Saturday
Saturday
The Encounter with the Samaritan Woman
[Jesus said,] “Whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst…. [It] will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
John 4:14
John began his Gospel with an affirmation that “the Word was God” (1:1) but went on to affirm that “the Word became flesh” (v. 14). Now he illustrates from Jesus’s encounter with the Samaritan woman how vulnerable that humanity was. It was about twelve noon when Jesus and his disciples reached Jacob’s well, and the sun was at its hottest. Jesus was tired after his morning’s walk, so he sat by the well to rest. He was hungry and so sent the disciples to the neighboring village to buy food. He was also hot and thirsty, so he asked the Samaritan woman for a drink. Thus Jesus was no superman immune to the frailties of ordinary mortals. He was an authentic human being.
The other characteristic of Jesus that this story highlights is his attitude to tradition. He was conservative in relation to Scripture, believing it to be the Word of God, but radical in relation to tradition, knowing it to consist of only human words. A radical is someone who is critical of all traditions and conventions, refusing to accept them merely because they have been handed down from the past.
Now the Samaritan woman had a threefold conventional disability. Firstly, she was a woman, and it was not done for a man to talk to a woman in public. But Jesus did what wasn’t done. Secondly, she was a Samaritan, and Jews did not associate with Samaritans. Thirdly, she was a sinner, having had five husbands and now cohabiting with a man to whom she was not married. But respectable people like rabbis did not mix with sinners like her. Thus three times over Jesus did what wasn’t done. He deliberately breached the social conventions of the day. He was entirely free of gender discrimination, ethnic prejudice, and moral priggishness. He loved and respected everybody and shrank from nobody.
Thus Jesus was both conservative (in relation to Scripture) and radical (in relation to culture) at the same time. It seems to me that we need a new generation of “RCs,” standing now not for Roman Catholics but for radical conservatives.
For further reading: John 4:7–18