case the date shows that, however much John is guided in the selection and ordering of the events narrated by other concerns, he by no means loses sight of a chronological perspective.

It cannot be denied that Jesus’ saying about the tearing down and building up of the temple (Jn. 1:19) plays a distinct role in the history of Jesus’ trial before the Sanhedrin and his subsequent execution (Mk. 14:58; Mt. 26:61; cf. Mk. 15:29; Mt. 27:40). But the Synoptics neither mention this connection nor set the saying into the story of the cleansing. They say that there was no consensus among the witnesses with regard to the saying, which does not suggest that there had just recently been a serious conflict over the issue between Jesus and the Jewish authorities.

Though there is thus much that argues for the Johannine dating of the cleansing, with regard to this much disputed point it is not likely that we shall ever arrive at absolute certainty or a unanimous judgment.

14-16 What comes most prominently to the fore in this confrontation between Jesus and the Jews is the absolute authority and attendant severity of Jesus’ public action. He not only tells the merchants and the money changers whom he found in the temple to leave but with a hastily improvised whip he drives them all⁵⁴—merchandise and everything—out of the temple. He spills out the money changers’ money and turns their tables over and commands the pigeon merchants to take their merchandise and leave—all this with the message intended for them: “You shall not make my Father’s house a house of trade!” In this description of the temple there is, of course, an implied legitimation of his action as well as an explanation of his anger and of the violence he uses. He acts and speaks as the Son, whose holy wrath and zeal are ignited at sight of what people have done with his Father’s house.

It has been asked whether what the merchants did was really that great an evil. After all, they provided pilgrims what they needed for the sacrifices and enabled them to pay the obligatory temple tax in the prescribed currency. The merchants had to pay substantial rent for their spaces in the temple court to the temple authorities. But Jesus’ fury and severity were not directed against the merchants’ or money changers’ profits but against the very fact of business being conducted in the precincts of the sanctuary. For him it was intolerable that the place of access to God’s holy dwelling and to communion with God himself was made into a place of trade in animals and money, a business for which in the nature of the case the temple was not intended. That his criticism was not only directed against the merchants but also concerned the authorities in the temple and the pilgrims in general, all of whom apparently accepted such a combination of contradictory matters as natural, is obvious and, as the sequel shows, was clearly understood as such by the Jewish leaders. The real conflict was between him and them. And, as will appear in vs. 18, the dispute was ultimately not over what was permitted or prohibited in the temple but over who wielded authority there.

17 In a parenthetical statement we learn that the disciples—whose presence as the regular companions and witnesses of Jesus is simply assumed here—remembered these words from Scripture: “Zeal for thy house has consumed me” (cf. Ps. 69:9). The idea that we have here a later reflection (as in vs. 22 and 12:16) is not suggested by the text itself. “Consume” does not refer to the intensity of the emotion that was manifest in Jesus’ zeal for the house of God but, as is clear from Ps. 69:9b itself,⁵⁵ to the lethal hostility that his zeal was to evoke from his adversaries. The full manifestation of this hostility would undoubtedly not surface till later, and the scriptural proof⁵⁶ from Psalm 69 (cf. Ro. 15:3; Jn. 19:28) was therefore undoubtedly proleptic. But this is not to deny that in Jesus’ violent and authoritative resistance against the misuse of the temple the disciples saw the spirit of prophecy moving in him—and that in that context they learned to understand his conduct also during his lifetime (cf. 14:25).

18 “The Jews”—a term that here as so often in the Fourth Gospel refers to the Jewish authorities in their hostile attitude toward Jesus⁵⁷—react by asking Jesus for a sign of legitimation⁵⁸—a supernatural demonstration of his authority. Such a sign was repeatedly demanded of Jesus (cf. Mt. 12:38, 39; 16:1ff.; Lk. 23:8) and was, indeed, characteristic of Jewish thinking (cf. 1 Co. 1:22; Jn. 4:48; 6:30). But Jesus never met such requests.

19 Jesus does respond with a pronouncement in which the prospect of such a “sign” is held out to them, but he does so in a way that for his adversaries (and for his disciples!) must have been a complete mystery: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”

20-22 “The Jews” took Jesus’ words literally⁵⁹ and, in view of the long period of time already spent (and still being spent) in the construction of the temple,⁶⁰ could only view the “three days” as an absurdity, about which there could be no sensible discussion. The Evangelist explains that Jesus spoke of “the temple of his body” (vs. 21) and tells us that after his resurrection the disciples remembered Jesus’ statement (vs. 22), and in both additions⁶¹ it is clear that the Evangelist intends us to understand “tearing down” and “raising up” as referring to Jesus’ death and resurrection. By his words in vs. 19, then, Jesus seems to be serving notice to his adversaries that his authority with regard to the temple would manifest itself when they would raise to the limit the hostility that they already felt toward him, by executing him. Then in three days he would build up again what they had broken down—his body—by rising from the dead. However much this explanation of Jesus’ enigmatic saying—unintelligible alike to friend and foe when he spoke it—illumines the background of the dispute between Jesus and his adversaries that erupts with increasing force in the following chapters, it does not remove the fact that as an interpretation of Jesus’ answer to the Jews it poses questions that are difficult to answer.

The first question is whether in the explanation every connection with the historic temple is excluded and Jesus, in total detachment from the situation in which he found himself, had in mind only his own body when he spoke of “this temple.” We must ask this because elsewhere in the Gospels similar—at first sight—statements of Jesus occur (or at least are put in his mouth) that seem to have a very different thrust. We specifically have in mind the statements made during the trial before the Sanhedrin: “I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and in three days I will build another, not made with hands” (Mk. 14:58), “I am able to destroy the temple of God, and to build it in three days” (Mt. 26:61; cf. Mk. 15:29; Mt. 27:40; Ac. 6:14). Scholars usually view these as eschatological sayings of judgment that Jesus uttered over the temple at Jerusalem, following it with a messianic announcement of another reality complete with a new temple “not made with hands.” “Three days” is sometimes taken as an indication of a short period or as an allusion to the rabbinic dating of the resurrection from the dead on the third day after the end of the world, in accordance with Ho. 6:2.⁶² Jesus’ answer in Jn 2:19 is said to have been understood in a similar sense by the spectators and to have been echoed in the charges made and the mockery expressed before Caiaphas and at the cross. The assumption is then that the Evangelist reinterpreted all this by taking “this temple” to mean not the temple in Jerusalem but the temple of Jesus’ body.

But can the parallel utterances really help us understand Jn. 2:19ff.? They are, after all, related as false testimony. And here in John Jesus does not say “I will tear down this temple,” but “Destroy this temple.” The imperative has a much fiercer sound than a conditional—“if you destroy this temple”—would have. It has the character of an ironic provocation, as in prophetic utterances like Am. 4:4; Is. 8:9f.:⁶³ “Go ahead, destroy this temple—as you are already doing and apparently love to do—and in three days I will raise it up again.” So tearing down the temple is not the judgment of God or Jesus on the temple (of which the violent cleansing would then be the prelude) but the manner in which the Jews themselves were disturbing God’s dwelling among them. Jesus announces that what they are apparently consciously tearing down he will build up in three days in a way that is not conceivable to them (“in three days”). Viewed in this light the connection with the temple in which they are standing (and with Jesus’ cleansing of it) is maintained—even given the Evangelist’s explanation. There lay the starting point of the entire confrontation. “This temple” the Jews, by their unspiritual “management” of the house of God, were in the process of tearing down. And, as is already clear now, Jesus himself, in his zeal for God’s claims upon the temple, was to fall a victim to that attitude. But the sign that they demanded of him and Jesus held out to them would not consist, as the Jews thought and later charged, in a new building (“made with hands,” Mk. 14:58) at Jerusalem, but—as the disciples, the church, and the Evangelist were to understand in retrospect—in the miracle of his resurrection, both as the proof of his authority and as the new way in which God would make his dwelling among people (cf. 4:21ff.). By way of this new focus, in which the entire dispute with the Jews is placed under the “heading” of that future, all the words about the temple in this context gain a new meaning and are placed on a new level, and “this temple” in vs. 19 is seen as a transition, the ambiguity of which only emerges later.

Interpreters are very divided in their opinions on this difficult passage. Some believe that vs. 19 should be explained by itself, apart from the temple at Jerusalem and the cleansing of the temple. In the words “this temple” Jesus is said to have had in mind only his own body, to which he perhaps pointed with his finger (“this”). Others believe that in vs. 19a the temple at Jerusalem is meant and in vs. 19b (“it”) Jesus’ body is meant. Brown, who reports all these ideas, calls the explanation of the Evangelist himself “a post-resurrectional amplification” of an original “eschatological proclamation referring to the Jerusalem temple.”⁶⁴ But, as stated above, we do not know with any clarity of such a proclamation from the mouth of Jesus, considering the murky source (Jesus’ accusers and opponents) we have to draw on. However, the idea that the words “this temple” are completely detached from the temple in Jerusalem where the disputants found themselves and which was at issue seems to me (as to Brown) equally hard to defend. Bultmann’s judgment is very radical. According to him it is clear that vss. 20 and 21 are “a secondary interpretation” because “the temple referred to in vs. 19 is the real temple of Jerusalem as is shown by … τòν ναòν τοῦτον.” And he regards it as a comical “way of getting out of the predicament” to say (as vs. 20 states) that with this τοῦτον Jesus pointed to his own body.⁶⁵ However much the starting point for the temple saying may have been “the real temple of Jerusalem,” it is no less clear that (in the mouth of Jesus) the object of the “tearing down” and “building up” cannot be the temple in Jerusalem. Jesus is not referring to the destruction of the temple as the coming judgment of God, as in Mt. 24:2, but to the manner in which the Jews were guilty of violating their own temple. And there is even less ground for the notion that he is holding out the prospect of an eschatological reconstruction—and that by himself—of this “real temple of Jerusalem.” The contrary is rather the case (cf. Jn. 4:21f.).

In addition, as far as the terms of the text are concerned, for “raising up” (again) the Evangelist uses a word⁶⁶ that can refer to “new construction” of a house or to “raising up” of a body—surely also with a view to the interpretation that is given. It is hard to say with certainty whether “in three days” is a direct prediction of the period between Jesus’ death and resurrection (elsewhere usually described as “after three days” or “on the third day,” cf. Mk. 8:31; 9:31; 10:34; Mt. 27:63; 16:21; 1 Co. 15:4) or an eschatological time indication (as it is used in the rabbinic literature; see above).

The most striking feature in the whole pronouncement is of course that in speaking of this marvelous construction Jesus is referring to his resurrection and in speaking of “this temple” he is referring to his body. Among the numerous explanations of this, it has been pointed out that elsewhere the body is called the temple of God or of the Holy Spirit (cf. 1 Co. 3:16; 6:19). But the point of departure for this idea does not lie in the body but in Christ himself, who in rising from the grave to which he has been consigned by people proves himself to be the one in whom the glory of God dwells among people. In Rv. 21:22 God and the Lamb are identified as the “temple” of the heavenly Jerusalem, and in Jn. 1:14 the indwelling of the glory of God in the flesh is described with as the “tabernacle”⁶⁷ (cf. also Mt. 12:6). But rather than seeking the explanation for Jesus’ identification with the temple in proof texts, we should find it in the general conceptual framework of the Fourth Gospel: In Jesus Christ has become manifest the truth of what in all sorts of ways was foreshadowed and predicted in Israel’s history, in the law of Moses, in the holy institutions of Israel as the people of God, and in the prophets’ future expectation. In other words, just as Jesus is the Lamb of God (1:29), so he is also the temple that will replace the existing temple and in whom the indwelling of God among people will be truly and fully realized.

This last point explains why the Evangelist uses the story of the cleansing of the temple to lead into Jesus’ confrontation with the Jewish leaders, which began with his appearance in Jerusalem. In that temple, in which all the privileges and pretensions of the religion they represented were concentrated, Jesus set himself as the Son of the Father with full power and authority over his house. And there he pronounced a devastating judgment over the havoc that the people had wreaked there. Over against that havoc he announced a new way of worshiping God that God would establish in him, a new way in which—as he was to tell the Samaritan woman—the true worshipers would worship the Father in Spirit and in truth (4:23).

For that reason the story of the temple-cleansing, together with that of the wedding at Cana, can also be viewed as the background of all that follows. In both stories the presence of God among people becomes visible in Jesus’ coming as a sign, in its salvific as well as in its critical significance. To his readers—in their struggle for the true religion—the Evangelist could hardly picture the radicality and exclusiveness of faith in Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God, with greater force than by the conjunction of these two introductory stories.

The last words of the pericope (vs. 22) say that the disciples did not remember that he had said this until after the resurrection. They, too, were unable to understand the meaning of his words before that. But then “they believed the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.” That is, they understood, by the light of Scripture, the way Jesus had to go and where it led. Then the word Jesus had once uttered became for them (all the more) reason to believe in him.

For our insight into the origin of the faith of the Christian church and of the gospel, this concluding verse is of special importance. It does not say that the roots of the Christian faith and of the way the historical Jesus was described lay in the experience of the resurrection. The Fourth Gospel emphasizes the manifestation of the glory of Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God, during his earthly life. It is not just the glory of the resurrection that retroactively shines over his earthly life. It is the glory with which he “dwelled among us,” the glory of the Word that became flesh, to which the Gospel consistently testifies.

But the disciples’ understanding of that glory did not keep pace with the revelation. It was the resurrection, the witness of the Spirit (14:26; 15:26), and the Scriptures that “brought to their remembrance,” that gave them the correct understanding of what Jesus had said and done. Thus they became aware of who he was and what he had said and meant. Neither the resurrection, nor the Spirit, nor the Scriptures, nor their faith was primary. What was and remained primary was the glory of the indwelling of God in Jesus. The gospel is not the story of the later faith of the Christian church; it is the report of the revelation of God in the flesh. But only the end, the resurrection, and the Spirit teach disciples to understand the beginning and offer faith a foothold in “the word that Jesus had spoken.”

2:23–3:10

Jesus’ Knowledge of Humankind, the Dialogue with Nicodemus

The purpose of vss. 23-25 is clearly to introduce a new perspective in relation to the revelation of the glory of Jesus Christ. Up to this point the revelation led to two opposing reactions: that of Jesus’ disciples and that of “the Jews.” The disciples beheld his glory and believed in him (2:11). “The Jews” questioned the authority with which Jesus acted in the temple and thus began the opposition that in the end was to lead them to their total rejection of Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God. Now in 2:23ff. we learn of a third reaction, one more favorable than that of “the Jews”: the “many” at Jerusalem were deeply impressed by Jesus’ miraculous power and so “believed in his name.” But Jesus adopted a very reserved posture toward this reaction.

All this constitutes a point of departure for the conversation with Nicodemus in ch. 3, where, in a profound way, the deficit of this faith on the part of the “many”—represented by Nicodemus—is stressed. This is done, first, on the basis of the “knowledge” (vs. 25) Jesus had of humanity (3:1-8), then in the light of a new and great exposition of Jesus’ coming into the world and of a corresponding faith in his name (3:11-22).

23, 24 The manner in which the transition is made to this new perspective is characteristic for the way in which the author works: there is a historical link with the preceding, Jesus’ stay in Jerusalem during the Passover, but there is no information whatever about any other action of Jesus at the feast, including the miracles he apparently performed repeatedly⁶⁸ in those days. The Evangelist considered Jesus’ performance of miracles wherever he was staying sufficiently well known to be able to refer to them in connection with the reaction of the “many.”

The Evangelist describes that reaction as “believing in Jesus’ name,” and we thus immediately encounter a problem that returns again and again in the Gospel and that surely played an important role in the later relationship between the church and the synagogue, namely what one can and should understand by “believing in Jesus.” The expression also occurs in 1:12, just as elsewhere there is repeated mention of “faith” that later proved impermanent (7:31; 8:30; 10:42; 11:45; 12:42). The Evangelist does not say that they pretended to be believers or anything like that; he does not deny that they believed. They believed in Jesus as a man sent from God, as, expressing the conviction of many, Nicodemus put it (“we know” in 3:2), and they did this because, unlike many of the Jewish leaders, they did not question the genuineness of Jesus’ miracles (cf. 9:16; Mt. 9:34; 10:25; 12:24, etc.). At the same time it is clear that not all “believing” or “believing in his name” could be equated with the faith mentioned in 1:12, where the link is made—as it will be in the conversation with Nicodemus—with “being born of God.”

The Evangelist himself does not pronounce this judgment, but refers in vs. 24 to the posture Jesus adopted toward the many who believed in him because of his miracles. Jesus “did not trust himself to them,” did not count on them as followers of whom he could be sure. We are not told in what way Jesus maintained this reserve toward them. He apparently did not prevent them from following him as his disciples (cf., e.g., 6:66) but he knew that the impression made on them by his miracles did not offer a guarantee that in the end they would choose for him. It is on that “knowledge” of Jesus that all the emphasis falls here.

25 Bultmann speaks of the cumbersomeness (“Umständlichkeit”) with which in vs. 25 Jesus’ omniscience is emphasized as the ground for his reserve and calls it typical for this Evangelist. However, this copiousness not only serves to explain Jesus’ restrained posture toward the people referred to in vss. 22-24 but is also meant to prepare for what will come up as the first decisive point of discussion in the dialogue with Nicodemus, which follows: “what was in the human person” (vs. 25b).

3:1 The conversation with Nicodemus offers a very specific elaboration of what was said in a more general sense in 2:23-25. In the figure of Nicodemus we are given an illustrative demonstration—perhaps we may say par excellence—of what in the preceding is called “the faith” of the many in Jerusalem who were impressed by the signs that Jesus did.

Nicodemus is introduced as “a man of the Pharisees.” “A man” could simply mean “someone,” but in light of the repeated ἄνθρωπος in 2:25 (and with a view to 3:4, 27), the use of the word is probably intentional. As a Pharisee Nicodemus was an adherent of a rigorously orthodox and nationalistic party and as such also a scribe (vs. 10). He was also “a ruler of the Jews,” which means, as is evident from 7:26, 48 (as also from the usage in Luke and Acts), that he was a member of the Sanhedrin. Again, then, we have here a confrontation between Jesus and official Judaism, but one that is very different from that in 2:18ff. Nicodemus clearly did not belong to the leaders who were hostile to Jesus, and later in the Gospel he speaks on Jesus’ behalf in the Sanhedrin (7:50) and joins with those who provide Jesus an honorable burial (19:39).

2 Nicodemus’s motive for going to Jesus was certainly that he wanted to become better acquainted with him, and this comes out in the significant remark he later addresses to his colleagues (7:51). That he came to Jesus “by night” is interpreted variously. The inference that he wanted to speak with Jesus without being noticed is obvious. This does not necessarily mean, however, that he was motivated by fear, as is often assumed (with reference to the context in which “by night” comes up again in 19:39 [cf. vs. 38]). But although in this encounter by night the element of prudence may have been a factor, one can hardly, in light of all the facts, call Nicodemus a model of fear.⁶⁹ And we certainly cannot place him among the “many of the authorities” whose secret faith is disqualified in 12:42f. Therefore some scholars look for the motive of this nocturnal visit simply in a desire to talk with Jesus undisturbed, just as the rabbis made a habit of studying the Torah by night.⁷⁰

The manner in which Nicodemus addressed Jesus and made known his view of him is typical for his role throughout this encounter. He comes to Jesus not with a question but with a statement (“we know”), one, indeed, that reflects what is said in 2:23 concerning the “many” in Jerusalem who believed in Jesus’ name. His position as a scribe and a member of the Sanhedrin gives all the more relief to this “we know”; still he is speaking in the first place as representative of this “faith” in Jesus and not so much as an authoritative scribe. Nicodemus speaks in the plural, as others do later (4:24; 9:24, 29, 31; 16:30), to say what certain groups believe or do not believe about Jesus.⁷¹

Nicodemus’s witness concerning Jesus is certainly not devoid of significant content. He not only addresses Jesus as “Rabbi” but expressly calls him “a teacher come from God,” mentioning Jesus’ signs as incontestable ground for this. He could base this on the general opinion of Jews that performance of miracles, and certainly miracles of the kind Jesus did, served as a clear indication that a person had been sent by God (cf., e.g., 9:31ff.).⁷² Others, going farther, believe that Nicodemus was referring here to the prophet predicted in Dt. 18:15, 18.⁷³ He does not speak of a prophet, however, but of a teacher, and Deuteronomy 18 does not mention miracles. Also, the description is too general to serve as a reference to the expectation of one very specific prophet (or teacher; cf. 9:33).

The qualifications Nicodemus uses of Jesus (“come from God”; “God is with him”) approximate or coincide with what Jesus says of himself (e.g., 8:29; 16:32). Therefore, we are faced with the question why Nicodemus is presented as one of those of whom it is said (2:24) that Jesus “did not trust himself to them,” one of those who “do not receive our testimony” and “do not believe” (3:11f.).

3 Jesus’ response is given with the great emphasis of “Amen, amen” (see the comments on 1:51) and is repeated in somewhat different language in vs. 5. It resembles (like 1:51) a revelational utterance that not only transcends human certainties (“we know”) but also replaces them with something of another order and a higher priority. Nicodemus had spoken of Jesus’ signs as proof that God was with him. Jesus himself reached beyond the signs and spoke of (seeing) the kingdom of God. He thereby placed his public conduct in a context in which God was with him in another, superior, more decisive way than Nicodemus and the “many” in Jerusalem were apparently aware of: by revealing in him God’s salvation in its “eschatological” all-embracing significance.

Only here and in vs. 5 is the kingdom of God mentioned in the Fourth Gospel. This surely ties in with the fact that John focuses everything on the person of Christ. All the more prominent in the Fourth Gospel, therefore, is the “personal” concept⁷⁴ that corresponds to the concept of “the kingdom of God,” that of “the Son of man” as the fully empowered Revealer and Bringer of the kingdom of God, as Daniel 7 speaks of him. In what follows, what is called the kingdom of God here will be referred to as the descent from heaven of the Son of man (vss. 13ff.). But to attribute such significance to Jesus and to see (that is, to be permitted to share in)⁷⁵ the kingdom represented by him, or to be allowed to enter it (so vs. 5), requires more than just being impressed by his miraculous power and ascribing to him a place of honor in the situation in which one finds oneself and considers oneself competent to judge. It requires a complete reversal in that situation, a reversal that Jesus describes as “being born from above.”

