John 4:7-12

Posted by DJL on Jul 9, 2015 in Daily Bread | 1 comment

A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?”

Note the surprise of the woman when Jesus asks her for a drink. Part of that surprise is simply because it wasn’t customary for a man to ask a woman he did not know for a drink. But even more of the surprise – and more to the point of the story – stems from the fact that it was definitely uncommon for Jews and Samaritans to interact with each other. John, in fact, goes out of his way to point that out in case his readers weren’t aware of the generations of conflict between these two related groups.

From this somewhat rocky beginning, John leads us into a familiar pattern that we saw play out in Jesus’ interaction with Nicodemus. First, Jesus ignores the major thrust of the question and instead takes it as a jumping off point to something more important. With Nicodemus, that was the need to be born anew, while this time it’s the matter of the “living water” Jesus has to offer.

Second, the other character in the story, in this case the Samaritan woman, misunderstands Jesus. Or actually, it’s not so much that she misunderstands him but, as with Nicodemus, takes him too literally. So when Jesus tells Nicodemus he must be born anew, he assumes Jesus means literally coming out his mother’s womb again. Here, the woman assumes Jesus is talking about actual water that one draws from the well. In both cases, Jesus is speaking metaphorically, offering spiritual truths via concrete symbols and images.

Apart from how this functions in John’s Gospel – which we’ll get to soon enough – I think this also invites us to think about how we understand the relationship between Scripture and truth. Many people assume that truth and facts are one and the same thing. That is, if something is truthful, it must be factually accurate. Yet that misses the point of much of literature completely. Is Shakespeare’s King Lear factual? No. But does it convey truth? Of course.

Living in a modern world, we tend to divide all literature into one of two categories: fiction and non-fiction. But in the ancient world, there was not the same sharp division. Authors like John knew that some truth could not be contained by mere history but only shared via a larger story, a story employing metaphor and symbolism and allegory and more.

And Jesus, it would seem, agrees. And so he teaches in parables and, especially in John’s Gospel, offers powerful metaphors that stretch beyond concrete, literal meaning to tease us into a deeper understanding of the truth of the abundant life and living water God offers. May we follow Jesus’ lead to discover that kind of truth.

Prayer: Dear God, let us listen for the truth of the Scripture that is wrapped in story, metaphor, and symbol that we may know and share the good news of your love for the whole world. In Jesus’ name, Amen.