There has been much controversy over whether we should translate ἄνωθεν as “from above” or “anew.”⁷⁶ A clear argument for the first is that “from above” is the starting point of the pericope in vss. 31-36, one that is intimately tied in with vss. 1-21. Just as the Redeemer “comes from above” (3:31; see also 3:13), so also the redeemed must be born “from above.” For the second meaning, “anew,” one can appeal to the response of Nicodemus, who speaks of “a second time.” Sometimes scholars speak of a play on words possible only in the Greek: Jesus had in mind “from above,” but Nicodemus understood “anew.” If, however, one goes back to the unquestionably Semitic origin of this pronouncement, then such a play on words is hard to construe, and one encounters an Aramaic word that can only mean “from above.”⁷⁷ We are not, however, dealing with an essential difference. As is evident from vss. 5 and 8 Jesus had in mind a birth “of the Spirit,” and it is “of God” in 1:13. Such a birth is both “from above” and “anew.” Nicodemus takes it to mean “entering one’s mother’s womb a second time” and in any case does not understand Jesus’ meaning. Therefore, although the translation “anew” is certainly not impossible, on the basis of the context I favor “from above.”

Scholars have tried in various ways to delineate the theological meaning of this striking expression more precisely. But, with a view also to Nicodemus’s answer in vs. 4, birth “from above” does not function in this specific Johannine form (which does not occur anywhere else)⁷⁸ as a fixed theological term adopted from some existing doctrinal system so that Jesus could expect an expert to understand it.⁷⁹ It has the character, rather, of one of those recurrent paradoxical sayings (e.g., 2:19; 6:41, 51) that were intended to produce some kind of shock. Although in vs. 5 Jesus will explain his meaning further, his primary intent is obviously not to refute or correct Nicodemus’s theological certainties by means of scribal terms or arguments, but to impress him at a much deeper level, where his entire existence before God is at stake.

Some regard this pronouncement as another version of the saying in Mk. 10:15; Mt. 18:3: “Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it.” Others mention the reference to being a child of God, which is more than the comparison “like a child” and thus assumes a new beginning. Still others look for the background of this mode of speaking in Hellenistic religiosity. Dodd refers specifically to the Hermetic literature, which mentions rebirth.⁸⁰ Bultmann speaks of a Gnostic source that the Evangelist used and that supposedly mentioned “being begotten from above.”⁸¹ In rabbinic writings, too, one finds many expressions that denote rescue from death, the forgiveness of sins, and the like as a re-creation,⁸² though this is different from what Jesus meant. All this may serve to show that Jesus was not speaking into a spiritual vacuum, but that does not remove the surprising (in this context) and paradoxical character of his emphatic revelational saying (cf., e.g., 6:53; also 1:51).

4 Accordingly, Nicodemus’s answer is not that of one who is unfamiliar with a certain “theological” terminology or thought pattern, but that of a natural man, one for whom being “born from above” is the end of all human knowledge or scribal learning.⁸³ He gives realistic expression to his feelings with a question calculated to show up the absurdity of what Jesus has said. One may call this rather primitive reply of Nicodemus a rhetorical form: John frequently has the conversation partners of Jesus—all responding to similar paradoxical statements—pose questions that show misunderstanding and incomprehension and that provide Jesus with an opportunity to explain himself further (e.g., 2:20; 4:11f.; chs. 8–9). But this sort of reaction also shows how great the distance is between Jesus’ mode of thought and theirs and how time and again his words thus sound strange or even absurd to them (cf. 2:19; 4:10; 6:52; 8:58)—an effect that Jesus undoubtedly intended to stimulate them to reflection but whose background and actual cause lay in the fact that Jesus spoke and acted from another reality than his partners in dialogue.

5 To Nicodemus’s question (“How can a person …?”) Jesus replies with a factual as well as formal repetition of his first pronouncement, using different words in place of the expression that had proven to be so puzzling and even absurd to Nicodemus, saying now not “from above” but “of water and the Spirit.” The reference to “the Spirit” as the creator of life as promised eschatological gift should have made clear to Nicodemus what Jesus meant. But “water and Spirit” together are harder to understand.⁸⁴ Some see here in “born of water and the Spirit” a reflection of the later ecclesiastical doctrine of baptismal regeneration and accordingly regard “of water” as a later “sacramental” insertion. But it would then be more natural to reverse the argument and explain the later teaching (partly) in terms of this expression—and also to explain the use of the words “regeneration,” “born anew” (cf. Tit. 3:5; 1 Pt. 1:3, 23), which display a much more fixed and hence later character, on the basis of this unusual “born from above”/“born of water and the Spirit.”

The question remains what might have been meant by “water,” which is governed by a single preposition with “Spirit,”⁸⁵ in the context of John 3. Some think that it need not refer to baptism but is a symbol for “Spirit,” as in 7:38f. and that the conjunction “and” is epexegetical, meaning “that is to say.”⁸⁶ But it is unlikely that “water” should mean no more than “Spirit,” which follows in the same breath. Why then mention water first? On the other hand, it is not at all necessary to think in this connection of the church doctrine of baptism, of which Nicodemus could not have had any notion. And Jesus is speaking not of access to the church but about entering the kingdom, with reference to which the connection between (baptismal) water and the Spirit was relevant from the start, as we have seen at length in the Baptist’s testimony (1:26ff.), and it can hardly be accidental that the pericope that immediately follows the present one (3:22ff.) again mentions John’s baptism.

Accordingly it is against that baptismal background that one must understand Jesus’ pronouncement to Nicodemus. The message of the kingdom was bound up from the beginning not only with the call to repentance but also with water baptism, in close connection with which the baptism of the Holy Spirit had been held out as the gift of the Coming One (cf. 1:33). Therefore, “water and Spirit” can be used together of the birth needed to enter the kingdom: baptism as the putting off of the old, the Spirit as the creator and gift of the new life. It thus becomes clear why Jesus counters Nicodemus’s seemingly positive and well-considered words with such a radical reply, one that shatters all human certainties. Where a person is actually confronted with the reality of the kingdom of God, that person’s entire existence is at stake, and in this crisis something more is needed than what he or she claims to “know” on the basis of experience: only “water and Spirit,” as the way and the gift of the new world of God, are relevant.

6 To demonstrate the necessity of such a new birth of the Spirit Jesus contrasts it with being “born of the flesh” as the mode of existence that belongs to humanity by nature and conditions all human thoughts and deeds. What is meant here by “flesh” can best be illumined with the aid of 1:13, where being “born of God” is opposed to being “born of blood, of the will of the flesh, of human will.” Hence “flesh” denotes a person in his or her natural existence as begotten by a father and given birth to by a mother. It is that birth that both determines and limits the nature of human existence, which thus does not extend to the ability to see and enter the kingdom of God. This is not just a matter of “above” and “below” as two mutually exclusive modes of existence, since one, in virtue of its origin, is by definition inaccessible to the other. Being born of “water and Spirit” does not mean—and it is precisely the Fourth Gospel that is very emphatic about this—being released from the temporal and “fleshly” existence of this world; it means rather the subjection of the flesh to the reign of the Spirit, of reconciliation, forgiveness, and renewal, a reign that deeply enters the sphere of the flesh (see also the comments on 1:29-34 above).

Hence—according to vs. 7—Nicodemus must not be too surprised⁸⁷ over the fact that Jesus spoke of the necessity of being “born from above.” How could that which is born of flesh, on its own strength as it were, secure for itself a share in the kingdom of God? Conversely, how could the Spirit, precisely as the Spirit of God and from above, not have the power to bring about this event, however puzzling and absurd it might seem to Nicodemus?

Verse 8 focuses on the positive side of Jesus’ initial pronouncement and illumines it by means of the image of “wind.” Both Hebrew and Greek have one word for “wind” and “spirit,” and wind, in its power and effect, is a common image for the Spirit (e.g., Ac. 2:2; Ec. 11:5). Wind is observable,⁸⁸ but it goes sovereignly where it pleases⁸⁹ and is untraceable in its origin⁹⁰ and disappearance.⁹¹. Also free, mighty, and untraceable in its movements is the Spirit in a person who is born of the Spirit.⁹²

In all this the divine possibilities are set over against the impossibilities of humankind (“flesh”), but not just negatively but precisely to cause people to look away from their own (im)possibilities and toward God for their salvation. For the freedom of the Spirit to go where he pleases is not capriciousness but power that nothing can hold back. And the Spirit’s untraceability is not anonymous incalculability but possession of means that humans cannot have but are possible with God (cf. Ro. 11:33ff.). It is in that way, a way not only determined by God but now opened up by him, that humans become participants in that new existence and hence gain entrance into the kingdom, which in vs. 16 is called eternal life. Accordingly, it is faith in the salvation thus revealed in Christ on which the now following verses focus and in which the “dialogue” with Nicodemus achieves its real goal.

Flesh and Spirit

In contrast with the above, scholars have sought to understand Jesus’ pronouncements concerning birth from above and the contrast between flesh and Spirit against the background of certain forms from the contemporary Greek world of thought and religion. In this pericope, according to this approach, we have been given an important hermeneutic key for the understanding of the Fourth Gospel: here the anthropological presuppositions that are determinative for Johannine soteriology and christology come to the surface. We are talking specifically of both C. H. Dodd’s idealistic interpretation and R. Bultmann’s Gnostic interpretation.

Dodd writes that in Jn. 3:1ff. we are very close to the widespread Hellenistic notion of the two levels of existence, “the upper world (τὰ ἄνω) which is the sphere of the νοῦς [referred to as πνεῦμα in this passage] in which alone dwell light and immortality, and the lower world (τὰ κάτω) which is the sphere of the ὕλη or of darkness [σάρξ in this passage].” “The main theme of the discourse, then, is the passage of man out of the lower order of existence, the realm of the flesh, into the higher order of existence, the realm of spirit in which alone eternal life is his portion.” Accordingly, we are told, we have here the (anthropological) key to the understanding of the nature of Jesus’ public conduct: passage (or rebirth) into the higher order of existence underlies both the story of the wedding at Cana, where it is symbolized by the changing of water into wine, and the story of the cleansing of the temple.⁹³

Bultmann rejects this idealistic understanding⁹⁴ and believes one must rather explain the contrast in a sense characteristic of Gnostic anthropology. In his view “flesh” and “spirit” denote not just the lower and higher levels in the human person but the radical opposition between two mutually exclusive metaphysical principles, which Bultmann, with the aid of terms derived from existentialist philosophy, then “demythologizes” and further interprets. “Flesh” refers to “the nothingness of man’s whole existence; to the fact that man is ultimately a stranger to his fate as to his own acts; that, as he now is, he does not enjoy authentic existence, whether he makes himself aware of the fact or whether he conceals it from himself. Correspondingly, ‘spirit’ refers to the miracle of a mode of being in which man enjoys authentic existence in which he understands himself and knows that he is no longer threatened by nothingness.” Once a person has understood this, Jesus’ statement to Nicodemus (vs. 7: “Do not marvel …”) applies to that person.⁹⁵

All this should show how far-reaching and profound the influence of the “anthropological” key one uses is in exposition of Jn. 3:1-8. It not only radically shapes one’s concept of rebirth but also one’s entire understanding of the coming and work of the Redeemer. Thus, according to Bultmann, vss. 3-8, in which the necessity of rebirth is spoken of, form the “explanation for the coming of the Revealer.”⁹⁶ Given this understanding, it is clear that the nature and goal of this coming are totally determined by one’s anthropological “preunderstanding,” one’s understanding of what “flesh,” “spirit,” and “birth from above” presumably mean here.

However much these concepts and the opposition between flesh and spirit may function in a variety of forms in Hellenistic religion, this does not yet say anything about the background and meaning of this pair of opposites in the Fourth Gospel. Bultmann is surely correct when over against Dodd’s interpretation he advances that the opposition between flesh and spirit in John is much more radical than that in the neo-Platonic idealism to which Dodd refers. But this is not yet to say that this opposition is rooted, as in Gnosticism, in an original and metaphysical dualism that, though in the gospel it has been stripped of its mythological and ontological character, nevertheless continues to shape the radical opposition that occurs in the “anthropology” of this Gospel.

In my opinion the opposition between flesh and Spirit—though in this connection it is not elaborated: see below!—has to be understood against a very different background. However sharp it may be, in the Fourth Gospel it is clearly not determined by an original dualism. The Fourth Gospel is, rather, sustained from the very beginning by the idea of the creation of all things by the Word. The Word did not come to a world that was foreign to him but to one that he had made, granted that it did not know him, and to his own, granted that his own did not receive him (1:9ff.). The opposition between flesh and Spirit primarily relates therefore to the creatureliness and dependence of humanity in relation to God as Spirit, Source, and Ruler of all of life. In that connection “flesh” does not denote what is “lower” in humankind but the whole human person, physical as well as spiritual. Accordingly, what is opposed to humankind in its “authentic existence” and threatens us as our “fate” is not our existence as flesh but the radical disturbance that has arisen in that existence as a result of the self-direction that has brought us into a position of estrangement from God, of guilt and powerlessness, of transience, uncertainty, and meaninglessness. Hence when, as here, the “Spirit” is contrasted with this powerlessness of the flesh to enter the kingdom of God and to inherit the true life, “Spirit” does not denote the great ontological anti-flesh principle, but God himself as the source of life (cf. 1:13) and above all in his restorative and life-renewing power as the only possibility left to humans to save them from lostness and alienation from God and to give them eternal life.

The opposition between “flesh and Spirit” thus understood also shows, however, that the dialogue about the necessity of rebirth must not be understood as an “anthropological insertion” into the christocentric construction of the Gospel followed up to this point, made in order to determine, from within this preunderstanding of what is human, the nature of the salvation that people need in order to enter the kingdom of God. All that is said in the dialogue before vs. 11 is that as flesh, and from within the “fleshly” orientation and perspective concerning Jesus (“we know”), no person can see or enter the kingdom of God. The alternatives “flesh” and “Spirit” are not “anthropological” in the sense of humankind as it is and as it should become in order to rise from the inferiority or nothingness of one existence (flesh) to a higher or “authentic” existence (Spirit). The alternatives rather concern humankind in its (fleshly) powerlessness over against the sovereignty and omnipotence of God (the Spirit), who alone can transform humankind, that is, grant us the needed rebirth from above.⁹⁷ It is in that sense that vss. 1-10 constitute the introduction to what follows, an introduction that is significant not only because it so powerfully and rigorously poses the necessity of such a birth from above but because in precisely those terms it leads up to him who “is from above” and “comes from above” (cf. vss. 13, 31; 8:23) and who therefore can only be known and received by those who are “born from above.”

9, 10 After Jesus’ elucidation of his original pronouncement, Nicodemus still does not fathom the possibility of the things Jesus has spoken of, though he now no longer, as in vs. 2, attempts to demonstrate their absurdity. With “How can this be?”⁹⁸ he is primarily responding to what Jesus has said concerning the working of the Spirit, but his skepticism concerning the “birth from above” continues to be present as an undertone. Jesus’ reply, accordingly, does not limit itself to an explanation of the words he uttered last but places all he has said in the grand context of his coming and work.

Jesus does find fault with Nicodemus, and more emphatically than he did in vs. 7: “Are you the teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand this?” The emphatic “the teacher of Israel” means something like “the man who has to teach Israel the knowledge of God.”⁹⁹ In Jesus’ coming and work is manifest the breakthrough toward the absolutely new, which requires a new approach, one that can be received only “from above.” But this is not to say that the background (the “preunderstanding”) for that approach was lacking in Israel, the people of God’s revelation, or that the knowledge of it could not reasonably be expected from Israel’s teachers. The prophets of Israel repeatedly spoke of a fundamental inner change and of the promise of the Spirit to that end (Ezk. 11:19ff.; 36:26f.; Is. 44:3; 59:21; Jr. 31:31ff.; Ps. 51:10). As far as the hermeneutical key to or horizon of Jesus’ words is concerned, he did not speak from within a thought world or “anthropology” foreign to Nicodemus or Israel. In that respect, too, Jesus came to his own (1:11).

But Jesus does not stop to discuss that background. For, as indicated earlier, all his words about the necessity of rebirth are only intended, from within the glory of God manifest in Christ, to cut off all “fleshly” knowledge of Jesus (“we know,” vs. 2). Hence the entire dialogue with Nicodemus now culminates in the new “we know” (of heavenly things)—though without his further participation.¹⁰⁰

3:11-21

The Descent of the Son of Man

Beginning with vs. 11 the “dialogue” changes into a monologue. Nicodemus, though he is addressed one more time, does not reply again. Jesus does still address an audience (vss. 11b, 12), still using the second person plural (as in vs. 7b). In vs. 13 the entire discourse seems to change in character. In keeping with the manner in which in vss. 13f. (as he does consistently elsewhere) Jesus speaks of the Son of man in the third person, in the succeeding verses of the pericope only the third person is used. Still, vss. 11-13 are still influenced by the encounter with Nicodemus, not only in the form of address (“you” singular, “you” plural) but also in the form of the pronouncements themselves.

Thus in vs. 11 it is said in the same emphatic tone as in vss. 3 and 5: “Truly, truly, I say to you [singular], we speak of what we know, and give witness to what we have seen. But you [plural] do not receive our testimony.” This “we know” clearly echoes the “we know” of Nicodemus in vs. 2. In a sense one can say that the confrontation only really begins here: the reference is no longer (negatively) to the inadequacy of Nicodemus’s knowledge but (positively) to another knowledge on the basis of which Jesus speaks. This discourse is further described as “bearing witness” on the basis of “what we have seen” and, therefore, as eyewitness testimony has judicially valid, faith-claiming force. Intended above all is the Son’s nonmediated knowledge of the Father (cf. 1:18), which in vss. 31-36 is defined as knowledge on the part of him who “comes from above” and who “bears witness to what he has seen and heard” (vss. 31, 32f.; cf. 7:28f.). Elsewhere, too, Jesus bases his knowledge of God on what he has “seen” and “heard” (e.g., 5:19, 20, 30; 8:26, 28, 40, 50; 12:50), and that in contrast with those who have never heard his voice or seen him (5:37; cf. 6:46).

To be sure, 3:11, in distinction from 3:31 and other passages, speaks of “we,” a fact that has given rise to divergent interpretations. Some think that Jesus here identifies himself with the prophets, but then one has to take “what we have seen” as referring to visions, which certainly does not fit Jesus (see above). Others think the reference is to Jesus and John, a view that in my opinion is no less improbable (in view of “have seen”). Nowadays many interpreters understand the “we” as the “we” of the church (the so-called pluralis ecclesiasticus).¹⁰¹ But such a change of subject from Jesus to the church is hard to accept because vs. 11b is introduced with the emphatic “I say to you” and because in vs. 12 Jesus again speaks of himself in the first person.

“Bear witness,” in the Johannine (forensic) sense, is used, apart from Jesus himself, especially of his disciples as those “who were with him from the beginning,” who on that basis bore witness concerning him (cf. 15:27; 19:35; 21:24), and of whom it can therefore be said—though in another sense than of Jesus himself (cf. 1:18; 6:46; see, however, also 14:7, 9)—that they bear witness to what they have seen and heard (cf. 1 Jn. 1:1ff.; Jn. 1:14). Accordingly, in vs. 11b the plural presumably relates not only to Jesus but also to his disciples as those whom he brought into his mission from above from the beginning (cf. 6:69).

It is “this unique character of eyewitness and this superior knowledge” that “come to expression in the ‘we’ forms in vs. 11”¹⁰² and in which the fundamental difference from the “we know” of Nicodemus consists. At the same time, we have here the reason that Nicodemus and those who are represented by him (“we”) require a “birth from above” if they are to understand what is happening in Jesus’ coming. As long, therefore, as Nicodemus persists in his incomprehension with respect to Jesus’ coming, the statement “but you do not receive our testimony” (cf. vss. 31f.), which is true of the “natural” person in general, applies to him. In that respect those who speak (as charitably) as Nicodemus are no different from other people. They acknowledge Jesus as a man of God endowed with special gifts, but they do not acknowledge him in his unique significance as the Son of God sent into the world, or, therefore, the secret of the Christian witness that proceeds from him.

Verse 12 confirms this with an argument a minori ad maius. The “earthly things” apparently are the matters that have been discussed in the preceding dialogue and not believed by Nicodemus. To be sure, the subject matter then also concerned being born “from above,” etc., but in that light it was restricted to humanity and the earth, things that one would assume a teacher in Israel could understand and believe. If they could not believe these earthly things made known to them by Jesus, then how would they believe heavenly things? Still, the question of the “how” of the earthly things cannot be resolved without faith and insight into the heavenly things of which Jesus is about to speak. For in light of the heavenly things it will become clear that being born from above, from “water and Spirit,” is not an “anonymous” miracle from above but something that occurs only through faith in him who came from above or, as vs. 13 has it, “descended from heaven.”

Verse 13 is the pivotal text for the entire context, but it is very hard to exegete. Echoing “the heavenly things” of vs. 12, it mentions “heaven” twice, both times in connection with (the ascent and descent of) the Son of man, the one whom God was to endow with all power as the Christ (see the comments on 1:51). But why does Jesus suddenly refer to this ascent and descent? Is it because the Son of man has at his disposal knowledge of the “heavenly things” and has brought it with him as the one who descended from heaven? But then how is the prior clause (“No one has ascended into heaven”) to be understood? Knowledge concerning heavenly things cannot be based on the fact that the Son of man (first) ascended to heaven, but only on the fact that as the one sent by the Father, the incarnate Word, he came from heaven. In other words, his descent precedes his ascent and not vice versa.

Those who think the reference here is to knowledge of the heavenly things (the majority of interpreters) are therefore compelled either to construe “ascend” in the first clause in a wider sense (“no one has ever been in heaven” or the like) or to assume an elliptical construction here (“no one ascended to heaven—and has seen heavenly things there—only the Son of man who descended from heaven has seen them”). This last view is defended at length by E. Ruckstuhl, who assumes that the first clause in vs. 13 refers not to the Son of man but to “not any one, whoever that may be.” The language is said to be that of wisdom, with special reference to Pr. 30:4, which also mentions ascent and descent. The idea is that no one has ever been able to ascend on high to bring down the hidden Wisdom. Only one was there—Wisdom itself, now incarnate in Jesus.¹⁰³ This entire view is implausible, however, not only because of the tortuous sentence construction one has to assume, but also because it subsumes everything under the category of wisdom (incarnate) simply on the basis of similarity of language with Pr. 30:4. However, not Wisdom (which is nowhere mentioned) but the Son of man is here the dominant figure (cf. vs. 14); his descent from heaven itself constitutes the core of “the heavenly things.”

In my opinion the issue is not who brought knowledge of the heavenly things to earth; the reference is to the ascent and descent itself as the divine work of redemption to be accomplished by the Son of man.¹⁰⁴ Ascent to heaven is not acquisition of knowledge from heaven (cf. Dt. 30:12; Pr. 30:4, etc.). It should rather be understood in the same sense as “the ascent of the Son of man” in 6:62, namely as participation in the divine glory (cf. 20:17; 17:5), what in 3:14 is called the “lifting up” of the Son of man, which entails salvation for those who believe in him. All these contexts (cf. also 8:28; 12:32) refer to the Son of man—occasionally alternating with the Son of God (cf. vss. 16f.)—because in this Gospel (as in the Synoptics) that is the name that denotes the transcendent character of Jesus’ messianic identity (and the kingdom of God represented by him; see the comments above on 1:51).

The staggering truth of what is said in vss. 13-16, however, is that there simply cannot be any talk of such a heavenly position of power (“no one”) unless—as is true of the Son of man—a descent from heaven has preceded the ascent to heaven. In other words, the mystery of God’s revelation in Christ consists in the incarnation of the Word as the gift from God of his only begotten Son, which is basic to the coming of the kingdom and the exercise of power by the Son of man. This is further explicated in vs. 14, which is simply joined with what precedes by the conjunction “and.”

Even given this as the explanation (the only possible one, I believe) of the order (no ascent except by way of descent), the first clause remains somewhat problematic. One might get the impression that the ascent in question has already been accomplished (“has ascended”). This is sometimes explained by saying that the Evangelist is speaking from a postascension standpoint, one that is no longer related to the situation of the encounter with Nicodemus. But vs. 14, where the exaltation of the Son of man is presented as a future event, argues against this, as does the fact that Jesus speaks about the heavenly things not as one who ascended but as the descended one (vs. 11). For that reason one has to take the perfect in the first clause of vs. 13 not in the historic sense, as referring to a completed action, but in the gnomic sense of a general pronouncement;¹⁰⁵ or—and this seems no less probable—as a reflection of Dn. 7:13f., where we read of such an ascent and exaltation in a prophetic apocalyptic sense (cf. “where he was before,” 6:62).¹⁰⁶

Verses 14 and 15 speak with increasing clarity about the way this descent and ascent of the Son of man, as well as the salvation represented in those events, is effected. Vs. 14 does so by comparing the raising up of the Son of man with that of the serpent in the wilderness. The reference is to the story in Nu. 21:8f., where Moses raised a serpent up on a pole as a visible sign of salvation for all who thought they were about to die. Jesus speaks of the exaltation of the Son of man, so “lifted up” acquires a double meaning here (as also in 8:28; 12:32, 34): the exaltation of the Son of man (= his glorification) is effected by his being raised up on a cross. The comparison brings this last meaning to the fore as tertium comparationis, since the element of glorification cannot be applied to the serpent. In this connection the redemption-historical “necessity” (“must be”) of this being “lifted up” is important, strongly reminiscent as it is of passages like Mt. 16:21; Lk. 9:22 in which the humiliation of the Son of man is described as the way of his exaltation and is related to God’s counsel of salvation. Still—and this is typical for the Fourth Gospel—the crucifixion is not presented as Jesus’ humiliation but as the exaltation of the Son of man. The reason, obviously, is that Jesus’ suffering and death were the way in which he would return to God and be glorified by him and that in that way he would grant eternal life to those who believed in him (vs. 15). This last point again ties in clearly with Numbers 21: Just as gazing at the serpent was the God-given means of life, a sign both of God’s will to save and of his power over death, so Jesus as the Son of man in his suffering and death on the cross also embodies God’s will to save and power over death. But it “had to” happen in the way of the descent from heaven, of the incarnation of the Word, of his suffering and dying on the cross. Later, therefore, the living bread that came down from heaven and that “the Son of man will give” (6:27) will also be called his “flesh” that he gives for the life of the world, and only those who “eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood” will have life in themselves (6:51, 53).

But all this is not further explicated, at least not in vss. 14 and 15. Here the reference is to “whoever believes in him.”¹⁰⁷ The object of this faith is the Son of man as the crucified one as well as the crucified Son of man. The Son of man “must” go this way, which is inconceivable to the flesh. But he takes it as one destined by God to the highest glory, as one who enters death in order thus, like the serpent lifted up by Moses, to be the great sign that in him God has the will and the capacity to save from destruction everyone who believes. Faith receives its character from the one as well as from the other truth. It is faith in the powerful Messiah-King promised by God, the Son of man, but in him as the crucified one; it is faith in the power of him who is powerless in the flesh and in the eyes of the flesh. Therein, also, lies the difference from “belief in his name” (2:23), which rests exclusively on the manifestation of Jesus’ power and which by itself need be no more than a conclusion of which the “flesh” is capable. But to be able to see and to believe in the heaven-descended, cross-exalted Son of man—that takes a different set of eyes, and for that one must be born from above.

Verse 16 reduces all this to its deepest underlying cause and to its ultimate simplicity with an explanatory statement: “For God so loved the world.…” What Moses did at God’s instruction in the wilderness, lift up the serpent, was great and marvelous. But nowhere more clearly than here do we see the difference (described also in 1:17) between what God gave through Moses and the grace and truth that came through Jesus Christ (cf. 6:32).

All the emphasis here lies on the “so”: “in this manner,” “in this measure.” This word refers back to the “how” of the lifting up of the Son of man, but it also directs the reader’s attention to the measure of God’s love that underlies that lifting up. All the terminology is attuned to the latter. Here we read not of the Son of man but of God’s only-begotten Son (cf. 1:18), so designated here as the highest gift God could give (cf. Ro. 8:32: “who did not spare his own Son”; Gn. 22:16). And we read “gave” in the sense of what is elsewhere called “giving up,” “surrendering” (e.g., Ro. 4:25; 8:32; Mk. 9:31), namely to death on the cross.¹⁰⁸ All this shows how in the Fourth Gospel, as elsewhere in the New Testament, the God-given sacrifice of Christ is of central significance. This is surely the case also because in that surrender the glory of God manifested itself so clearly “in the flesh” of the man Jesus, but above all because it brought to its highest manifestation the measure of God’s love for the world (cf. 13:1).

There is a close connection here with the utterance of John the Baptist in 1:29 (35): “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” That utterance includes no reflection on the death of Christ,¹⁰⁹ and 3:16 does not mention in so many words the sin of the world as that which makes necessary God’s surrender of his Son. The common component in the two pronouncements is that it is God who makes the all-embracing sacrifice for the world. There is no further analysis of why God loves thus. The text’s exclusive concern is the fact and the magnitude of God’s love. It is love that not only manifests itself in God’s power over death, the death into which the world (like Israel in the wilderness) would sink; in the death of Christ it also identifies with the world in its lostness and thus imparts the deepest meaning to the great statement in the prologue, “and the Word became flesh.”

Again, as in vs. 15, we read: “… that whoever believes in him (the Son) …,” and again the essence of believing in his name becomes clear. The starting point of faith does not lie in the fact that the world returned to God in the ascent of the Son of man and so found its lost self, any more than the starting point of faith in the incarnation lies in the fact that in the man Jesus God again put the world on the track of true humanity (“not perish,” “have eternal life”). The starting point is that God in his eternal love returned to the world as to his own, that he loved it in the surrender of his only-begotten Son (cf. 3:35), and that the Father loves the Son because he gave his own life (cf. 10:15) in a love that persisted to the end (cf. 13:1ff.). It is faith in a path that, before it ascended to the glory of heaven, first descended to the depth of the earth, that is not itself from below but from above as the sign of true sonship and of those who are born of God (cf. 1:12f.).

17-18 If thus, as the content of the heavenly things, vss. 13-16 refer above all to the great salvation-historical (“eschatological”) events effected in the mission of Jesus as the Son of God, the consequence for humanity and the world is an all-determining final decision. Already vss. 15 and 16 mentioned “eternal life” twice as the presently inaugurated gift for one who believes (and thus “has” eternal life).¹¹⁰ Vss. 17ff. refer to the decisive “critical” character of the mission of the Son of God. In close connection with vs. 16, but now per negationem, the divine will to save that is manifest in this mission is again confirmed, and any notion that the Father sent the Son into the world to judge the world is banished. The idea in itself is not foreign: throughout prophecy the coming of the kingdom of God is accompanied by the judgment of God over his enemies (cf. also Mt. 3:7f. par.), and judgment is part of the fullness of the divine powers of the Son of man (cf. 5:22, 27; Mt. 25:31ff.). But in the present passage everything is viewed from the perspective of the mission of the Son and the descent of the Son of man from heaven. And that mission and descent have no other purpose, as the Evangelist keeps saying (cf. 12:47; 8:15), than to open a way, in him, for faith and for the world’s salvation.

This is not (vs. 18) to delay the decision; on the contrary, it is to bring it closer. For he who descended is God’s only-begotten Son, and God has put “all things into his hand” (vs. 35). For that reason the Son has the power even now to release people from their guilt (“authority on earth to forgive sins,” Mt. 9:6), and one who believes in him does not come under judgment. In the fellowship of faith with him judgment is suspended. And conversely, one who does not believe in him is already under judgment. The judgment to come in the confrontation with the coming judge of the world has become for that person an issue of great present relevance. The perfect tense (“are condemned”) refers to the situation in which that person has placed himself or herself, not on account of the verdict already pronounced by the Son, but “because he (or she) has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.” That person has not acknowledged the saving love of God manifest in his Son; and that does not only mean not to know God’s love but to live under the doom of its absence, the privatio actuosa. Still for that person, too, the truth is that the coming of the Son is not aimed at condemnation. That person still has to deal, not with the judge of the world in his heavenly glory, but with the Son who has descended into the world and who continues to woo people with the love of God, yet even now with no other purpose than to save the world, even those in the world who do not believe in him (cf. 5:34).

A striking feature of this passage, finally, is the degree to which everything is concentrated on the importance of believing. Whereas in vss. 1-8 the birth from above is posed above all else as the indispensable condition for entry into the kingdom of God, in vs. 12 and especially in vss. 15ff. the crucial importance of believing comes increasingly to the fore. It is clear that the one cannot do without the other: the birth from above, however much it is a miracle of the Spirit, is not effected without the call to faith and the response of faith. Nor is faith simply a stage in the salvation-order transformation of a person; it rather describes the totality of transformation as the work of the Spirit. And in this connection faith is always the way in which and the means by which the new life comes into being. It is for this reason that all the emphasis falls on believing.

On the other hand, it is no less true that the new birth does not rest on an antecedent human decision. Faith is not the response of the higher or the better self to the message of the gospel. Nor is it an enlivening in the prisonhouse of the flesh by a voice in which a person recognizes himself in his divine origin, his deepest “disposition,” his “authentic existence,” or the like, for as we read in 5:25: “The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live” (cf. vs. 24). In other words, faith belongs to the ministry and miracle of the Spirit. It is not a predisposition that is already present but a decision that is realized in the address of the Word and that is subject to the moral power that proceeds from that Word. There can be a “hearing” and a “seeing” only when the Word is understood and followed in accordance with its meaning (cf. 5:25; 6:26).

In this connection much has been, and is being, written about the Johannine idea of predestination,¹¹¹ and the reference to texts like 6:37, 39, 44; 10:29; 17:2ff. is self-evident. And, in contrast, when it comes to faith or the call to faith the Evangelist obviously does not think of a preestablished divine decision, for his entire Gospel is a continuing struggle on behalf of faith and a continual indictment of the culpable and mysterious character of unbelief. Especially in the dialogue with Nicodemus, where the necessity of birth from above is so clearly asserted, not believing and not accepting (vss. 12, 13, 18ff.) are not attributed to the flesh, and the situation of Nicodemus himself is viewed not as closed but as clearly kept open.¹¹² The Spirit is like the wind, blowing where it wills. Hence one must inevitably conclude that every deterministic schematism is as alien to the gospel as is any dogma of inviolable human freedom. Faith will always bear on its face the sign of the grace of being a child of God, just as unbelief bears the sign of disobedience to the summons of the gospel (cf. vs. 36; see also the comments on 1:12f.).

Finally, in vss. 19-21, the background and significance of the faith and unbelief mentioned in vs. 18 are further elucidated. The beginning of vs. 19, “and this is the judgment” (krisis in vs. 19, as in vs. 18, means “judgment” and not just “separation”) means something like: And, this is the reason—despite the contrary intention of God—the coming of the Son has turned into a judgment for unbelievers: “People” have not been able to bear the light of his coming, which arose over their darkness, and therefore have turned away from him.¹¹³ “People” refers to the world as a whole. The passage is strongly reminiscent of 1:4f., 9-11. But now this not knowing and nonacceptance are explained: people have loved darkness more¹¹⁴ than the light. The reason is that “their deeds were evil.” In the nature of the case, the author’s concern is not just with evil deeds but with people. But here and in vss. 20f. the emphasis, in connection with the image of the light, is on the deeds. When the light appears, people become manifest first of all in their deeds.

The fact that evildoers are averse to the light is repeated, as a kind of rule of experience, in vs. 20: “Everyone who occupies himself/herself in doing¹¹⁵ worthless/reprehensible things hates the light.” That person does not come to the light so that his or her work will not be manifest in its true nature, unmasked as evil and worthless.¹¹⁶

Verse 21, by contrast, speaks of the one who “does what is true,” an expression that, like others in this context, has a strong Semitic flavor.¹¹⁷ It is literally “act in such a way that truth comes into being,”¹¹⁸ “truth” being that which is trustworthy, genuine, and nondeceptive. One who so acts “comes toward the light,” and here we have the question whether this statement refers to experience in general or specifically to the coming of the Son of God as light. The conclusion of the sentence might suggest the latter, though the idea expressed can have a broader meaning. The idea is not that he who does what is true comes to the light to bring his deeds as much as possible into public view—to “show them off” as it were—but to make them cognizable as having been done “in God” (that is, in communion with him and in keeping with his will) and thus to identify himself in his deepest intentions. The fact that in the conflict between truth and error, uprightness and deception, reality and illusion one person shuns the light and another is attracted to the light is not just a matter of psychology or of a good or a bad conscience. At its root it is a matter of “being” of God or not of God, that is, of the devil (8:44; 1 Jn. 2:21). For that reason one hates the light not only out of fear that he will be unmasked by it but because the darkness is his or her natural element; and the other comes to the light out of knowledge that he or she is profoundly understood there.

One may still ask whether in this way everything—faith and unbelief, being saved or being lost—is not reduced merely to the “moral issue” of doing evil or doing good deeds. But after all that has been said about the descent of the Son of man and the birth from above as a birth of the Spirit, that can hardly be the conclusion or intent. The repeated and emphatic mention of “deeds” is due not to the idea that in the end it is works and not faith that is decisive for entry into the kingdom of God; it is based rather on the idea (deeply rooted in the Old Testament and the religion based on it) that the truth is practical, that something must be done, and that what most deeply motivates a person becomes cognizable in his or her deeds (cf. Mt. 7:16ff.). Accordingly, that is what the light of Christ brings into the open either as evil and worthless or as true and done “in God” and hence as coming from him. The antithesis is posed in such absolute terms because the light in view here is the light of the Word, which was in the beginning with God and was God, and because “in him was life, and the life was the light of humanity” (1:4). What light and darkness, life and nonlife, “evil and worthless” and “doing the truth” are, therefore, is determined by whether or not one knows and accepts the light (cf. 1:4, 5, 9ff.). “Because their deeds were evil” extends, therefore, beyond a merely moral judgment. It concerns the nature of the darkness of life outside God and of the evil works done outside of God.

All this does not mean, meanwhile, that the light that came with the sending of God’s Son into the world has no other purpose than to make visible this difference between the two kinds of people. It undeniably has this effect. Still, it is the descent of the Son of man and the incarnation of the Word that should banish from our minds any notion that this effect is what is primarily at stake. The light that comes into the world and penetrates it, however true it is that it absolutely unmasks the darkness and everything that is done outside of God, has no other aim than to attract the world to the light of God’s love, in order that everyone who believes in the Son should not perish in darkness (cf. 8:12).

3:22-30

John the Baptist’s Final Testimony

Verses 22 and 23 depict the situation of the continuing activity of Jesus and John the Baptist. “After this” in vs. 22 is very general but apparently means “after Jesus’ stay in Jerusalem as described in the preceding section.” There is no mention of a place where Jesus and his disciples stayed in “the land of Judea.”

As to Jesus’ activity we are told only that he “baptized,” and this we are told clearly in preparation for what follows (cf. vs. 26). This striking statement—nowhere else in the tradition are we told of Jesus baptizing—is restricted in 4:2 to Jesus’ disciples. The idea that here the Evangelist uses another tradition (according to which Jesus himself baptized) so as to contrast Jesus’ baptism, as a baptism with the Holy Spirit, with John’s baptism¹¹⁹ is fraught with difficulties. Not only does the correction in 4:2 then have to be from a later author (or editor) who directly opposed the Evangelist’s intent (see the comments below on 4:2), but the whole idea that in the dialogue between John and his disciples the issue was one of concern over this kind of superiority of Jesus’ baptism over that of John can in no way be derived from the text. All the emphasis, in this view, would then lie on vs. 34, where alone the Spirit is mentioned. But vs. 34 belongs to another context (see below), and what occasioned John to speak of Jesus as he does in vss. 27ff. was his disciples’ complaint that “all” were going to Jesus to be baptized (vs. 26). There is no question that “all” received the baptism of the Spirit, and according to the Evangelist’s own estimate (cf. 7:39) that was simply not yet a possibility.

Hence the activity of Jesus described in 3:22 can, in my opinion, only be interpreted to mean that, just as John for a time continued his activity even after Jesus’ appearance, so Jesus and the disciples who followed him did not immediately abandon the pattern of John’s preaching of an approaching kingdom and the baptism of repentance that went with it. This is apparent, with regard to Jesus’ preaching, from Mt. 4:17; 3:2, where Jesus’ message (“Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand”) is identical to that of John. That this call to repentance with a view to entry into the kingdom was accompanied also in Jesus’ ministry by the “baptism of repentance” is not hard to understand (cf. 3:5), even if it should eventually become evident that Jesus’ ministry and baptism embraced far more than that of John. Still, this link with John’s baptism means that the turning point in the history of salvation represented by Jesus, a turning point to which John had borne witness, precisely in relation to the baptisms of both, did not manifest itself in Jesus’ public ministry as a sharply demarcated break but rather as an increasingly more manifest fulfillment of the preparatory work of the Baptist.

But from the outset it could escape no one that Jesus was very different from John and that in his preaching and baptism he had much more to offer than his predecessor. The difference manifested itself not only in their outer appearance and public conduct (cf. Mt. 11:18ff.) but above all in the authority with which, both in words and miraculous deeds, Jesus proclaimed the richly salvific significance of the kingdom that was at hand—which was undoubtedly why so many more people came to him than to John (vs. 26; cf. 4:1). In this connection perhaps some light is cast on the remarkable statement in 4:2 that not Jesus himself but his disciples baptized: by not baptizing Jesus immediately distinguished himself from John, even while he sought to maintain continuity with his forerunner through his disciples’ baptizing. But for them as well their activity as disciples of Jesus would in time not be linked with the forerunner’s baptism but would rather become their baptism—mandated to them by Jesus on the basis of his universal authority—in the name of the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit (Mt. 28:16-20).

23 The (new) place where John’s baptized (“Aenon near Salim”) cannot be identified with certainty, though it is clear from vs. 26 that it was on the west side of the Jordan. According to an ancient Greek tradition the Salim referred to here was in the northern part of the Jordan valley, in the watery plain of Beth Shean (Scythopolis).¹²⁰ But other locations to the south have been considered.¹²¹ Some believe the reference is symbolic: Aenon (= “spring”) near Salim (“salvation”), with Aenon understood as the place where Jesus lived. But though the Evangelist sometimes refers to the symbolic meaning of the name of an actual place (cf. 9:7), there is no such allusion here, nor is the name fictitious, since such symbolism would have been attached to the place where Jesus baptized. And the symbolic interpretation that has been suggested is too far-fetched for us to attribute it to the Evangelist.

24 Of more importance to us is the parenthetical statement that John had not yet been put in prison. The Evangelist clearly alludes here to the violent ending—assumed to be familiar to the original readers—of John’s activity, without, however, relating the story of how it occurred (which we find in the Synoptics). We find a reference to the brevity of John’s ministry only in 5:35. The seemingly superfluous insertion here in 3:24 is linked perhaps with the Synoptic tradition according to which Jesus’ ministry in Galilee occurred after the arrest of John (Mk. 1:14; Mt. 4:12), the Evangelist explicitly indicating here that John and Jesus acted and worked side by side in Israel for a time. Although the Synoptics, especially Luke (cf. 4:14), suggest that, immediately after his baptism by John and the temptation in the wilderness, Jesus returned to Galilee and began his public ministry there, the chronological order of events remains murky. Must we conclude from Luke that John, after he baptized Jesus, was immediately imprisoned by Herod? In Matthew (4:12) Jesus’ going to Galilee is immediately described as a “withdrawal,” which suggests that he retreated from the center of Jewish life for reasons of security (cf. Jn. 4:1, 44). That assumes that he had become known among the people.

So, although the Synoptics—Matthew and Luke following Mark in this—place the beginning of Jesus’ activity in Galilee, the portrayal in Jn. 3:22ff. is not for that reason less trustworthy. It rather provides more historical perspective on the beginning of Jesus’ ministry and hence more insight into his “withdrawal” to Galilee: his spectacular conduct in Jerusalem and Judea led to this development.¹²²

The description of John’s “final” testimony concerning Jesus at this point in the Fourth Gospel also finds a ready explanation in this development. It clearly assumes that Jesus has become known and popular among the people and can therefore hardly be viewed, as some authors wish,¹²³ as an alternative to John’s testimony, reported earlier. It may be true that the Evangelist had no concern to “correct” the historical situation (as compared with that of Synoptics?). His interest clearly lies in the material thrust of the story. But this does not remove the fact that the latter in its very “intentionality” represents a tradition that lifts the edge of the curtain on a period in the life of Jesus into which we would otherwise have no insight at all.

25 John’s testimony was occasioned by a dispute of John’s disciples¹²⁴ with a certain Jew¹²⁵ about “purification.” It is not clear precisely what started the dispute. The purification in question presumably refers to the baptism (cf. vs. 26), although this designation for baptism is unusual. But what was the point of the dispute, who was this Jew, and what did he advocate over against John’s disciples? Was John’s baptism the subject of discussion—possibly in relation to Jewish practices of the day?¹²⁶ To judge by vs. 26, the baptism now administered by Jesus and his disciples was also drawn into the dispute. This naturally led to the question by whom one should be baptized, John or Jesus, and whose baptism was more effective.

26 Whatever may have been involved in this dispute for John’s disciples, it prompted their need to speak to their master. And what played a no less important role was that the number of people who went to Jesus began completely to overshadow the number of those who came to John.

One is struck by the impersonal way in which John’s disciples refer to Jesus: “he who was with you beyond the Jordan, the one to whom you bore witness.” Apparently they had been present on the occasion or at least had heard of it. It had not, however, prompted them to join others in following Jesus. On the contrary, they witnessed with displeasure how Jesus’ influence grew and that of their master declined, and now they express their feelings in a way (“all”) that betrays their envy and unhappiness. It is hard to say with any certainty whether there is an allusion here to a continuing controversy between the disciples of John and the later Christian church—especially because there is a lack of clear data on that controversy. In any case, one gets a very one-sided picture here if one tries to interpret this pericope totally or primarily from the vantage point of a polemic against the “Baptist sect” of the time of the Evangelist in which John is supposedly brought in as the main witness against his own later followers.¹²⁷ Rather, this final testimony of John shows positively the extent to which he—as a model to all other witnesses of Jesus—fulfilled to the end, and in keeping with its nature, the mission mandated to him by God (cf. 1:6).

27 In his more or less aphoristic reply John reminds his disciples first of all of the principle that no one can “receive” (in the sense of “appropriate,” “have”) anything “except what is given¹²⁸ to him from heaven.”¹²⁹ This does not mean that everything a person manages to lay claim to has come to him as a gift from God (cf. 19:11); it means rather that a person has a thing at his disposal only if and to the extent that God permits. One could take this statement in both negative and positive senses, that is, with reference to both John’s “decrease” and Jesus’ “increase.” But that understanding does not fit very well with vs. 26. Undoubtedly the point here is that Jesus “received” more people than his forerunner in accord with God’s plan.¹³⁰

28 And that more people went to Jesus was also in keeping with John’s earlier witness concerning Jesus. John does not merely acknowledge this because events force him to. He calls his disciples to witness that from the beginning he has referred to himself not as the Messiah but as the Messiah’s forerunner (cf. 1:20, 23, 27).

29, 30 This relationship between John and Jesus is now elaborated with the aid of a wedding metaphor. The point of comparison is the difference between the bridegroom and “the friend of the bridegroom.” The bridegroom is the principal person because “he has the bride.”¹³¹ The “friend,” familiar from the Jewish life of the day, is the one who both before and during the wedding assists the bridegroom in everything having to do with the wedding. His goal is achieved and his happiness is complete¹³² only, when at the feast, standing by the bridegroom,¹³³ he can witness the bridegroom’s unconcealed joy.

It is not merely with resignation therefore that John witnesses Jesus’ success among the people; it is rather a sense of full and unmixed joy that fills him when he sees that his work of preparation has reached its intended goal. All that is now left for him to do is to withdraw like the friend of the bridegroom. By way of conclusion that is now succinctly expressed: “He must increase, but I must decrease.” This is the divinely ordered, salvation-historical “must” to which John refers (see the comments above on 3:14). John stands at the border of two worlds, two dispensations (cf. Mt. 11:11-13).¹³⁴ The old has run its course; the time of fulfillment has come, in which, the more radiantly the rising sun begins to shine, the more John’s star will grow dim (his words here are often understood in the sense of the increase and decrease of the light of celestial bodies).¹³⁵

With this last statement the witness of John to Jesus, which already in the prologue (1:6ff., 15) plays such an important role in the Fourth Gospel, is pithily concluded. In what follows there is more than one reference to him as the great witness to the truth (5:33; 10:41). But from now on the light of the lamp, in which people had occasion to rejoice for a while (5:35), will pale, and the entire focus will steadily be on the greater one, the one to whom John had witnessed so forcefully. The pericope that now follows provides, as it were, an interim epilogue that sums up that superior greatness.

3:31-36

Epilogue

Verses 31–36 are joined to what precedes without explanation or attribution. It is more or less natural to take them as a continuation of the words of John the Baptist, who would thus continue to speak of Jesus’ superior greatness, though no longer in relation to himself, as in the preceding verses. The reference to the gift of the Spirit (vs. 34) is said to fit very well among the words of the Baptist (cf. 1:26, 31). For that reason there have always been scholars who accept the traditional view that vss. 31-36 belong to John’s response—which began in vs. 26—to the words of his disciples.¹³⁶

It has been correctly noted, however, that the content of vss. 31-36 has many more points of contact with the dialogue with Nicodemus: “from above” (vs. 31; cf. vss. 3, 7), “comes from heaven” (vs. 31b; cf. vs. 13), “is of the earth/speaks of the earth” (vs. 31; cf. vss. 6, 12), “bears witness to what he has seen and heard” (vs. 32; cf. vs. 11), “(not) receive his testimony” (vss. 32f.; cf. vs. 11), “the gift of the Spirit” (vs. 34; cf. vss. 5f.), and “believe in the Son” and “have eternal life” (vs. 36; cf. vss. 15f.). This parallelism is so strong that a number of commentators even believe that we have here a displaced part of the dialogue with Nicodemus, which they would insert after vs. 21.

But as Dodd has noted, vs. 31 does not naturally follow vs. 21,¹³⁷ though it does form a good transition after vs. 30. There is more to be said, therefore, for viewing vss. 31-36 as a sort of meditation on everything that precedes. Some consider it an epilogue written by the Evangelist himself, while others view the material as words of Jesus inserted here by the Evangelist. An obvious argument for the first is that throughout the passage Jesus is spoken of in the third person, though the same is true of vss. 13ff., for which reason those verses are sometimes viewed as a gradual transition from Jesus’ words to the Evangelist’s commentary. But others have pointed out that what is said there about Jesus has strong affinities with what Jesus says in the first person about himself in 12:46-48.¹³⁸

From all this it may be inferred that what is said in ch. 3 about Jesus in the third person (vss. 13ff., 31ff.) is intended by the Evangelist to be understood materially as the words of Jesus, but the boundaries between Jesus’ self-testimony and the Evangelist’s witness to Jesus seem to be indefinite, at least in this chapter (cf. 14:26; 15:26ff.).

In that sense, then, we may view vss. 31-36 as a recapitulating epilogue subjoined by the Evangelist to the dialogues reported in vss. 1-30, but derived from what Jesus revealed concerning himself.¹³⁹ The subject of this epilogue is the surpassing significance of Jesus Christ as the one sent from God, which was fundamentally also the content both of the preceding self-definition of John in relation to Jesus and especially of the dialogue with Nicodemus, in which Jesus is described as the Son of man come down from heaven and as the only-begotten Son of God sent into the world (vss. 13ff.).

Verses 31 and 32 again put all the emphasis on this heavenly origin of Jesus: “He who comes from above is above all.” “From above” alternates here with “from heaven” as a conventional reference to the world of God, to which no one can ascend (cf., e.g., Dt. 30:12). The specific meaning of this pronouncement emerges from the contrast with what is said of the one “who is of the earth”—again a reference to humankind in its natural existence as those “born of the flesh” (vss. 6b, 7; 1:13). The human person “is of the earth,” that is, is characterized and shaped in his or her entire existence and possibilities by the earth¹⁴⁰ and “speaks of the earth.” Therefore, he who comes from above is qualitatively distinct from and above all.¹⁴¹ What he, as the one come down from heaven, has seen and heard (vs. 32), that he bears witness to. So again we hear of the contrast of both “knowledge” and “speech” (which also dominated the beginning of the dialogue with Nicodemus: cf. vss. 2, 11) and of the testimony of and to Jesus as one who heard and saw heavenly things (see the comments on vs. 11). Of that testimony we are told that “no one receives his testimony” (cf. 1:10f.). That general judgment corresponds with what is said in vs. 31 about the one who is “of the earth.” That person is so totally conditioned by the earth that he or she does not recognize the one who comes from above and does not accept his testimony, even if on the basis of earthly knowledge he or she comes to Jesus with ever so much respect. Hence the absolute “no one.”

33-35 As in 1:10-12, universal rejection is immediately followed by “[but] whoever does receive his testimony.” That this can only occur in virtue of new birth “from above,” “from the Spirit,” “from God” (3:3, 5; 1:13) is not mentioned again. The focus is rather on the effect of acceptance or rejection of the testimony. To receive Jesus’ testimony is to “seal [confirm, validate] that God is true” (just as one who does not believe makes God a liar; cf. 1 Jn 5:9f.). That and nothing less is at stake: not just the truthfulness and trustworthiness of him who was sent but also that of the Sender. For the Father identifies himself with the one he has sent to such an extent that the words that one speaks are “the words of God.” “For it is not by measure that he [the Father] gives [Jesus] the Spirit.”¹⁴² Jesus is not merely a prophet who speaks the word of God on occasion, when called on to do so. His authority to speak as God is unlimited, or as vs. 35 has it: “The Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hand.”

With mounting urgency and increasing simplicity the “above all” of him who “came from above” is made personal and identified as divine, a pattern that culminates in the statement that distills the essence of it all: “The Father loves the Son,” which refers back to 1:18 and recurs in the Gospel (5:20; 10:17; 15:9; 17:23ff.). As is evident from vs. 35b (and the other passages just cited), this means that the love that proceeds from God is directed toward and concentrated in the Son, who as the bearer of God’s love can be called God’s Son and is, in fact, God’s Son. The reference is not just to the relationship between the Father and the Son as such but to the fact that God is manifest in his Son as the God of love.

Therefore, “the Father loves the Son” is a pronouncement about both the nature and the authority of Jesus’ mission. With regard to the nature of that mission, as the Son he represents the love of God. In him and in his mission God is present in the world as the God of love. For that reason the same truth can be expressed in the words of 3:16: “God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son.” With regard to Jesus’ authority, it is he in whom the victorious fullness of God’s love makes its way and into whose hand, for the sake of that revelation, all things have been given (cf. 13:3). This reality is explicated in various ways in what is to follow in the Gospel (cf. 5:20, 26f., 36; 10:17f.; 17:2, etc.), not infrequently where the Son is described as “the Son of man” (cf. 5:27; 6:27; 8:28). It is on account of this concentration of the Father’s love in the Son, the Son’s authority over all things, and his being endowed with the Spirit (“not by measure”) that the revelation of God in Jesus Christ is absolute, all-embracing, and all-sufficient and that “outside him salvation is not to be sought or found.”

36 It is also for that reason that in believing or not believing the Son the disjunction between having and not having “eternal life” is realized. Here, in other words, the truth of vs. 18 is repeated (cf. vs. 15). Because he is the Son, believing in him means eternal life; it is the power of his word, by which the dead hear his voice and live, now and on the last day (5:28f.). “He who does not obey the Son will not see life.”¹⁴³ “Disobeys”¹⁴⁴ serves as a description of “unbelief” because the crucial decision lies in “hearing” the word that issues from the Son of God. Because he is the Son, no one can ignore his word with impunity. Such a person is already condemned (vs. 18), or as the final clause of the pericope reads, “God’s wrath remains on him (or her).” God’s wrath is his judgment (cf. Ro. 2:5; Mt. 3:7). “Remains” implies that this judgment is a present reality (cf. Ro. 1:18). In the estrangement of unbelief judgment is already present. But to save the world from that judgment God has sent his Son (vs. 16). As the conclusion of all that has been said up to this point, here, too (see the comments on vs. 21), all the emphasis comes to lie on the definitive eschatological decision confronting the world in the coming of Christ. “The conclusion is less a promise than a warning” (Bultmann). The warning is there, however, not to condemn the world but to save it (vs. 17).

4:1-26

The Woman of Samaria: The Well and the Mountain

This long and graphic story is another in the series of images and encounters by means of which the Evangelist seeks to demonstrate the significance of Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God. The persons who appear briefly on center stage in this process represent, for the Evangelist, a certain “christological” (or “evangelical”) interest: in their uniqueness and reaction to the encounter with Jesus they serve as mirrors in which, each time in a different way, the image of Christ is reflected. One can speak of the “people around Jesus” since in these encounters not only Jesus’ image but also that of each of these people emerges more clearly—but hardly in a personalistic sense. The focus is not on their histories or their psychological makeup. They appear on stage too briefly and too fragmentarily for that. Their stories have quite another focus. It is not the task of the exegete—as has been all too often attempted with much imagination and skill—to supplement the profile sketched by the Evangelist with historical and psychological detail.

All this applies to the story of the Samaritan woman. The scene by the well—like other such scenes in the Bible (cf. Gn. 24:11ff.; 29:2ff., 9ff.; Ex. 2:16ff.)—is picturesque enough, and the dialogue here is much more “personal” than that between Jesus and Nicodemus. Still this encounter represents more than an individual event, however it was essential to the woman herself and in that way is a model for others. Here, too, it is the great salvation-historical eschatological motif of the breakthrough, in Christ’s coming, of the promised time of salvation that shapes and transforms everything (cf. vss. 21ff., 35ff.).

The story has been composed with great care, and its structure is transparent. After the historical transition in 4:1-3 comes the first major part of the story, the dialogue between Jesus and a woman of Samaria in vss. 4-26. The second half of the story, vss. 27-42, is a report of the woman’s return to her village and the ensuing arrival of other Samaritans and, while she is gone, Jesus’ conversation with his noncomprehending disciples about the meaning of what is happening. The story ends with the meeting between the Samaritans and Jesus and their confession that Jesus is the Savior of the world.

Verses 1-3 place the following event in the broader context of Jesus’ return (cf. 2:2, 13) from Judea to Galilee. Hence what is about to take place in Samaria is not the purpose of the journey. Jesus saw himself forced to return to Galilee when he learned of the hostility of the Pharisees, hostility occasioned by the large numbers of people coming to him to be baptized and to be his disciples, even more than had come to John (cf. 3:26ff.). This probably means not that the Pharisees sided with John against Jesus but that they regarded Jesus as even more dangerous to their authority than John. We may therefore assume that Jesus’ departure was motivated by concern for his own safety (cf. 7:1). A striking feature is the correction or clarification (by a later hand?) in vs. 2 with regard to Jesus’ baptizing. It is not altogether clear why this note occurs here and not in 3:22, 26, to which 4:1 is evidently related.¹⁴⁵

The story begins with verse 4. It is unclear how much weight one should give “had to.” One instinctively thinks of the “must”—frequent in the Synoptics but occurring in John also (cf. 3:14)—of the divine plan of salvation that Jesus came to carry out. But here the expression has primarily a geographical focus. The main road from Judea to Galilee ran through Samaria. It was possible to avoid this road, but Jesus chose otherwise (cf. Lk. 9:52; 17:11), and that choice brought him by necessity into the country of the Samaritans. But this does not exclude (a point one must always add in John!) that for the understanding reader the other “necessity,” the deeper necessity, is also present tacitly (cf. the comments on vs. 42).

5-6 For the time being all the emphasis lies on the “natural” course of events. There is some uncertainty about the location of the place (called “Sychar” in most manuscripts) to which Jesus went. Some scholars identify it with Tell ʿAskar, but that is located more than a kilometer from the well of Jacob. The Syriac version has “Sychem,” the name of a village known from other sources and located much closer to the well, but that makes a scribal change from “Sychar” to “Sychem” much more likely than the reverse. But the history of Jacob, to which vs. 5 refers, explicitly mentions Shechem (Gn. 33:18; 35:4; 37:12f.), and the same name comes up in connection with the land that the descendants of Joseph inherited from Jacob (Josh. 24:32; Gn. 48:22). Jacob’s well itself is not mentioned in the Old Testament. It is mentioned first in pilgrim stories from the fourth century A.D.; to this day it is pointed out alongside the road to Galilee by the city of Shechem. Jesus apparently knew the site and chose it as a place of rest from the journey. “And so,” as a tired traveler, Jesus sat down by the well. The time indication, high noon, the hottest time of the day, is part of this description of the setting. The whole account is designed to give as natural and human a picture of Jesus’ presence at the well as possible, one that should eliminate from the outset any idea that John’s christology has some degree of “docetic” character.¹⁴⁶

7-8 The description of the appearance of the woman is extremely concise, but—and this can hardly be an accident—it contains precisely those words that will dominate the conversation that now follows: “woman,” “Samaria,” and “water.” Not a word is said about the encounter itself. The request for water with which Jesus opens the dialogue elicits from the Evangelist no other comment than that the disciples had gone to the city to buy food. So to quench his thirst Jesus had to rely on the good will of the woman. He—and this is of course deliberate—makes no distinction. He does not hesitate, a Jewish man sitting thirsty by a well, to ask a Samaritan woman for the favor of a drink. It is as though he were oblivious of the boundaries and barriers that alienate and separate people from each other.

9 But the woman is not so ready to comply with Jesus’ request. She immediately recognizes this stranger as a Jew. And although she does not directly refuse to give him a drink, she does want first to express to him the surprise that his blunt request has occasioned in her. She minces no words. She does not say, “How can I, a Samaritan woman, give you water?” She says, rather, “How is it that you, a Jew, can ask this of me?” Surely no right-minded Jew would do that even if he were dying of thirst!¹⁴⁷

To explain this reaction, the Evangelist inserts in vs. 9b (at least according to some important manuscripts) the statement “For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans,” referring to the deep-rooted hostility and even contempt that Jews felt for the Samaritan people (cf. 2 Kg. 17:33ff.; Jn. 8:48), an attitude that Samaritans reciprocated (cf. Lk. 9:53). The Samaritans were descendants of Israelites from the ten tribes who were left behind after the destruction of Samaria in 722 B.C. and colonists from the East imported by the Assyrian kings (cf. 2 Kg. 17:24ff.). They accepted as authoritative only the five books of Moses and worshiped the God of Israel on Mount Gerizim, rejecting Jerusalem as the place of worship (cf. vs. 20; Lk. 9:51ff.). Along with these religious differences were a number of political conflicts between Jews and Samaritans over the centuries. All this led to what the Evangelist calls, speaking in general terms, “no dealings.”¹⁴⁸

10 Although the woman’s question in vs. 9 touches one of the main motifs of the entire story, Jesus refrains from commenting directly on the polarity she refers to. As with Nicodemus (3:13), Jesus answers her by referring to another world and reality than the one in terms of which she lives, one in which the barrier she has mentioned plays no role, though he does speak in terms entirely derived from the situation at hand. The “gift of God” is the well from which Jesus draws and gives living water. It is called that to distinguish it from the well that Jacob had once “given” (vs. 12) and from which the woman was accustomed to draw water. If she knew the gift of God and, in that connection, who the stranger was who was speaking with her, she would no longer trouble herself about problems between Jews and Samaritans but would ask him for water and he would give it to her: living, running, water (again, whether she was a Samaritan or not). Essentially it is the same set of alternatives we encountered in the dialogue with Nicodemus: By what is a human being to live—by what is at hand, by what she knows and what lies within her reach, or by what is from above and she does not have at her disposal but must be given to her by him who “came down from heaven”?

In verses 11 and 12 the woman shows no sign of understanding what Jesus is talking about and, like Nicodemus (3:4) and the disciples later (vs. 32f.), clings to the literal meaning of Jesus’ words.¹⁴⁹ After all, “living” water was what one called running water, such as flows from the spring that feeds the well of Jacob and makes it so important for the people living near it. The woman’s answer, though couched in respectful terms (“Sir”) and in the form of a question, shows some annoyance. How can he give her water from the well, which is very deep,¹⁵⁰ with nothing to draw the water up with? Or—and this seems even more absurd to her—does he think perhaps he can get running water from some other source than this well? The first possibility simply does not make sense to her (vs. 11), and her self-awareness as a Samaritan rebels against the second (vs. 12). Does Jesus, a stranger, imagine that he is greater than “our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, and his sons, and his cattle”?

Emerging ever more clearly is the extent to which the entire encounter derives its meaning from this background, which vss. 5 and 6, by twice referring to the patriarch Jacob, already anticipate. It is also becoming more and more apparent that Jesus’ request for a drink and the theme of living water that he broached immediately after, however general in thrust, are related from the start to the contrast between Jews and Samaritans. Here in vs. 12, however, this emerges for the first time in the woman’s critical questioning of Jesus: “Certainly¹⁵¹ you are not greater than our father Jacob?”

13, 14 Although in a sense this posed the central issue of the dialogue (see below), in his answer Jesus limits himself to the superiority of what he had to give and does not yet speak about himself. He therefore contrasts the water from Jacob’s well (“this water”) with his gift. He does not condemn the first as though there was something wrong with it. He had, indeed, begun by asking for it. But it has only a limited effect. It only temporarily quenches one’s thirst. In the nature of the case, this is as far as the gift of father Jacob goes. Over against it Jesus sets the water—described with repeated emphasis as his gift—that will forever assuage a person’s thirst, water one does not over and over have to go and get but that becomes a spring of living, self-replenishing water within. Not that a single drink will satisfy, but as the gift of God it is an everlasting,¹⁵² self-renewing spring of refreshment and life.

Much has been written about this pronouncement, and its explication is decisive for the interpretation of the entire Fourth Gospel. As with the contrast between flesh and Spirit in 3:6ff., here, too, scholars have looked for the background in the dualistic thought of contemporary Hellenistic religiosity,¹⁵³ whether in an idealistic sense (the material and earthly as the lower over against the spiritual and heavenly as the higher)¹⁵⁴ or in that of Gnosticism (the earthly as the unreal over against the immaterial, which comes from above).¹⁵⁵ Within this approach, the history of salvation recedes completely into the background. Everything—not only soteriology but also christology—is then governed by a strongly individualistic view of humankind.¹⁵⁶

However, as a reaction to the statement by the Samaritan woman (“Certainly you are not greater than our father Jacob”) Jesus’ answer certainly has a very different background. At stake is the contrast between what Jacob, patriarch of the Samaritans, gave his children and descendants and the water that Jesus will give. One thinks instinctively of ch. 6, where the bread from heaven that Jesus gives and is (6:32f., 48ff.) is contrasted with the manna that Moses gave the fathers in the wilderness. There, too, we find the motif of the inadequacy of what was given in the past (vs. 49) and of the fact that those who partake of what Jesus gives and is will never lack (vs. 35); there too we encounter a request for “this bread” (6:34) paralleling the Samaritan woman’s request for “this water” (4:15). It is said by Bultmann and his followers, to be sure, that when the Jews or the Samaritan woman makes these requests they represent only “the world” in its unbelief, which views illusion as though it were real.¹⁵⁷ In this fashion the Jewish and Samaritan historical background becomes unimportant. All we find here then is the universally valid antithesis between the understanding of the human situation from within the revelation in Jesus (the Christian faith) and the world, represented by Judaism or Samaritanism.¹⁵⁸

Still, however true it is that Jesus is “the way, the truth, and the life” for all people without distinction, this does not remove the fact that he is this—especially in the Fourth Gospel—as Israel’s Messiah. That is why the point of this story and the way by which Jesus leads the woman to faith can only be understood against the salvation-historical background of God’s revelation to Israel. The gift of water from the well of Jacob was for the Samaritans, like the manna in the wilderness to Israel, a reminder of the sacred tradition—continuing evidence of God’s richly salvific involvement with his people through history. When Jesus describes the gift of God in terms from tradition, such as “living water” and “bread from heaven,” the adjectives “living,” “true,” “good,” and the like are rooted theologically not in an ontological contrast between illusion and reality but in a salvation-historical contrast. What Jesus brings is the fulfillment, the “truth” and the “fullness” of the gift of God. Everything that preceded had reference to that fullness, but could not provide it. None of this is opposed to the past, therefore, but it brings the past into the future (cf. 8:56ff.; see also the comments on 1:17). What is referred to here as “living water” is already present in the Old Testament portrayal of what the people in their distress desired from God, and that not only in a physical sense (cf. Pss. 23:2ff.; 36:8; Is. 12:3, etc.): one reads of “thirst for God” (Ps. 42:1) and of God as the “fountain of life” (Ps. 36:9; Jr. 2:13: “the fountain of living waters”); the salvation of the Lord is offered as waters for those who are thirsty (Is. 55:1ff.) as contrasted with that which only temporarily quenches thirst.

Vs. 14 does not define how Jesus is the fulfiller of all this. In 7:37ff., where he speaks in the same sense of “rivers of living water,” this is explained as referring to the coming outpouring of the Spirit, just as in ch. 6 the living bread of Jesus’ flesh and blood, which give eternal life (cf. 6:35, 51, 53ff.), is understood. Some interpreters try to find a more specific meaning here also¹⁵⁹—but mistakenly in my opinion. What is central here is not a specific meaning of “living water” but the proclamation that in Jesus as the divinely sent Messiah the gift of God is present, the gift, namely, to which prophets and psalmists ever and again testified and for which people in their thirst for God were always looking. In the messianic context of “him who speaks to you is he,” of what he reveals and does, the gift he confers on those who thus believe in him will be increasingly understood, as will appear from the dialogue as it now continues.

15 But the woman has not yet reached that point, though her tone has changed. What at first seemed utterly absurd to her is now beginning to assume the form of something miraculous, of which the stranger apparently knows the secret and that might perhaps be useful to her. In any case, her request, again couched in respectful terms (“Sir, give me this water that I may not thirst”), seems sincere (and not ironic or playful, as some interpreters think; cf. also 6:34). But to judge by what else she says (“so that I do not have to come here repeatedly¹⁶⁰ to draw water”) she seems still not to understand what Jesus wants to give her. Or is it that things are beginning to dawn on her and she is only repeating Jesus’ words in order to prompt him to explain himself?

16-19 Things only change when Jesus suddenly shifts the conversation to something seemingly unrelated to the subject at issue: “Go, call your husband, and come back here.” Scholars differ greatly on the meaning of this shift. Some think that there is no connection with what preceded and that therefore the transition from vss. 10-15 to vss. 16-19 cannot be original. The idea is that vss. 10-15 were taken by the Evangelist from another source and inserted after vs. 9, with the implication that vss. 16-19 originally followed vs. 9.¹⁶¹ Even ignoring the fact that scholars thus have the Evangelist deal most awkwardly with his “sources,” it is very questionable whether linking vss. 16-19 with vs. 9 furnishes a clearer sequence than the present one.¹⁶²

Admittedly, the linkage is not devoid of problems. What could have been Jesus’ motive for having the woman call her husband? All kinds of explanations have been proposed.

It is suggested that Jesus wanted to involve the woman’s husband in what he had discussed with her since his gift was not intended only for her. Or that Jesus wanted to test the confidence the woman had expressed. Or that he wanted to make her understand that he knew her life history in order thus to create in her a better understanding for what he wanted to give her. And the allegorical interpretation is back in circulation: The “marriage” relationship(s) of the woman are said to refer here to the religion of the Samaritans. For this, reference is made to symbolism also to be found in Ho. 2:2, 7, 16. The “five husbands” (vs. 18) are said to be the five gods of the nations that had gone from Assyria to settle Samaria (cf. 2 Kg. 17:24ff.), while the present husband of the woman (who was not her husband, vs. 18) is said to refer to the illicit worship of Yahweh by the Samaritans.¹⁶³ But surely this intepretation is too fantastic. Not only does the Evangelist not “use allegorisation but rather symbolic representation as his main literary device”¹⁶⁴ but in Samaria there were not five but seven nations that worshiped their gods, and they did so simultaneously, not successively (cf. 2 Kg. 17:29ff.). And could Yahweh be called the illicit husband of the Samaritans? The woman’s own explanation in vs. 29 in no way points to an allegorical interpretation, any more than one can interpret the later dialogue concerning true worship as a further application of this “allegory.” Hence we shall have to take the command of Jesus to the woman to call her husband in a literal sense.

In view of what follows the intent can hardly be other than that, by bringing up the subject of her husband, Jesus wanted to lead the woman to the realization that he knew her past and present life and thus to make her more open to the meaning of his words.

In the history of exegesis (and of preaching) this interpretation has often been given a religio-psychological twist, according to which Jesus sought to lead the woman to repentance and conversion by way of increased self-knowledge. The command “Go, call your husband” is said to have been the first step toward getting her to realize how sinful her life was. The woman’s answer in vs. 17a would then be ambiguous, even misleading, as an instinctive reaction to escape further interrogation at this point. Jesus then used her answer, so the argument goes, to unmask her sinful life further (vss. 17b, 18). Although the woman has to acknowledge Jesus’ prophetic knowledge concerning her life, she next tries (vss. 17, 19f.) to divert attention from herself to a more impersonal “subject,” the nature of true worship, as a kind of confessional diversionary tactic.¹⁶⁵

This interpretation undoubtedly contains the truth that Jesus led the woman to this acknowledgment, not by an arbitrary manifestation of his supernatural knowledge, but by focusing this knowledge on her own life. And what he thus brought to the fore was certainly not flattering for her. The words “you are right”—echoed in vs. 18 with “this you have said truly”—must have sounded in her ears as a judicial verdict that, by saying “I have no husband,” she herself had pronounced. And the explanation of this verdict made this “truth” all the more unambiguous and revealing: by Jewish standards¹⁶⁶ and in the general Near Eastern view, it was an indecent extravagance for a woman to have been married successively to five men. And if that was followed by “living with” another man, any claim to the honor of being a married woman had been totally abandoned. There can be no doubt, therefore, that by thus revealing to the woman his knowledge of her life, Jesus sought to give his conversation with her a dimension of depth for which until now she had shown no understanding. It is not difficult, therefore, to find material points of connection between this and what has been said in the preceding conversation about a thirst that ever returns and water that cannot quench it.

Still, it is questionable whether the text permits a psychological-pastoral interpretation ending with a deepening of the woman’s sense of sin and her repentance. In any case, her answers do not show this. The idea that she lacked the self-knowledge that Jesus is presumably now imparting to her is nowhere evident. When he says to her, “Go, call your husband,” her reply tersely and radically reflects her real situation: “I have no husband.” That she does not immediately reveal her entire situation to him can hardly be interpreted against her. In any case, Jesus does not reproach her for this but rather commends her for saying she does not have a husband. And when he then proceeds to confront her with a picture of her life, she does not act like this were the first time she realized the seriousness of it or finally arrived at self-knowledge and a sense of sin. At least she shows no sign of this.

Her only reaction to Jesus’ unveiling of her life is: “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet.” Hence her answer relates more to Jesus than to herself, though of course it implies the acknowledgment that he has spoken the truth about her. And that also is the viewpoint from which the Evangelist would have us regard this decisive shift in the conversation: Jesus knew with whom he had to do when he sought contact with this woman by asking her for a drink and then offering her the living water. It is that knowledge that over and over illumined the authority and nature of Jesus’ messianic mission. On the basis of this knowledge he called Nathanael, as a true Israelite, to follow him (1:47), kept Nicodemus and the “many” represented by him at a distance (2:25; 3:3), and, through this woman with her dubious past and reputation (cf. vss. 29, 39), sought entrance among the despised and hostile people of Samaria. What therefore determines the goal and progress of Jesus’ conversation with the Samaritan woman is not that she—in four steps or stages¹⁶⁷—arrived at ever deeper self-knowledge but began, in the face of all her personal and shared prejudices, to understand who the Messiah of Israel was and what “the salvation from the Jews” represented by him amounted to (vss. 22, 29, 39).

But the faith that reaches that goal is not achieved all at once. She has come closer to Jesus than she did in vs. 15, but still no closer than the admission that he is a prophet. She insists on the indefinite article: a prophet. Still, this was a step that, as the developing conversation shows, arose not from a general sense that she was dealing with a kind of miracle-worker,¹⁶⁸ but rather from the Old Testament image of the prophet as one who is endowed with supernatural knowledge (cf., e.g., 1 Sa. 9:19; 2 Kg. 4:27; Lk. 7:39) and to whom one could turn to hear the Word of God.¹⁶⁹

20 It is in the light of that discovery that the woman now brings up the heart of the issue that has from the beginning made her reserved toward the stranger but that she now poses to him, now understanding him as a prophet and hence as expert on that issue: What did he think about the great stumbling block between the Samaritans (“our fathers”) and the Jews (“you,” plural), namely “where people ought to worship”?

From of old the Samaritans had worshiped Yahweh alongside their idols (2 Kg. 17:26f., 32, 41). In distinction from the Jews who, according to Dt. 27:4 (Masoretic Text), brought their sacrifices to Mount Ebal, the Samaritans, in their Pentateuch, gave this significance to Mount Gerizim, which was situated adjacent to Jacob’s well (“this mountain”) and worshiped Yahweh there. In the course of time they built a temple there (with permission from Alexander the Great, according to Josephus), but it was destroyed by John Hyrcanus I, a Jewish king, in 128 b.c. But the Samaritan worship of Yahweh was continued on Mount Gerizim¹⁷⁰ and remained the great religious bone of contention (cf. Lk. 9:53).

Here, too, the “psychological” interpretation, which views this shift in the conversation as a diversionary tactic of a “confessional” nature (see above), takes us into the wrong direction. According to this interpretation one not only faces the question why Jesus did not cut her off but in fact followed her when she took this track but also thus disregards the christological viewpoint that dominates the entire conversation. What follows does not have a “theoretical” character.

The situation is rather—and this is the strategy of the Evangelist in all these conversations—that the “case” of the woman herself illustrates the relevance of the controversy in a highly personal way. After the conversation about the well has taken this turn, how could conversation about the mountain be avoided? The woman’s first question was: “How can you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” But at this point another question urges itself on her even, and more forcefully: “How can you, a Jew (in fact, a Jewish prophet), speak about the gift of God and of living water to me, a woman of Samaria (and what a woman), as if ‘this mountain’ were not an enormous stumbling block between us?”¹⁷¹ She does state the issue in more general terms. But what drove her to do this was not a theological attempt at diversion but the awareness that the issue between Jews and Samaritans had never been more personally important to her than it was at this point in her conversation with this Jewish prophet.

21-22 Accordingly, Jesus reacts to her pronouncement without any deviation. He, too, feels no need to return to the personal life of the woman but addresses her as representative of her people (“you,” plural). For, however much in all his words he kept the woman in mind, now that he has gained her attention for who he is, it had to be made clear to her that the issue between him and her was not just the shift in her history but a breakthrough that concerned her entire people, indeed, the whole world. With solemn emphasis (“Believe me, woman”)¹⁷² Jesus announces the hour when they (she and her fellow Samaritans) would worship the Father “neither on this mountain (Gerizim) nor in Jerusalem.” That is, they would no longer have to choose between these two cult locations. This is not to say that Jesus made no distinction between the two existing places of worship. He describes the worship of Samaritans as based on ignorance of what they are doing. For, in virtue of the revelation given to Israel, salvation is “from the Jews,” and all worship that puts itself in opposition to that revelation or separates itself from it is worship of one’s own choosing.

Much recent scholarship regards this verse as a later insertion because the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel, it is thought, could not have said anything of the sort.¹⁷³ Reference is made to texts (such as 8:41ff., 17; 10:34; 13:33) in which Jesus either sharply attacks “the Jews” or clearly distances himself from “their” law. But however often “the Jews” is the term by which the leaders of the Jews who are hostile toward Jesus are described, that does not mean that the designation can have only this antithetical sound or meaning in the Fourth Gospel (cf. 2:13; 5:1; 7:11; 11:19ff., etc.).¹⁷⁴ Much less can it be maintained that in so-called dualistic thought, with “the world” on one side and believers on the other, “the Jews” and their tradition (Moses!) always represent “the world.” It has been correctly noted by some that one who approaches and interprets the Fourth Gospel in this way totally misunderstands it and in fact even runs the danger of attributing anti-Semitic tendencies to the Gospel. However true it is that Jesus, in his conversations with Jews who are hostile to him, dissociates himself entirely from their spiritual motives and their handling of the Torah and makes very strong statements, it is no less true that his entire mission, even according to John, is rooted in the revelation granted to Israel (cf., e.g., 5:45ff.; 7:19ff.; 8:39ff., 53ff.; 10:34). Hence one must not for that reason, any more than on that of the textual witness, question for a moment the genuineness of either part of vs. 22.¹⁷⁵

23-24 The “but” with which vs. 23 begins also points to the authenticity of vs. 22: However much the Jews may have been right in their dispute with the Samaritans, now other criteria for true worship are going to apply. Again Jesus announces “the hour is coming” (cf. vs. 21), referring thus to the great time of salvation, and follows this, as in 5:25, with “and is now.” The breakthrough has come and the future has become present tense, but without losing its future character.

The mark of that future is worship “in Spirit and truth,” as contrasted with worship that is bound to a specific place. This is not to be understood as saying that true worship is realized totally in the sphere of the supersensuous and elevated above the visible temporal world or any cultic form.¹⁷⁶ “Spirit”—here linked with “truth” in a hendiadys as with “grace and truth” in 1:17—refers to the time of salvation that has come with Christ and to the concomitant new way in which God wants to relate to human beings. Whereas “grace and truth” above all describe the compassion and love God displayed in the sending of his Son (cf. 3:16), “Spirit and truth” refer to the fellowship thus established in its life-creating and life-giving power, as leading to the fullness of God’s gifts (cf. 1:16) that is no longer mediated by all sorts of provisional and symbolic forms, but by the Spirit of God himself, which is why it is repeatedly called worship of the “Father.”

And all this takes place “from now on” because in Christ the way to the Father is being opened in a totally new manner (14:6), the limits of the old patterns of worship are being broken through (see comments on 1:29), and the true worshipers are being brought together in a single fellowship. They, accordingly, are such (vs. 23b) as God “seeks,” that is, desires, as his worshipers. Therein lie both the condition (cf. “must” in vs. 24) for true worship and the desire of God to attract such. For (vs. 24) “God is Spirit,” not a statement intended to emphasize God’s inaccessibility to earthly, material beings (so that they would have to draw near to God by way of interiorization and spiritual self-emptying), but the description, rather, of God as the Foundation and Giver of the true life (14:16), he to whom, therefore, one can come only in the way he has opened for that purpose in Jesus Christ.¹⁷⁷

25 The woman does not respond to the specific content of Jesus’ words. But she does reveal her awareness that they relate to the great future—matters that suggest to her mind the thought of the¹⁷⁸ Messiah, of whose coming she as a Samaritan knew. Hence she comes increasingly closer to Jesus’ way of thinking. She names the Messiah, but still (cf. vs. 29) distances herself from the relevance of what she has heard (“the hour is now”). She prefers to appeal to the coming Messiah, an expectation she shared with her people: “When he comes, he will show us all things.”

Just what kind of Messiah was this woman looking for? And in what respect did Jesus identify with her expectation. She refers to “Messiah,” but the eschatological figure expected by the Samaritans was called Taheb, not Messiah.¹⁷⁹ The fact that the woman nevertheless calls him Messiah seems to be based on a certain accommodation or generalization in the designation of the future bringer of salvation.¹⁸⁰ Although, on the basis of the available historical material one cannot form a clear picture of this Taheb, at least not for the time of Jesus, as background one will in any case also have to consider the Pentateuch held in honor by the Samaritans and the prophetic figure predicted there: “I will raise up … a prophet like you.… I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him” (Dt. 18:18). The woman speaks of this prophet as the one who “will show us all things.”

26 With this last statement the woman has come very close to the truth, so close that for his self-revelation Jesus needs no other description of his identity. Still, the real truth must come from Jesus himself: “I who speak to you am he.” These words return in the Fourth Gospel in a variety of ways, and each time “he” has a different content (e.g., 6:35; 9:37). But they all give expression to one and the same thing: all the adjectives with which divine salvation can be described, all the predictions of the prophets, and all the expectations based on them find in him their only subject, their fulfillment, their “truth.” Here, too, this pronouncement is, as it were, the terminal point to which the woman is led step by step. He it is, not only for the Jews but also for the Samaritans; and he it is not only in the future (as the coming Messiah, who “will show us all things”) but here and now (“I who speak to you”).

Over and over, wherever that is possible, this is where the conversations climax (cf. 9:37) throughout the entire Gospel (20:31). What is constantly at stake in this connection is the unity of two focal points: Jesus is the Messiah and the Messiah is Jesus, though now one and now the other is predominant. In the nature of the case, one is determined by the other. Nevertheless, materially the identity of the person precedes that of the salvation in question. The identity of the Messiah, the one sent by the Father, and the way messianic salvation comes into being—in short, the entire soteriological process of events and its effect—is manifest in Jesus and fulfilled in him; and one cannot, conversely, fill in the christological identity of the person with what people expect of him or desire of him on the basis of their “existential understanding” or tradition. But there is definitely also continuity in the history of salvation because salvation is “from the Jews.” Therefore the true outlook on the coming Messiah is revealed, as with the Samaritan woman, in the context of the expectation that is oriented to Israel. For that reason Jesus does not at this point react to the content of the woman’s messianic expectation but focuses in his final statement on the fact that it is he who is speaking to her.

4:27-42

Fields White for Harvest

In verse 27 the conversation is suddenly broken off by the return of the disciples. The Evangelist skillfully relates the story of what follows along two tracks, with both Jesus and the woman returning to their “natural associates,” he to his disciples and she to her fellow citizens in the Samaritan town. But the story is continued on both tracks. Now both the disciples and the Samaritans, each in their own way, are involved in the story. And then the story again flows through a single channel when the woman returns to Jesus through the fields with her people and meets his disciples, who have meanwhile been informed of what was happening.

The change of situation is sketched with just a few striking brush strokes. The coming of the disciples not only interrupts the conversation at its climax but brings with it a disturbance of the atmosphere. They are clearly astonished to find Jesus thus engaged in conversation.¹⁸¹ The mere fact that he has been talking with a woman is bad enough, by the conventions of the day,¹⁸² but how much more with a Samaritan woman! Still none of the disciples ventures to ask, “What do you want of her?”¹⁸³ or “Why are you speaking with her?” They somehow sense that their “why?” is not his and that he is acting from motives they dare not encroach on.

28-30 But to the woman this whole change was a sign for her to return in haste—leaving her jar behind—to the city and to her people. The picturesque detail of the jar has been given a range of all too profound explanations,¹⁸⁴ but it does of course mark the change of mood that has occurred in the woman—she has forgotten the real object of her journey—as also her eagerness to share with her fellow townspeople what has happened to her at the well.

It is clear how deeply she has been struck not only by Jesus’ knowledge of her life but also by his statement that he is the Messiah. Now she no longer refers to a prophet, and for a chance to see a prophet she would probably not have attempted to mobilize the whole city (“Come, see …”). Her appeal is couched in the form of a question, as though she herself was not at all sure of the answer (“Can this man perhaps be the Christ?”).¹⁸⁵ But the way she involved herself sounded to the Samaritans who heard her like a strong motive not for immediately suspecting her of credulity or a desire for sensation but for determining for themselves what could possibly be happening. And so, on the basis of this woman’s witness, despite or perhaps precisely because of her notorious past, “they went out of the city.” Could Jesus have sent a better witness?

31 While the Samaritans were on their way to Jesus, a most remarkable conversation ensued between Jesus and his disciples, one which was to prepare them for the coming of the Samaritans. Although there are difficult exegetical problems, which have occasioned a wide variety of views of the text,¹⁸⁶ the general thrust of this pericope is not unclear: The harvest of the world has begun! And in this connection the entire focus is on persuading Jesus’ disciples of the relevance of this event and on involving them in God’s “work.” After the woman had left, the disciples, in their silent astonishment at Jesus’ conduct (cf. vs. 27), could only think of urging him to eat: “Rabbi,¹⁸⁷ eat!” After all, it was so that he (and they) could eat that they had gone to this city.

32, 33 Jesus’ reply to their invitation and their subsequent reaction are strongly reminiscent of the beginning of Jesus’ conversation with the woman (vss. 11, 12). Just as in that conversation the water, so here the food, has a different meaning for him than for them. He speaks the same language but uses it, as it were, from within another world. And although he points this difference out to them clearly enough (“I have food to eat of which you do not know”), they, like the woman, continue to cling to their one understanding of food and eating. They can do no better than to ask—each other!—a dull-witted and improbable question:¹⁸⁸ “Surely, no one else has brought him food?” In the Fourth Gospel, the disciples’ incomprehension, though it is not cited as proof of a lack of faith or loyalty to Jesus (cf. 1:41ff.; 2:11; 6:66ff., etc.), continues to the end to be a factor in their conduct (cf. 6:7f.; 11:12; 13:6, 37; 14:8, etc.). Not until after his resurrection do they fully learn to understand his words (cf. 14:20; 16:25ff.). That is not to deny that, as we see it here, their time with Jesus on earth was for them a continuing school in which Jesus taught them to see with different eyes what till now had only had one valid meaning for them (cf. vs. 35ff.).

34 To that end Jesus gives them a further reply. His food—apparently in distinction from theirs¹⁸⁹—as a means of life and the fulfillment of his deepest need, lay in the fulfillment of his divine mission. For the first time here we encounter the designation—one that occurs more than twenty times in the Fourth Gospel on Jesus’ lips—of God as “he who sent me,” sometimes (as in 5:23; 6:39f.) with “the Father” (cf. also 3:34f.). It is that mission, that is, the authority given to Jesus by God and the gift of God comprehended in it, that determines his entire existence. He describes it further as “the will,” that is, the plan of salvation, that it is his task to realize and “the work” that he must accomplish.¹⁹⁰ In this one word “work”—elsewhere called “works” (9:4)—here and repeatedly in the Gospel, Jesus’ entire mission, both in words and in deeds, is summed up (cf. 17:4).¹⁹¹

35 All this not only applies to Jesus but must also govern the disciples’ outlook on the present. To make that clear, Jesus uses a common saying (“Do you not say …?” “Is it not your way of speaking …?”) about the harvest: “There are yet four months, then comes the harvest.” Although we know of no such saying from other sources, it is rather generally assumed that such a saying is being referred to here.¹⁹² It is thought to have meant that just as there are (at least)¹⁹³ four months between sowing and harvesting, things cannot be expected at once but take time and must be given time.¹⁹⁴ However true this may be in itself, it is not the wisdom by which the disciples could live now so that they could direct their energies to all sorts of other things than those for which Jesus had called them. Therefore he exhorts them with great emphasis and authority—“I tell you!”—to lift up their eyes and focus on what must now be their highest priority: “See how the fields are already white for harvest!” He is evidently referring to what is literally taking place in the field in front of them,¹⁹⁵ namely the exodus from their city of the Samaritans who at the woman’s saying, “Come and see,” have started out to go to Jesus. For Jesus that scene is a sign and proof of the breakthrough in time: people in a strange country have heard of him and cross ancient boundaries to ascertain for themselves the possible fulfillment of their long-cherished hope.

36 Jesus continues to speak in terms of the harvest: already the time of the harvest has begun and the reaper can gather in the fruit of labor. This to be understood in the salvation-historical (“eschatological”) sense of the harvest of people for eternal life.¹⁹⁶ All the emphasis falls on the word “already”¹⁹⁷ because that is what the disciples need to understand. Sowing is no longer only a time of expectant waiting: sowing, harvest, and the time in between all now coincide, since while the sower is still going out to sow the harvest is already coming in. In other words: the sower and the reaper meet each other, “rejoicing together” at the same time. This is the paradoxical new wisdom about the “sower” and the “reaper” that replaces the old and leaves it behind.

37, 38 These verses, with a view to the disciples, express this truth in still another way, “for” that which was said in general terms above applies in still another sense to them. Jesus here bases himself on yet another saying about harvest: “One sows and another reaps” (cf. Mi. 6:15; Jb. 31:8). It probably owed its origin to the experience of disappointment in the life of many a sower who was unable to pluck the fruit of his or her labor but had to leave it to others to enjoy. In the case of Jesus’ disciples, however, the reverse is the case; it is their privilege, as those involved in his work, to live in the time of harvest and to reap what they themselves have not sown. Many before them labored for the day of the harvest but were not permitted to see it. The disciples have entered into the labor of the others. While those others never saw the day of the harvest, the disciples are now permitted to see with their own eyes that the fields are white for harvest. It is this awareness of being allowed to participate in the time of fulfillment that Jesus wants to bring home to them now that the Samaritans are at the point of coming to him. Otherwise they might be superseded by the Samaritans when moments later the Samaritans confess Jesus as the Savior of the world.

This interpretation differs from most others in that it makes no attempt to identify the sower, the reaper, and the “others.” This concern to identify these figures has led to great difficulties and consequently to many hard-to-swallow “solutions.” In vs. 36 many interpreters correctly refrain from making such identifications. That sower and reaper rejoice together means simply that sowing and harvesting coincide.¹⁹⁸ For this idea one can also refer to Old Testament salvation prophecies such as Lv. 26:5 and Am. 9:13.¹⁹⁹

But some think that in vs. 36 the sower is God and the reaper is Jesus.²⁰⁰ Once this has been laid down, the difficulties arise in interpreting vss. 37 and 38, where the reapers are the disciples and the “others” are the sowers. The assumption then is that vs. 36 speaks of the time before the resurrection and vss. 37 and 38 to the time after the resurrection, when the disciples take over reaping. Jesus himself might then belong among the “others,” a very difficult line of thought and one not supported by the text.²⁰¹

However, the reference in vss. 37 and 38 is not to something other than or to another time than vs. 36. In both cases the focus is the one great fact that the time of harvest has come, that the disciples are now in that time and, as his disciples, involved in it, and that this privilege should determine their view of their surrounding world. If one neglects this point of view, one cannot avoid the question of who the “others” are. But it is obvious, in any case, that in vs. 38 the disciples are the reapers. The words “I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor” raise questions because what has come before makes no explicit mention of any such mission. But the Evangelist assumes much more knowledge of Jesus’ disciples among his readers than what he tells them. The idea that the Fourth Gospel could describe the disciples (apostles) in this fashion only after the resurrection (cf. 20:21ff.) is, in light of what Jesus tells them in the farewell discourses, entirely incredible (cf. 13:16; 15:27; 17:18; cf. 9:4; 6:5ff.).

In this “mission” (“I sent you”) the paramount idea is that in the time of fulfillment, the time of harvest, they have their task—and that in distinction from those who (in connection with vs. 37) are called “others” and are defined by the fact that they had their task in sowing time, the time of hard preparatory work. There is no indication that one should think here of particular “others” like the prophets or John the Baptist and his disciples. Still less should one think of others who presumably preceded the disciples in preaching the gospel, such as the Samaritan woman, or other (previously unreported) predecessors who are presumed to have been working among the Samaritans before this, or even Jesus and the Father himself.²⁰² All of those no longer belong to the time of sowing but, like the disciples, to the time of the harvest.

For that same reason there is no help in the solution that many contemporary interpreters finally adopt, namely that “I sent you” refers not to the disciples who are present in the narrative but was “spoken from the standpoint of later missionary work where every missionary could look back on some predecessor in his field”²⁰³ or was meant specifically of Peter and John, who went to Samaria to continue the work of the “sower” Philip and impart the Holy Spirit to the Samaritans (Acts 8).²⁰⁴ For this totally ignores what must be regarded as the real point, namely that as followers of Jesus the disciples were permitted to do their work in the joy of harvest time and in that respect were distinguished and privileged above all those who preceded them in the work of God.

Should one look for a comparable utterance in the Synoptics, one might consider a passage like Mt. 13:16f.: “Your eyes are blessed because they see and your ears because they hear. Truly, I say to you, many prophets and righteous people wanted to see what you see, but did not, and to hear what you hear, but did not” (cf. also Mt. 11:11f.). In this light it is not hard, precisely because of the generality of the contrast, to understand the statement that Jesus sent out his disciples to reap that for which they did not labor and that they thus “entered into the labor of the ‘others.’ ” The statement indicates the difference between the time before and the time after the fulfillment, especially for those who with intense longing looked forward to that time of harvest.

39-42 The conclusion of the story—the arrival of the Samaritans and their confession concerning Jesus—links up with vs. 30 but can only be read in the light in which the Evangelist wants to have it understood after vss. 31-38: that of the visible breakthrough of the time of the harvest, climaxing in the confession of Jesus as the Savior of the world. At their request Jesus spends two days among them. It is a visit “in passing.” It is not certain, however, that it was the Evangelist’s intention to stress the brevity of the visit. In any case, the time was long enough to lead still many more people to faith in Jesus and to move the people from the testimony of the woman to the word of Jesus himself as the basis for their faith. Although they give somewhat negative expression to this vis-à-vis the woman (“no longer”), the statement is not intended to minimize her importance in the whole episode. It was “the word” of her “testimony” (vs. 39) that had awakened faith in Jesus in their hearts.²⁰⁵ Still it was not her story but what her fellow townspeople now heard with their own ears that led them to the conviction (“we have heard for ourselves, and we know …”) that Jesus was truly what the woman had so tentatively proposed to them: the Savior of the world.

Here one senses anew the power and significance of the cry “come and see” (cf. 1:39, 46) with which now the woman has exhorted her fellow townspeople to ascertain for themselves what she has found in Jesus (cf. vs. 29). This repeated exhortation and the emphasis on the fact that the Samaritan population “heard for themselves” obviously do not mean—as many interpreters think—that no one should be content with what others witness concerning Jesus and that therefore everyone should seek a personal encounter with Jesus. The point of this “come and see” is the position of eyewitness, which intrinsically cannot be the privilege of all and which does not keep Jesus from calling those blessed who have not seen and yet have believed (20:29). The Samaritans’ pronouncement rather proves how powerful and all-embracing Jesus’ self-revelation “in the flesh” actually was. It did not limit itself merely to the the woman and her life story but communicated itself in its saving significance (crossing all traditional boundaries) also to those who had come in response to the woman’s testimony and that of many in the city who met him themselves. For when they heard him himself, they understood that they were in fact dealing not just with a clairvoyant or miracle worker but with the Savior of the world.

These words with which the whole story ends unmistakably convey the thrust of the story: salvation is not only for Jews. The Samaritans understood this from the manner in which Jesus had made himself known to the woman (this woman) and had spent two days with them. They do not call him by the name which was typical for the future expectation of the Jews, “Messiah,” or by that of their own, Taheb, but by a name in accord with universal salvation.²⁰⁶ The theme of the universal redemptive significance of Jesus’ coming keeps returning in the Fourth Gospel (e.g., 1:29; 3:16; 6:33; 12:47; see also 1 Jn. 4:14; 2:2). Still, the story in ch. 4 is the only place where that salvation is actually effected—and that only among the Samaritans, Israel’s nearest neighbors, perhaps also the neighboring people most hated by the Jews (cf. 8:48). The gospel was to go to Gentiles only later (cf. 12:20-23), when Jesus’ glorification, his return to the Father, had begun (cf. 12:32). But now already, in his lifetime, Jesus could not, as it were, go beyond the Samaritans. He “had to” pass through Samaria. And by that token the geographical “had to” (see the comments on vs. 11) acquires in retrospect a deeper meaning. And wherever he had to go he was the Savior, even among the Samaritans, and that in consequence of his encounter with this one woman. The fact that God loved the world in him could hardly be more clearly evident than here; and this was undoubtedly the compelling reason that the Evangelist took so much care to include among the deliberately selected encounters between Jesus and people this encounter with a Samaritan woman.

4:43-54

Back to Cana: The Healing of the Royal Official’s Son; Faith and Miracles

43-45 These verses constitute the transition to the following story. After the two-day stay in Samaria the journey to Galilee (cf. 4:3) is continued. Vs. 44 immediately confronts us with a seemingly insoluble difficulty. Apparently to explain (“for”) Jesus’ journey to Galilee, the Evangelist cites the familiar saying of Jesus that “a prophet has no honor in his own country” (cf. Mt. 13:57; Mk. 6:4; Lk. 4:24). But this involves a double problem: First, how could this be a reason for Jesus to go to Galilee? Second, is this not immediately contradicted by vs. 45, which describes the welcome extended to Jesus by Galileans who had seen what he had done at the feast in Jerusalem?

From ancient times²⁰⁷ scholars have sought a way out by saying that by “his country” not Galilee but Judea is meant, and this view has maintained itself to the present day.²⁰⁸ But this goes against what is meant elsewhere by the same saying (cf. Lk. 4:24, also speaking of Jesus’ initial public ministry in Galilee!). Furthermore, in John Galilee could hardly function as a place of refuge from Jesus’ country since “for Jesus himself testified …” explains not only why he departed from Judea but also why he went to Galilee instead (cf. vs. 3). Assuming that one could argue that Jerusalem was Jesus’ city or country, that could hardly be true in explicit contrast with Galilee.

Most recent scholarship therefore maintains that Galilee was Jesus’ country referred to in the saying. The “for” of vs. 44, it is said, is an a priori allusion to the resistance Jesus was to encounter there. In consequence vs. 45 has to be understood in an exclusively negative sense: people only welcomed Jesus for his miracles, as Jesus himself expressly says in vs. 48.²⁰⁹ Still, one cannot be content with this view either. With it the “for” in vs. 44 remains very difficult, and above all the story of the royal official contradicts the idea that in Galilee Jesus would encounter exclusively negative reactions (cf. vss. 50, 53).

The “for” in vs. 44 explains, rather, Jesus’ escape to Galilee in connection with his reason for leaving Judea, namely his own security (cf. 7:1). There, in his own country of Galilee, he did not have to fear the attendance of large crowds, which in the eyes of the Jewish authorities made him so dangerous. Being “held in honor” was to run the risk of universal adoration, of being viewed as something more than “one of our own.” This is not in conflict with vs. 45. The Galileans welcomed him on account of what they had seen him do in Jerusalem. But that was all. People there, by contrast with Judea, did not regard his coming as a threat to their own authority or power but as a chance that, being one of them, he would demonstrate his miraculous power also in his fatherland (cf. Lk. 4:22f.).²¹⁰

46 Jesus went again to Cana in Galilee. The verse explicitly mentions the miracle he performed there before. Two things are striking here: first, the special significance thus attributed to Cana as the place where a miracle again takes place and, second, that Cana is again identified as being in Galilee (2:1, 11; 4:45; also 21:2, cf. comments on 2:1 above). In vs. 54 the Evangelist returns to the fact of the second miracle (see comments there).

The view that the story that now follows is a variant of the healing narrated in Mt. 8:5-13 and Lk. 7:1-10 is widespread.²¹¹ The basilikos in Jn. 4:46 is then said to be the same person as the centurion of Mt. 8:5; Lk. 7:2. This identification is not in itself impossible because in vs. 46b the basilikos is said to be someone in the service of King Herod Antipas (really a tetrarch but popularly called a king). Hence he could be a military man, though basilikos rather suggests a court official.²¹² But there are other more striking similarities between the two stories: Capernaum as the place of residence of the official, healing from a distance, the father’s pleading for his child (in Matthew the παῖς could also be a son, though in Luke he is clearly a slave).

But there are also conspicuous differences. In John, in contrast with the Synoptics, Jesus is in Cana, and the view (partly based on that fact) that vs. 46 is a later addition and that the story originally began with “Now there was a royal official at Capernaum” (cf. 3:1) lacks all textual support and runs into conflict in vs. 52 (“yesterday”). Furthermore, the thrust of the two stories differs to a considerable degree. In the Synoptics the central subject is a Gentile centurion, whom Jesus praises as a model of faith such as is not found in Israel. In John we are told nothing of a Gentile official. In response to his first request Jesus answers the official very critically and places him among the Jewish population (note the plural in vs. 48).²¹³ His faith is mentioned only in the second place (vss. 50 and 53, after the fact). If one wishes to trace the two stories back to a single event, one has to assume that the Evangelist regarded the father’s conduct from a totally different theological viewpoint and reshaped the entire story in terms of that viewpoint.²¹⁴ This constitutes an identification, therefore—one that is not very persuasive—of two traditions with two sharply divergent theological profiles.

47 This brings us to the story’s most conspicuous feature, the ambivalent way in which the relationship between faith and miracle is referred to. This verse clearly evidences the father’s faith in Jesus’ power to do miracles. When he heard that Jesus was coming to Galilee, he went to Cana and made an urgent²¹⁵ request to him to come down²¹⁶ to Capernaum with him and to heal his child, who was deathly ill.

48 At first blush Jesus’ response in vs. 48 seems to be hard and to ignore the true faith that the father placed in his miraculous power. Some interpreters therefore regard vs. 48 as a corpus alienum that was not in the original story but was added by the Evangelist as part of his criticism of mere faith in miracles.²¹⁷ But this ignores the real point at issue: Jesus does not charge the father of the sick child with wanting to see a miracle as legitimation of Jesus’ claims (as, e.g., in Mk. 8:11ff.). His complaint is, rather, that all that moved the man to come to Jesus was Jesus’ miracles: “If I did not perform miracles, you would have no interest in me,” you would not “believe” in me.²¹⁸

Accordingly, the special character of our text remains that this critical approach to a miracle-oriented faith is directed to someone who is not, in fact, out to see miracles of Jesus in general but who is appealing to Jesus out of his own distress. This difference may be explained by Jesus’ use of the plural: He is not addressing the official personally but in light of the general mood that arose around Jesus, in Galilee as in Jerusalem, and that Jesus “knew” (cf. 2:23ff.). On the other hand, for Jesus to make an issue of the inadequacy of miracle-oriented faith precisely vis-à-vis the father of a critically ill child shows how serious Jesus was in not wanting to be misunderstood in his miraculous power both for the sake of his mission and for the sake of this man himself. Even in the heart-rending situation in which the royal official came to him, Jesus was not content simply to heal the man’s son: his seeming harshness was aimed at not letting the man (and his entire household) remain stuck halfway on the road of faith. It has therefore been correctly remarked that Jesus’ answer in vs. 48 was not so much an accusation as a challenge.²¹⁹ In other words, Jesus did not only want to give the son back to his father: he wanted to give himself (cf. also 6:27-29).

49, 50 This is also evident from what follows. The father, motivated by the critical condition of his son, persists—now with a passionate appeal to Jesus for help: “Sir, come with me before my child dies!”²²⁰ He urges himself upon Jesus all the more intensely just as Jesus seems to withdraw himself from him (cf. Mt. 15:25ff.). Hence he presents the picture Jesus elsewhere describes as “entering the kingdom violently” (Lk. 16:16; Mt. 11:12).

And then, as in Mt. 15:28, Jesus succumbs—but only in part. He says: “Go; your son will live.” With increasing²²¹ urgency the man has asked Jesus to go down to his house with him, which to him seemed indispensable if his son was to have a chance. But Jesus sends him away—with his word of power “your son will live,”²²² to be sure, but that word had to be enough for the man. Hence the Evangelist puts all emphasis on that fact when he describes the man’s positive reaction: “the man believed the word that Jesus spoke to him and went his way.”

51-53 The outcome of the story confirms both Jesus’ word and the father’s faith. The servants who come out to meet him are unbiased witnesses because they know “nothing.” Also, the determination of the hour of the healing excluded all doubt. When Jesus spoke, at a great distance, the condition of the sick boy changed, “yesterday at the seventh hour.”²²³ The statement at the end, “and he himself believed and all his household,” speaks in contemporary terms (cf. Ac. 11:14; 16:15, 31f.; 18:8) of the reversal that from that moment occurred in the life of this father and his family. The “absolute” statement “he believed” (without an object) no longer denotes a single act of faith, as in vs. 50, but conversion to a life of faith: “they became believing,” adherents of Jesus in the deeper sense of the word. The miracle of healing had paved the way for this. It is precisely these last words that express the change that occurred since the father had hastened to Cana to ask for Jesus’ help. He already “believed” in Jesus, that is, that Jesus could heal his son. But by the way in which Jesus had countered and tested him, Jesus had made him believe at his word and thus related him entirely to himself.

It is from this latter point that this “miracle story” derives its meaning in the series of encounters described by the Evangelist. Miracle belongs inseparably to Jesus’ mission, as his witness to the Father (cf. 5:36; 10:25), as the sign of the salvation represented by him (cf. 9:1, 39; 6:32), and hence as a means of leading people to faith (10:38; 12:37; 20:30). But Jesus is more than the miracles he performs, more than the bread he distributes, and more than the child he restores to its father (and mother and whole family, vs. 53). He is himself the miracle from above; it is therefore also himself he imparts in his miracles, the bread of life (6:35), the resurrection and the life (11:25), the light of the world (9:35). The faith he demands is therefore more than faith in (his power to do) miracles; it is faith in him as the gift of God come down from heaven (4:10; 6:29, 33). For that reason the mere fact of being allowed to participate in a miracle does not yet by itself mean that the recipients have participated in the gift of God in Jesus (cf. 6:27; 5:14). The opposite rather is the case: only one who believes in him participates in the miracle he grants and is (11:25). Miracles not only precede faith as a means of coming to Jesus; they also come after as the ever-remaining “benefit” of faith in him.

Of this the royal official is an example. He came to Jesus on account of the miracle he desired, but Jesus placed himself between the father and his child. Only when he allowed himself to be sent on his way by Jesus’ word did the father find that the miracle he wanted was, as it were, already waiting for him. There is in this story of Jesus’ miracle-at-a-distance, among “the many other signs he did,” a unique motive for believing that “Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing one may have life in his name” (20:30f.). The readers of this Gospel also lacked, and still lack, the chance to see first and then believe. But anyone who, like this anonymous official from Capernaum, lets himself be sent on his way in faith without first having seen, will see that the miracle is already there waiting for him. It is that order that governs the key statement of this entire story: “Go, behold your son will live” (cf. also 20:29).

Verse 54 concludes the pericope. It presents a problem in that while it speaks of “the second sign,” apparently with reference to “the first of his signs” in 2:11, it seems to ignore 2:23 and 4:45, which mention signs Jesus had performed between this “first” and “second.” Moreover, this enumeration is not continued and as such seems rather senseless in the Gospel as we now have it. All this has led to the hypothesis that this enumeration stems from another source,²²⁴ one in which these two miracles are, in fact, the first and the second. In drawing from this source the Evangelist is then said to have adopted also its enumeration, ignoring the miracles that he has reported in the meantime.²²⁵ Although many commentators place much emphasis on this assumed inconsistency (“aporia”) in the text as we have it and make it one of the pillars of the hypothesis of the “sēmeia source,”²²⁶ it seems to me that the Evangelist is, here again,²²⁷ being too readily charged with disturbing his own narrative—not this time, as in vs. 48, on “theological” grounds, but on account of his careless handling of his source.

But two things are being overlooked: First, the Evangelist does not just mention the miracles Jesus performed in Jerusalem in passing in 2:23, that is, in such a way that he could easily miss them in the enumeration, and he brings them up again in 3:2 and in the present pericope (vs. 45; cf. vs. 48) as an important datum in these chapters. Second, the connection between 4:54 and 2:11 is much too organically integrated in the text for one to regard it as an “alien body” inappropriately taken over from another context. In vs. 46 also, as soon as Cana in Galilee is mentioned, there is immediate reference to the miracle Jesus performed there (just as in 2:11, Cana in Galilee is again expressly mentioned as the place of “the first of the signs”). When, therefore, in 4:54, following the mention of “the second sign,” there recurs the seemingly redundant (after vss. 43, 45, and 46) reference to time and place “when Jesus had come from Judea to Galilee,” it is clear that the Evangelist very specifically wants to direct the attention of the reader to the second sign in Galilee. Grammatically there is no objection to taking vs. 54b as a qualification of “second” in vs. 54a (“As the second miracle that Jesus performed after his arrival”).²²⁸ Therefore, “again” in vs. 54a is not to be taken as a pleonastic apposition²²⁹ alongside “second” but rather, as in vs. 45, as an indication that there was an “encore” in the same place (cf. also 4:36).²³⁰

The question then becomes: Why did the Evangelist expressly link the two Galilean miracles? It is unlikely that we are dealing merely with a geographic coincidence. In all kinds of ways scholars have attempted to bring out points of correspondence between the two miracles that are assumed to explain this connection.²³¹ Nor can it be denied that—as far as the construction of the two stories is concerned—such points are clearly present.²³² But in 4:54 that is obviously not the point.²³³

It seems to me more important that with this second miracle the story returns, as it were, to the location of the first, where everything began, forming an inclusio²³⁴ and giving the intervening cycle of stories a kind of conclusion. As a result Galilee attains a certain strategic significance as the base for the manifestation of Jesus’ messianic glory (against all human expectations and prejudices: cf. 1:46; 7:41). The road to Jerusalem and the temple ran from there (2:13) and not the other way. Each time he returned to Galilee, it was as to his own country. It was also a place of refuge from dangers present in Judea (4:1ff.; 7:1, 9).

Furthermore, the “second” miracle in Galilee also constitutes a new beginning of Jesus’ self-manifestation in and from within Galilee—not, like the first time, to manifest his glory before the eyes of his disciples (cf. 1:11) but rather to take an unambiguous position against the chauvinism and craving for miracles of his compatriots and to bring to light the true “faith in his word.” That struggle for the recognition of his true identity will continue in Galilee in a decisive way (cf. ch. 6) but will also from now on be the great issue in all those journeys he will make from Galilee to Jerusalem in the confrontation with “the Jews,” who are increasingly hostile to him. In view of all this 4:43-54 serves as a hinge²³⁵ in the construction of the narrative, being the conclusion of the preceding and a bridge to what follows, where the relationship between faith and miracle (which is so fundamental in this pericope) will increasingly prove to be of cardinal significance (especially in chs. 5–10: note 5:14ff.; 6:26ff.; 7:2ff.; 9:35ff.; 10:37f.).

1. See, e.g., M. Rissi, “Der Aufbau des vierten Evangeliums,” NTS 29 (1983), pp. 48ff. and the literature cited there.

2. See also Bultmann, Comm., p. 111:

ch. 3 (for which the introduction is provided by 2.23-25) and chap. 4 should be taken together; in each of the two chs. (and only there) the central feature is provided by Jesus’ conversation with a single person, with the διδάσκαλος τοῦ Ίσραήλ and with the γυνὴ Σαμαρεῖτις, with the man and the woman, with the official orthodoxy and with heresy.

3. That of J. A. T. Robinson.

4. See F. J. Moloney, “From Cana to Cana (John 2:1–4:54) and the Fourth Evangelist’s Concept of Correct (and Incorrect) Faith,” Studia Biblica 2 (1978), p. 200; see also Brown, Comm. I, p. cxl (“Part Two: From Cana to Cana—Various Responses to Jesus’ Ministry in the Different Sections of Palestine [chs. II–IV]”). Moloney then makes the following further distinctions:

perfect faith, 2:1-11

no faith, 2:12-22

partial faith, 3:1-21

perfect faith, 3:22-36

no faith, 4:1-15

partial faith, 4:16-26

perfect faith, 4:27-30

perfect faith, 4:43-54.

The three instances of perfect faith are further distinguished as occurring in Jewish, Samaritan, and non-Jewish contexts (the last in 4:43-54). This last classification, in any case, is based on conjecture: In the text—in distinction from the story in Mt. 8:15ff. and Lk. 7:2ff.—the Jewish or Gentile identity of the royal official is left completely open. In vs. 48 he is considered from the perspective of Galileans in general. Brown, more restrained and less schematic than Moloney, repeatedly and rightly warns: “We must beware of being more ingenious than the evangelist himself” (p. cxliv).

5. Apart from the commentaries see the overview and bibliography in A. Smitmans, Das Wunder von Kana. Die Auslegung von Joh. 2:1-11 bei den Vätern und heute, 1966.

6. For this entire complex of problems see esp. W. Nicol, The Sēmeia in the Fourth Gospel, 1972 (e.g., p. 123), who assumes the existence of a sēmeia source but takes a much more positive view of the significance that the Evangelist attached to miracles.

7. For the meaning of σημεῖον see the comments on 2:11.

8. See below on 4:47.

9. Cf., e.g., J. Breuss, Das Kana-Wunder. Hermeneutische und pastorale Überlegungen aufgrund einer phänomenologischen Analyse von Joh. 2:1-12, 1976, pp. 69ff.

10. Cf., e.g., H. van der Loos, The Miracles of Jesus (NovT Supplements), 1965, pp. 615ff.

11. Cf. also Nicol, Sēmeia, p. 107:

It is not accidental that we doubt again and again. The interpretation is not given separately from the story so that we can be certain, but it is hinted at in the narrative. Literal meaning and deeper meaning cannot be clearly distinguished; the deed of Jesus and its meaning are not separated.… History and divine meaning are not on different levels.

12. Breuss, Kana-Wunder, p. 55; cf. also pp. 40ff. See also K. Hanhart, “The Structure of John I 35–IV 54,” in Studies on John (Festschrift for J. N. Sevenster), 1970, pp. 38ff., who also regards “the third day” as an allusion to Jesus’ resurrection and who, on the basis of the connection between Jn. 2:10 and Ac. 2:13 (translated as “they are full of new wine”), understands the whole story as an allegorical description of Pentecost.

13. With an appeal to a textual variant in vs. 41 where there is express mention of πρωΐ (“early in the morning”).

14. Cf. B. Olsson, Structure and Meaning in the Fourth Gospel, 1974, pp. 103f.

15. So, e.g., M. É. Boismard, Du Baptême à Cana, 1956, pp. 75f.: “The second creation, that of grace, corresponds to that of nature in order to demonstrate that it is truly a creation.”

16. Cf. Bultmann, Comm., p. 114, n. 3.

17. So J. Willemse, Het vierde evangelis. Een onderzoek naar zijn structuur, 1965, p. 153.

18. Ibid., pp. 154ff.

19. Cf. Strack/Billerbeck II, pp. 398ff.

20. Cf. also Brown, Comm. I, p. 106:

The application of the theory of seven days to John 1:19-2:11 is very attractive, but how can we possibly be sure that we are not reading into the Gospel something that was never even thought of by the evangelist or the redactor?… The Gospel itself counts Cana as occurring on the third day, and the day that covers 1:40-42 is only obliquely indicated. That the reference to seven days fits well with clear parallels to Genesis in the Prologue … is true, but this does no more than at most to make the theory of seven days a possible interpretation.

21. See Olsson, Structure and Meaning, pp. 26ff., 109ff. Even farther down this road, to the point of the fantastic, goes Hanhart, “Structure of John I 35–IV 54,” pp. 43ff. He deems it likely that no real city is intended and that the name must therefore have a symbolic meaning. “Perhaps Κανά is simply a combination of Καφαρναούμ and Ναζαρέτ,” a combination for which Hanhart then seeks an explanation.

22. According to a third-century Latin preface to the Gospel, the bridegroom was John the son of Zebedee. According to another tradition, John’s mother was a sister of Jesus’ mother, making John and Jesus cousins, which would explain why both Mary and Jesus were present at the wedding. But there is no trace of any of this in the text.

23. Here, too, all kinds of historicizing suggestions have been made, though they divert attention from the matter itself. For example, the supply of wine was inadequate because so many new guests arrived suddenly, and that was the situation that Mary wanted to make Jesus aware of. On the other hand, in the story of Mary’s attempt to “mediate,” scholars have seen signs of an emerging mariology and have sought to relate Jesus’ address “woman” to the woman in Revelation 12. Others have seen anti-mariological tendencies in the answer attributed to Jesus. See, e.g., Brown’s criticism of all sorts of fanciful views and his attempt to arrive at a more responsible mariological interpretation (Comm I, in loc.): “Mary is the New Eve, the symbol of the Church; the Church has no role during the ministry of Jesus but only after the hour of his resurrection and ascension.” On the meaning of “the hour” see below under vs. 4.

24. Here, too, from a mariological viewpoint interpreters have arrived at a number of explanations and refinements; see Brown, Comm. I, pp. 99, 102, who himself sees a connection between “woman” and Gn. 3:15 and Revelation 12 (pp. 108ff.). Others have inferred from the sharpness of Jesus’ reply that Mary is a symbol here of a Judaism that is keen on miracles and signs. Both are fantastic in my opinion.

25. So, e.g., Strathmann, Comm., pp. 58ff.

26. So Nicol, Sēmeia, p. 129. He regards it as “nearly certain” that the hour in 2:4 is the hour of Jesus’ departure, and he believes that 2:4 thus “implies an admittance of John that he has reinterpreted the miracles.” See also Nicol, pp. 30, 110.

27. This is totally misjudged by Bultmann, who thinks here of the miracle worker of antiquity, the θεῖος ἀνήρ, who also had to wait for his hour and for the voice that called (Comm., p. 117, n. 1).

28. And therefore not like the temptation to make arbitrary use of that miraculous power (cf. Mt. 4:7), as some interpreters believe.

29. Wherever John uses periphrastic verbs, “ἦν exhibits a certain independence” (BDF §353.1): The jars were not (always) there but had been “put” there for the occasion.

30. Because it was believed that stone does not attract impurity. Cf. Strack/Billerbeck II, p. 406.

31. See at length Olsson, Structure and Meaning, p. 59.

32. See the passages cited in Strack/Billerbeck IV, pp. 951ff., specifically those relating to Gn. 49:11, with special attention to the wine (every grape will contain at least thirty jars of wine, etc.). 2 Baruch 29:5 describes hyperbolically the abundance of wine and 29:8 the “supply of manna” that “will again come down from above.”

33. Against this eschatological interpretation E. Linnemann, “Die Hochzeit zu Kana und Dionysos,” NTS 20 (1974), p. 411, advances the objection that in Jewish eschatology the abundance of wine is never the result of a miracle done by the Messiah but is described as a marvelous “natural” growth. But this is based on an overly literal view of what the New Testament considers the fulfillment of prophecy and of Jewish future expectation. In the multiplication of the loaves in John 6 the participants also see evidence that Jesus is the prophet and the messianic king (6:14f.; cf. 7:31).

34. In the interpretation offered by Olsson, for example.

35. For the typically “Johannine” character of the miracle at Cana, see also Nicol, Sēmeia, p. 110.

36. For this point see also the predicative significance of “I” in the “I am” pronouncements, pp. 223-29.

37. ὁ οἰνοχóος τοῦ θεοῦ καὶ συμποσίαρχος.

38. ἀντὶ ὕδατος οἶνον; see further Bauer, Comm., p. 29; H. Seesemann, TDNT V, pp. 163f.

39. See, e.g., W. Bousset, Kyrios Christos: A History of the Belief in Christ from the Beginnings of Christianity to Irenaeus, 1970, pp. 102f.; Bultmann, Comm., p. 119.

40. Esp. in H. Noetzel, Christus und Dionesos, 1960; see also Haenchen, Comm. I, p. 178.

41. Noetzel, Christus und Dionesos, pp. 33ff.

42. So Linnemann, “Hochzeit,” p. 411.

43. Structure and Meaning, pp. 18-114.

44. Ibid., pp. 107ff., 114.

45. “The Place of the Old Testament in the Formation of New Testament Theology,” NTS 23 (1976), pp. 59-66, here p. 65.

46. Cf. Olsson, Structure and Meaning, pp. 67f. (“somehow representative of the creative and transforming work of Jesus”); Nicol, Sēmeia, p. 114.

47. σημεῖον.

48. τέρατα.

49. See the extensive analysis in Nicol, Sēmeia, pp. 62-66, 113-16, and passim.

50. See also C. H. Dodd, Historical Tradition in the Fourth Gospel, 1965, pp. 235f.

51. For a summary of the arguments see Brown, Comm. I, pp. 117ff.

52. The argument is also taken the opposite direction: see Brown, Comm. I, in loc.; Grosheide, Comm. I, p. 183.

53. See also Schnackenburg, Comm. I, pp. 354ff.

54. Some scholars believe that πάντας in vs. 15 must refer to the sheep and cattle and that Jesus used the whip to drive them away, not the people (“since one cannot drive animals merely with one’s hands,” Haenchen, Comm. I, p. 183). But even if the whip was intended mostly for the animals, πάντας clearly refers primarily to the people. τε is unusual in the Fourth Gospel, and some therefore consider τὰ τε πρóβατα καὶ τοὺς βóας, a difficult apposition next to πάντας, a secondary addition. But one can see τε in the light of the preceding verse and take the partial repetition with πάντας in this verse in the sense of “sheep and cattle and all.”

55. Future κατάφαγεται agrees with the LXX.

56. γεγραμμένον ἐστιν.

57. See the comments on 1:19 above.

58. “What sign do you show us that you (have the right to) do these things”; cf. Mk. 11:28.

59. As always when such “misunderstandings” occur; see also the comments on 3:3ff.; 4:15, etc.

60. The reference of course is to the “second” temple, the construction of which, according to Josephus (Antiquities 15.380), began in the eighteenth year of Herod’s reign, that is, in 20-19 b.c. “Forty-six years” would mean, therefore, that the conversation here took place around 27-28 a.d. The construction of the second temple was not completed until just before the outbreak of war in 66.

61. Cf. οὖν in vs. 22.

62. Cf. Strack/Billerbeck I, p. 747.

63. So correctly Bultmann, Comm., p. 125, n. 4.

64. Brown, Comm. I, p. 123.

65. Bultmann, Comm., p. 126, n. 2.

66. ἐγείρω.

67. With the verb ἐσκήνωσεν.

68. Cf. imperfect ἐποίει in vs. 23; also 4:45, which alludes to the miracles.

69. On this see at greater length the comments on 7:52 below.

70. Cf. Strack/Billerbeck II, p. 420. Still others think symbolism is involved here. Nicodemus is said (by contrast with Judas, 13:30!) to come out of darkness to the light (cf. vss. 19, 21); see Brown, Comm. I, p. 130. But of course this says nothing about Nicodemus’s preference for meeting Jesus by night!

71. See also M. de Jonge, Jesus: Stranger from Heaven and Son of God, 1977, p. 46.

72. Cf. Strack/Billerbeck I, p. 127; IV, pp. 313f.

73. See, e.g., J. L. Martyn, History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel, 1979², p. 116, with an appeal to G. Bornkamm.

74. See on this at greater length my “Jezus van Nazaret,” in Bijbels Handboek IV, 1987, pp. 59-125.

75. For “see” with the meaning “have personal experience of, participate in,” see, e.g., 3:36; Ac. 2:27; 1 Pt. 3:17.

76. Latin desuper or denuo; for the first meaning see, e.g., Mt. 27:51; Jn. 3:31; 19:11, 23; Ja. 1:17; for the second Gl. 4:9.

77. Cf. Strack/Billerbeck II, p. 420, which mentions as the equivalent of ἄνωθεν Aramaic milleʿêlāʾ, which is used spatially, not temporally.

78. For ἄνω-θεν see also 3:31; 8:23.

79. In vs. 9 Jesus does call into question Nicodemus’s competence as a teacher (see also vs. 7: “Do not marvel”), but only after he has explained his meaning further. Therefore, he means only that, on closer scrutiny, his first utterance (vs. 3) was not as enigmatic as it might have seemed.

80. C. H. Dodd, Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, 1963, pp. 49f., 304f.

81. Comm., p. 136.

82. Cf. Strack/Billerbeck II, p. 421.

83. So Bultmann: “He makes not a typically Rabbinic, but a specifically human reply.” Bultmann correctly rejects views like those of B. Weisz and Schlatter that attempt to impart to Nicodemus’s answer a certain theological meaning (Bultmann, Comm., p. 137).

84. In some manuscripts it is repeated in vs. 8, presumably on the analogy of vs. 5.

85. ἐξ ὕδατος καὶ πνεύματος.

86. Cf. Calvin, Comm. I, p. 65: “Nor is it unusual to employ the word and explanatorily when the latter clause is an explanation of the former.” For the entire question of ὕδατος καὶ πνεύματος, see X. Léon-Dufour, “Towards a Symbolic Reading of the Fourth Gospel,” NTS 27 (1981), pp. 449ff., who asserts that an original nonsacramental symbolic meaning in 3:5 need not exclude a later sacramental interpretation: “It is not necessary to reconstruct two successive stages of the text. But it is necessary to perceive two times of revelation, that of Jesus to Nicodemus and that of the Spirit to me, the reader of the Gospel” (p. 450).

87. μὴ θαυμάσῃς (cf. 5:28; 1 Jn. 3:13) was a characteristic turn of speech in rabbinic discussions; see Schlatter, Comm., p. 90; Bultmann, Comm., p. 142, n. 1.

88. τὴν φωνὴν αὐτοῦ ἀκούεις.

89. ὅπου θέλει πνεῖ.

90. πóθεν ἔρχεται.

91. ποῦ ὑπάγει.

92. Strictly speaking it is not the Spirit but the one born of the Spirit that is compared with the wind. The one that does the work and the work are telescoped, so to speak (cf. Mt. 13:19, 20, 22, where what happens with the seed is transferred to the person in whom the seed either does or does not have its effect).

93. Dodd, Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, pp. 304f.

94. Comm., p. 139, n. 1.

95. Comm., p. 141, see n. 2: “What is decisive in each case [in both Paul and John] is the radical way in which the nullity of human existence is understood, whether it is more or less limited to the idea of transitoriness and death, or whether it is related to the radical perversity of man’s will and of his understanding of the world and himself.”

96. Ibid., p. 132.

97. See also de Jonge, Jesus: Stranger from Heaven, p. 40, where against Bultmann’s thesis that “the coming of the Revealer is explained by the necessity of rebirth” de Jonge asserts that “the necessity of ‘birth from above’ rather follows from the ‘coming from above’ of the Revealer.”

98. For “How (can this be)?” see also 6:42; 8:33; 12:34.

99. The article before διδάσκαλος does not mean that Nicodemus is the teacher in Israel par excellence but has representative meaning (contra BDF §273.1).

100. See also the insightful characterization of ch. 3 in de Jonge’s essay on “Nicodemus and Jesus,” in his Jesus: Stranger from Heaven, pp. 29-47, esp. pp. 38ff.: John 3 “intends to give a deepening and correction of Nicodemus’s Christology in vs 2,” in which “vss 3-10 are no more than an intermezzo, though a very appropriate and necessary one.” “We relegate the ‘birth from above’ theme to a secondary place within the whole discourse in chapter 3 and put the christological discussion in the centre.”

101. So, e.g., H. Hegermann: “Seldom is it so clear as it is here that the Evangelist quite consciously formulated his own witness and that of the church out of the mouth of Jesus” (“Er kam in sein Eigentum,” in Der Ruf Jesu und die Antwort der Gemeinde [Festschrift for J. Jeremias], 1970, p. 120).

102. So E. Ruckstuhl, in Jesus und der Menschensohn (Festschrift for Anton Vögtle), 1975, pp. 314-41, here p. 319, though he does not delve any further into the problem of the “we.”

103. Ibid., p. 327.

104. Bultmann, Comm., pp. 150f., n. 2, cites Odeberg, according to whom “v. 13 is not intended as an answer to the question: ‘Who can bring knowledge from the heavenly world?’ but: ‘Who can enter the heavenly world?’ ”

105. Cf. Bultmann, Comm., p. 151, n. 2, citing BDF §344.

106. Namely as of one, as a Son of man who “came on the clouds of heaven” and “set himself before the Ancient of days.” See the comments above on 1:51.

107. The reading of certain important manuscripts is ἐν αὐτῷ. Others (e.g., ⁶⁶) have ἐπʼ αὐτῷ; still others εἰς αὐτóν. This last reading looks like assimilation to vs. 16. ἐν αὐτῳ appears to be the most original. Several interpreters take it with ἐχῇ, partly on account of the distinction from εἰς in vs. 16. Still, the emphasis probably lies on the object of faith and in this connection there need not be a difference between ἐν and εἰς.

108. In other places in this Gospel “send” is used. It is only here that the sending is described as a giving. In place of the Son of man (vss. 13f.) we now read “the Son” because of the motif of surrender: “The Son” implies a (preexistent) personal relationship, while “the Son of man” implies a salvation-historical function. For a shift from “Son of God”/“Son” to “Son of man” see 5:25-27.

109. See the comments on 1:29.

110. Surely also in close association with the “seeing” and “entering” of the kingdom of God mentioned in vss. 3 and 5. “Eternal life” and “the kingdom of God” are also used synonymously in the Synoptics (cf. Mk. 10:17; Mt. 7:14; 18:8f.; Lk. 10:25). In John (except in 3:3, 5) the reference is consistently to “eternal life” or “life” (3:36; 5:24, etc.). Bultmann distinguishes the two: “However a distinction is made, inasmuch as ζωή, when characterised as ἀιώνιος, always refers to the life as a condition of man, while ζωή by itself may also refer to the power which creates life.… Thus ζωὴ αἰώνιος is never predicated of God or the Revealer, whose ζωή is the power which creates life (1.4; 5.26; 11.25; 14.6)” (Comm., p. 152, n. 2).

111. H. Hegermann speaks of a conjunction made by the Evangelist of “two almost disparate messages,” “a message of a new creation and one of predestination,” in vss. 6-8 as well as in vss. 19-21. In this connection the latter message is said to have been made subject to the former: “The pronouncements oriented to predestination stand in the service of this concept of salvation,” namely that of an “inconceivable divine miracle of a new creation” (“Er kam in sein Eigentum,” in Der Ruf und die Antwort der Gemeinde, 1970, pp. 119-21). But if one wishes to speak of the idea of predestination, is that not precisely in the idea of the new creation as a miraculous work of God unattainable for the flesh? For this entire complex of problems see the extensive work of R. Bergmeier, Glaube als Gabe nach Johannes, 1980.

112. See also the comments on 7:50ff.

113. Taken strictly the content of the ὅτι clause falls into two parts, which of course have to be taken as a unity. The judgment did not consist in the coming of the light as such.

114. μᾶλλον refers not to a relative choice but to an absolute choice: potius, not magis.

115. πράσσων, present participle.

116. ἐλέγχειν, not φανεροῦσθαι, which appears in vs. 21. The idea is to bring to light the truth, and in vs. 19, of course, in malam partem. It can also have a forensic meaning. It doubtlessly has the more general sense here of: “prove in error, expose, find culpable.” For the whole idea, cf. Jb. 24:13-17.

117. See Schnackenburg, Comm., I, p. 407, who refers regularly to the resemblance with Qumran documents.

118. See also Schlatter, Comm., p. 101.

119. So, at length, Dodd, Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, pp. 309ff., further developed in his Historical Tradition in the Fourth Gospel, 1965, pp. 285ff.

120. See G. Dalman, Orte und Wege Jesus, 1924³, p. 250.

121. See, e.g., Brown, Comm. I, p. 151.

122. See also the treatment of this passage in Dodd, Historical Tradition, pp. 291ff.

123. See the critical discussion of the views of Wellhausen and Boismard in Brown, Comm. I, p. 154; his own view is that “this scene has been transposed from the beginning of the Gospel to its present site and adapted (in vss. 26 and 28) to make it fit” (p. 155).

124. ἐκ τῶν μαθητῶν.

125. “Certain” (τινος) is not present in the text even though with singular “Jew” one would expect it. Some important manuscripts have the plural (with no article!), which has to be considered a change from the (strikingly indefinite) singular (rather than the reverse). Some interpreters, assuming textual corruption, have proposed that the original reading was “Jesus.” But the text as we have it is not so incomprehensible that one has to resort to such a drastic correction; cf. also the comments on vs. 26. See also Dodd, Historical Tradition, p. 280, n. 2, though he opts for the plural.

126. On this pericope see at length Dodd, Historical Tradition, pp. 279ff., esp. p. 281.

127. See, e.g., Bultmann, Comm., p. 172; see also his History of the Synoptic Tradition, 1963, p. 165. Cf. the comments on 1:20 above and the work by W. Wink cited there.

128. It is better not to take δεδομένον ἐκ as the opposite of λαμβάνειν but as meaning “allowed [to do something].” Thus one avoids the notion rejected above, which is undoubtedly not intended here; see also Schnackenburg, Comm. I, p. 415.

129. Here and elsewhere “from heaven” means “from (the side of) God” (Mk. 11:34; Lk. 15:18), also indicated by “from above” (cf. 19:11), in keeping with Jewish usage (to avoid using the name of God).

130. One could also take the receiver (the “him” of vs. 27) to be the believer; cf. “no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father” (6:65). But the reference here is more directly to Jesus as receiver than to those who follow him (cf. 6:37, 44).

131. The reference of the metaphor is restricted to the role of the bridegroom and his friend (cf. Mk. 2:18f. par.). That the church is the bride of Christ (cf. Rv. 7:7; 21:2; cf. also Ho. 1:2; Jr. 2:2; Is. 41:10) does not play a distinct role in this text, and it is questionable whether it is assumed in the metaphor. It would seem that one has to keep the two images separate and not unite them into one (allegorical) complex.

132. χαρᾷ χαίρει is a Hebraism: Adding the cognate noun to the verb is meant as an intensive (“greatly”).

133. ὁ ἑστηκὼς καὶ ἀκούων αὐτοῦ.… “His standing there is not without meaning. He stands and waits in front of the bridal chamber for the jubilant cry of the bridegroom” (Schlatter, Comm., p. 108).

134. See the comments on 1:29, 34 above.

135. See also BAGD, s.v., which points out that in 3:19, 21 there are five uses of φῶς and that this meaning, at least of ἐλαττοῦσθαι, occurs elsewhere as well.

136. See Barrett, Comm., p. 224.

137. Dodd, Interpretation, p. 309.

138. See, e.g., Brown, Comm. I, pp. 147ff.

139. For this complex of problems, see also Schnackenburg, Comm. I, pp. 380ff., who does not regard vss. 31-36 as an epilogue to the whole chapter, however, but as “a connected and complete discourse” that should precede vss. 13-21. For the composition of ch. 3 see also D. M. Smith, The Composition and Order of the Fourth Gospel, 1965, pp. 125-27.

140. “The expression εἶναι ἐκ is not tautological, but brings out the two meanings of ἐκ, origin and type, with the origin determining the type (cf. v. 6)” (Schnackenburg, Comm. I, p. 382).

141. One can also relate “he who comes from heaven” (vs. 31b) directly to vs. 32, as some important manuscripts do by omitting “is above all” and in some cases τοῦτο in vs. 32 as well. This reading seems attractive because then the repetition “is above all” is avoided and one arrives immediately at “the matter” itself: The one who comes from heaven bears witness to what he has seen and heard. But Johannine style is sometimes circuitous. One can hardly make a choice on the basis of the importance of the different manuscripts. However, the thought pattern is the same in both cases.

142. Other scholars believe that it is Jesus here who gives the Spirit (on the basis, e.g., of 6:63; cf., e.g., I. de la Potterie, “l’Esprit saint dans l’Évangile de Jean,” NTS 28 [1972], pp. 448f.). But in this connection (with γάρ as introducing explanation of the preceding and vs. 35 as parallel) the above view that God is the subject (a view shared by Barrett and Bultmann) seems preferable. Many ancient textual witnesses also reflect this preference.

143. For “see” see the comments on vs. 3.

144. ἀπειθέω, disobey, appears here alone in the Fourth Gospel, though it is common elsewhere in the New Testament (e.g., Ro. 11:30f.). The noun ἀπείθεια has the same sense in, e.g., Ro. 11:30; Col. 3:6.

145. Many exegetes believe that 2:2 is the work of a later editor. Brown regards it as “almost indisputable evidence of the presence of several hands in the composition in John.” The unusual expression meaning “however” in vs. 2 (καίτοιγε) is also said to point to this (Brown, Comm. I, p. 164). Dodd, too, believed that the correction could not be from the Evangelist himself and that the parenthesis in vs. 2 “has a better claim to be regarded as an ‘editorial note’ by a redactor than anything else in the gospel except the colophon XXI, 24, 25” (Interpretation, p. 311, n. 1; cf. idem, Historical Tradition, p. 285). But one can regard the parenthesis as a clarification by the Evangelist himself if one accepts that he omitted it in 3:22ff. because there the baptizing by (or, as now appears, under auspices of) Jesus was the crucial point that John’s disciples took to their master. See also the comments on 3:22.

146. See also my Het Woord is vlees geworden, 1979, pp. 10ff.

147. On this request of Jesus to a Samaritan woman see at length E. Leidig, Jesu Gespräch mit der Samaritanerin, 1981², pp. 84ff. In this connection Leidig discusses at length the Jewish laws of purification, about which the Evangelist, however, does not breathe a word.

148. The translation of συνχρᾶσθαι is not certain. Some translate it more literally by “use together” (cf. NRSV “share things in common”). If this were correct, one would have to think in this case of the water jar mentioned in vs. 28 and the reference would be to Jewish laws of purification (see, e.g., Brown, Comm. I, p. 170; Olsson, Structure and Meaning, pp. 154ff., following D. Daube, “Jesus and the Samaritan Woman: The meaning of συγχράομαι,” JBL 69 (1950), pp. 137ff. The problem is that vs. 9b does not mention any common utensil.

149. On this stereotypical reaction as a rhetorical form, see the comments above on 3:3.

150. The deepest well in Palestine according to R. D. Potter, “Topography and Archaeology in the Fourth Gospel,” Studia Evangelica I, 1959, pp. 329-37, here p. 331. See also Dalman, Orte und Wege, p. 176.

151. The question begins with μή and so is a rhetorical question expecting a negative answer.

152. The words “to eternal life” go with “welling up,” not with “will become,” and thus indicate the imperishability of the water that Jesus will give (cf. 6:27). The future tense (twice) is not explained but must presumably be understood in keeping with the parallel pronouncement in 7:38.

153. See on 3:6-8 above.

154. See, e.g., Dodd, Interpretation, p. 314.

155. Cf. Bultmann, Comm., pp. 181ff., and the history-of-religions material given there.

156. Against this view, cf. also Leidig, Jesu Gespräch mit der Samaritanerin, pp. ixff., with a strong appeal to “salvation-historical exegesis” (pp. xi-xvii, and in connection with vs. 11, pp. 45ff.).

157. “To confuse the inauthentic with the authentic” (Comm., pp. 186, 223ff.).

158. Bultmann, Comm., p. 86.

159. See, e.g., Brown, Comm. I, pp. 178ff. Also Leidig, Jesu Gespräch mit der Samaritanerin, pp. 46ff., who makes much of the distinction between the water from Jacob’s well, for which one needed an ἄντλημα, and the water that Jesus gives and of which the wellspring that (in accordance with rabbinic tradition) went with Israel in the wilderness is said to have been the historical prefiguration. In my opinion this explanation is far-fetched.

160. δι-έρχομαι.

161. Cf. Bultmann, Comm., pp. 175f., 187.

162. Cf. also Leidig, Jesu Gespräch mit der Samaritanerin, p. 8.

163. Cf. the remarkable interpretation of C. M. Carmichael, “Marriage and the Samaritan Woman,” NTS 26 (1980), pp. 332-46, according to whom the whole discussion about water is determined by sexual imagery. Jesus’ offer of water to the woman “has a deliberately intended conjugal association.” Carmichael refers to 4:15 as well as to Jacob’s encounter with Rachel at the well (Gn. 29:7). Jesus woos the woman in the way Hosea was instructed to take a prostitute as wife to give expression to the relationship between God and Israel. The shift in the dialogue in vs. 16 “would be inexplicable if it were not for the underlying marital theme.” Hence when the woman asks Jesus for “water” it has to be made clear first that she has no husband and that only Jesus can give her water that will never let her be thirsty again. Hence: “Go, call your husband.” In the woman Jesus weds Samaria to the true worship of God, and so forth. In my opinion there is not a single point of contact for this interpretation in the text itself.

164. Bultmann, Comm., p. 188 n. 3.

165. For this pastoral-psychological approach to Jesus and the woman’s attempt to divert the conversation see at length F. Pfau, Normen für die Seelsorge aus Joh. 4,1-42, 1889, pp. 161-87. For the above analysis, cf. esp. Brown, Comm. I, p. 177, who closely follows F. Roustang, “Les moments de l’acte de foi et ses conditions de possibilité. Essay d’interpretation du dialogue avec la Samaritaine,” Recherches de science religieuse 46 (1958), pp. 344-78. Brown speaks of “the drama of a soul struggling to rise from the things of this world to belief in Jesus” (p. 178).

166. Cf. Strack/Billerbeck II, p. 437.

167. On these “four cognitive stages of the Samaritan woman,” see at length Leidig, Jesu Gespräch mit der Samaritanerin, pp. 154f.

168. Cf., e.g., Bultmann, who thinks that “prophet” here represents the Hellenistic θεῖος ἄνθρωπος (Comm., pp. 187f.; see also pp. 101f. and the literature cited there).

169. See also Nicol, Sēmeia, p. 61; Leidig, Jesu Gespräch mit der Samaritanerin, pp. 11f., 271, n. 41. The idea that she is referring to the prophet like Moses (Dt. 18:15-22; so Leidig, p. 13) seems to anticipate the following “phase” (vs. 25).

170. And continues now. See also J. Jeremias, Die Passahfeier der Samaritaner, 1932.

171. The mountain was in full view from the well (see Potter, “Topography and Archeology in the Fourth Gospel,” p. 331).

172. Bultmann: “It is introduced by the singular πίστευέ μοι, which clearly stands in place of ἀμὴν ἀμ. λέγω σοι (the latter occurs nowhere in ch. 4)” (Comm., p. 189).

173. In this regard one finds strongly categorical pronouncements, especially in Bultmann, Comm., pp. 189f. Cf. on 1:11: “It is impossible in the Prologue … to take τὰ ἴδια (or οἱ ἴδιοι) to mean Israel or the Jewish people” (p. 56, n. 1).

174. See the comments on 1:19 above.

175. For the polemics concerning the genuineness of vs. 22 see at length Leidig, Jesu Gespräch mit der Samaritanerin, which is devoted to a large extent to defense of the verse (p. xvii: “We have made it our task to show how John’s statement in 4:22 can be understood in relation to his positive utterances about the Jews”; see esp.

176. See also E. Schweizer, TDNT VI, p. 439: “πνεῦμα, then, does not mean man’s soul or understanding, that which is most like God in him, his immaterial or purely inward part.”

177. Cf. also ibid., p. 439: “Hence ἐν πνεύματι corresponds materially to the Pauline ἐν Χριστῷ. God’s sovereign act of revelation in Jesus has marked out the sphere in which there is true worship. Hence any cultus, however spiritual, is judged as not in the πνεῦμα if it is not based on this divine act.”

178. Without an article but not meant indefinitely.

179. On the Evangelist’s parenthetical addition (“he who is called Christ”), see the comments on 1:41. Other scholars think that in the tradition that John followed this addition was attributed to the woman. She is supposed to have said: “Taheb, the one that you Jews call Messiah” (see Bultmann, Comm., p. 192, n. 2). But for one to understand the text as handed down it is not necessary to resort to this (ingenious) reconstruction.

180. “The conversation in John 4:19-25 fits the Samaritan concept of the Taheb as a teacher of the Law … even though the more familiar Jewish designation of Messiah is placed on the woman’s lips” (Brown, Comm. I, p. 172). See also, W. A. Meeks, The Prophet-King: Moses Traditions and Johannine Christology, 1967, p. 318, who speaks of a “levelling of different terminologies.”

181. ἐλάλει, imperfect.

182. Cf., e.g., Strack/Billerbeck II, pp. 155f.

183. The question was undoubtedly addressed to Jesus, not to the woman.

184. “The symbol of her old life and religion.” So, e.g., Olsson, Structure and Meaning, pp. 155f.

185. “The μήτι does not demand absolutely a negative answer, but can express a cautious opinion” (Schnackenburg, Comm. I, p. 444).

186. See, e.g., Olsson, Structure and Meaning, pp. 218ff.; W. Thüsing, Die Erhöhung und Verherrlichung Jesu im Johannesevangelium, 1970², pp. 56ff.; Schnackenburg, Comm. I, pp. 444ff.

187. Although Jesus did not have the schooling that the scribes had (cf. 7:15), he did act publicly as a teacher (e.g., in the synagogue, 6:59), he called disciples to follow him (1:43), and he was respectfully called “rabbi” by both his disciples and others (1:38, 49; 9:2; 13:13; 3:2, 26).

188. For this reaction as a rhetorical form, see the comments on 3:4 above.

189. ἐμóν, “my,” the emphatic form.

190. Some wish to distinguish between “will” and “work” by saying that the first relates more to the present and the second more specifically to the completion of Jesus’ mission in the future in his death and resurrection. This is partly based on the future tense of τελειώσω (cf. Olsson, Structure and Meaning, pp. 224ff.). But in my opinion both refer to the present as well as to that which is still to come; hence: “accomplish.”

191. For ἔργον (in connection with σημεῖον and δóξα) see the lengthy exposition in Nicol, Sēmeia, pp. 116ff.

192. Scholars have also often believed that Jesus is speaking here of the season that at that moment still separated them from the time of harvest (so that the matter related here must have taken place around December), a view that has played an important role in the “chronology” of Jesus. But for that the introduction (“Do you not say …”) would not quite fit. It seems rather artificial to thus attach the coming of the Samaritans to a time four months before the harvest season.

193. The latest one could sow was in December, and the harvest came in April.

194. “Rome was not built in a day.”

195. Cf. Potter, Topography and Archeology, in loc.

196. In other places, too, “harvest” as an image of the consummation plays a large role in Jesus’ teaching, specifically in connection with the work his disciples had to do (e.g., Mt. 9:37) and as a reference to the judgment, in which the good and the evil will be brought together (Mt. 13:30); so also “the gathering for eternal life.”

197. ἤδη should be read as the first word of vs. 36, not as the last word of the preceding sentence (so some manuscripts).

198. Cf. Bultmann, Comm., p. 197.

199. Cf. Brown, Comm. I, p. 182; Olsson, Structure and Meaning, pp. 227ff., 232.

200. So, e.g., Olsson in his lengthy exposition of Jn. 4:31-38 in Structure and Meaning, pp. 218-41, esp. pp. 227f., 232; see also Schnackenburg, Comm. I, pp. 451, 453ff.

201. Schnackenburg, who holds this view, has to acknowledge (Comm. I, p. 444): “The transition from the time of Jesus’ labor to that of the Apostles is made, not very smoothly, by the rather awkward parenthesis of vs. 37.”

202. So Thüsing, Erhöhung und Verherrlichung, pp. 54ff.

203. Bultmann, Comm., p. 200.

204. See, e.g., Brown, Comm. I, p. 184. Schnackenburg, on the other hand, who wants to interpret ἀπέστειλα from the historical situation by Jacob’s well, says of Jesus that he is “fully conscious of his future exaltation and of the salvation which he will effect through his disciples” (Comm. I, p. 453). ἀπέστειλα (aorist) then has to be interpreted “in terms of prophetic prevision” (p. 452). But this grammatically difficult interpretation is superfluous if one regards the element of mission as included from the very beginning in the calling of the disciples as Jesus’ special followers (cf. 1:43, 51). According to the Gospel they already baptized during Jesus’ time on earth (3:22; 4:2)!

205. There is therefore no reason to take λαλιά in vs. 42, though the word could also be used in a denigrating sense (“chatter,” “prattle”), as inferior in importance to the “word” (here διὰ τòν λóγον) of Jesus.

206. It must be granted that salvation for Israel was also called σωτηρία (cf. vs. 22; Lk. 1:47, etc.).

207. Cf. Origen, In Joh. 13.54 (quoted by Brown, Comm. I, p. 187).

208. See the extensive treatment of this issue by J. Willemse, “La Patrie de Jésus selon Saint Jean IV, 44,” NTS 11 (1965), pp. 349ff. Among Willemse’s conclusions is that πατρίς represented Judea/Jerusalem specifically because Jerusalem was the city where the house of Jesus’ Father was located and could therefore be called “his Father’s city” (pp. 359ff.). See also M. Rissi, “Der Aufbau des vierten Evangeliums,” NTS 29 (1983), p. 48. Other advocates of this view (Jerusalem/Judea = πατρίς) include Barrett, Comm., p. 246; Dodd, Interpretation, p. 352; de Jonge, Jesus, Stranger from Heaven, p. 64 (“clearly Judea for the Fourth Gospel”).

209. See, e.g., Bultmann, Comm., p. 204.

210. For this view, cf. also Strathmann, Comm., p. 93.

211. For lengthy considerations of this question see Schnackenburg, Comm. I, pp. 471ff.; Nicol, Sēmeia, pp. 41ff. Schnackenburg, p. 474: “Similarities and divergencies [in John 4 as compared to Matthew 8 and Luke 7] are equally apparent and the verdict as to whether one or more events are involved seems to be left to the judgment of the individual commentator.” Schnackenburg is inclined to the view that one event is referred to (p. 475). Nicol speaks of “possible parallels” (p. 55; cf. pp. 41f.), but also has difficulties with the theological differences (pp. 55ff.).

212. οἱ βασιλικοί is sometimes used of soldiers in the king’s service (see BAGD s.v.), but here the singular probably refers to a civilian official.

213. “Very probably representative of Galilee” (de Jonge, Jesus, Stranger from Heaven, p. 63.

214. This is argued at great length by E. Schweizer in “Die Heilung des Königlichen: Joh. 4.46-54,” in Neotestamentica, 1963, pp. 409ff. Cf. p. 207 of the same book, where, in relation to Jn. 4:46f., Schweizer writes: “The changing situation of the hearers changed the message of this story,” which he regards as a pointer also for modern interpretation. But is it really conceivable that an Evangelist dealt with historical tradition as though it were a pile of Lego blocks from which one could make new figures at will by rearranging the pieces and adding new pieces?

215. ἠρώτα, imperfect to indicate the persistence of the request.

216. καταβῇ.

217. See, e.g., Nicol, Sēmeia, pp. 28ff.

218. Cf. ibid., p. 100; see also Schweizer, Neotestamentica, p. 413: “Hence the false component here does not consist in that he will recognize Jesus only on the basis of a sign (cf. Mark 8, 11, etc.), but in that he is not at all interested in Jesus himself, only in something to be obtained through him” (cf. 4:15; 6:34). Vs. 48 is strongly reminiscent of Lk. 4:23 (together with 4:24!), where at his first public appearance in Galilee (Nazareth) Jesus also sharply rejects, as being oriented solely to miracles, the acclaim of his countrymen. Hence vs. 48 does not just represent a Johannine feature but is deeply rooted in the tradition.

219. See de Jonge, Jesus, Stranger from Heaven, p. 123.

220. Here παιδίον μου in place of υἱóς, which appears in vs. 47.

221. See also C. H. Giblin, “Suggestion, Negative Response, and Positive Action in St. John’s Portrayal of Jesus,” NTS 26 (1980), p. 204: “V. 49 not only reiterates the request to ‘come down,’ but more obviously presents that ‘coming down’ as the supposedly indispensable condition for saving the boy’s life (aor. imv. immediately followed by πρίν w. inf.).”

222. These words recall 1 Kg. 17:23: “Live” in this connection is a typically Jewish word for “become well,” “remain alive” (cf. Nu. 21:8; 2 Kg. 1:2; 8:8) and need have no deeper meaning. Cf. Nicol, Sēmeia, p. 107: “John narrates the healing of the boy without any conscious allusion to deeper meaning, but he would not have objected to anyone (such as Dodd, p. 324) who saw in the thrice repeated ‘your boy lives’ (4:50, 51, 53) a reference to the spiritual ζῳοποιεῖν of Jesus discussed in the next chapter.…”

223. According to Dalman, Orte und Wege Jesu, the shortest road between Capernaum and Cana was twenty-six kilometers long (“a truly wearisome road”): “If the father left at sunrise he could be at his destination by noon and hear Jesus’ comforting word at ‘the seventh hour’ (Jn. 4:52); but on this day he could at most travel half the distance to Mammela, so that on the following day the servants, who were rushing toward him, could meet him in the plain of Gennesareth” (pp. 113f.).

224. Usually thought of as a “sēmeia source” (see the comments on 2:1-11 above). On this source there exists an extensive body of literature; see, e.g., J. L. Martyn, History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel, 1979², pp. 164-68.

225. See, e.g., Nicol, Sēmeia, who also infers the existence of a sēmeia source.

226. Brown speaks of “the backbone of the theory of a collection of signs” (Comm. I, p. 195). Brown himself does not hold to this theory but does believe that the two “closely related” Cana miracles were borrowed from a single source and separated to form the beginning and the end of the second main division of the Gospel (chs. 2-11), which Brown entitles “From Cana to Cana.”

227. See the comments above on vs. 48.

228. As Bultmann also recognizes (Comm., p. 209, n. 2). But he thinks this is impossible “because in that case the first miracle would have had to be recorded.” However, though the entire sentence is also applicable to the first miracle (cf. 1:43!), the Evangelist’s focus is clearly not the time but the place of the miracle.

229. Though by itself not uncommon (cf. 21:16; see also BDF §484).

230. So Giblin, “Suggestion, Negative Response, and Positive Action,” p. 198, n. 7:

The evangelist is not numbering signs consecutively (“first,” “second,” etc.). He begins with an inaugural sign in Cana of Galilee (“This beginning …,” ταύτην … ἀρχήν …, 2:11), mentions other signs (2,23; 3,2), and then returns to “this second” sign (τοῦτο … δεύτερον) on his return to Galilee—omitting the definite article after τοῦτο and imposing πάλιν between τοῦτο and δεύτερον, etc.… In 4:54 as in 4:46 πάλιν helps correlate this Galilean sign with that Galilean sign that was already mentioned.

231. E.g., F. J. Moloney, “From Cana to Cana (John 2:1–4:54),” in Studia Biblica (Sixth International Congress on Biblical Studies, Oxford 1978), 1980, p. 190; Brown, Comm. I, pp. 194ff.

232. Cf. Brown, Comm., ad loc.: “Someone comes with a request; indirectly Jesus seems to refuse the request; the questioner persists; Jesus grants the request; this leads another group of people (the disciples; the household) to believe in him.”

233. The same structural pattern occurs elsewhere also; see Giblin, “Suggestion, Negative Response, and Positive Action,” p. 200.

234. So also Brown, Comm. I, p. 198.

235. Most interpreters believe it belongs to what precedes. Others (e.g., Dodd, Interpretation, pp. 318f.; A. Feuillet, “La signification théologique du second miracle de Cana [Jn IV, 46-54],” in Études Johanniques, 1962, pp. 34-36) view it as a preparation for ch. 5. One does not really have to choose, though it may be most natural to think of it as primarily the conclusion of chs. 2–4 (see also Brown, Comm. I, p. 198).

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