Bible Commentaries
John 4

Verses 1-54

IV 1-54 Through Samaria to Galilee —It is only at the beginning of this section that Jn first joins the Synoptists, Matthew 4:12; Mark 1:4; Luke 4:14, who begin the public life of Christ in Galilee. The short mission of two days in Samaria, 4:43, is an episode registered only by Jn. Lke Christ’s brief stay in the territory of Tyre and Sidon at a later date, Matthew 15:21 ff.; Mark 7:24 ff., it was intended to show that salvation was not for ’the lost sheep of the House of Israel’ only.

1-4 Motive of Journey —The Baptist was already in prison, Matthew 4:12; Mark 1:14.

1. ’When the Lord therefore understood . . .’ (B, C, A, L against S, D Vg). The Master’s ordinary human knowledge of providential events usually determined his actions. At this point he knew that the Pharisees (the chief focus of hostility) were aware of the growing movement towards him and his baptism.

2. The remark that he did not himself baptize may be perhaps a further indication that no sacrament was yet administered.

3. Judaca was henceforth dangerous, and so the Messianic light was to rise in Galilee, Isaiah 9:1 f. 4. Some ’necessity’ which Jn does not explain compelled Jesus to go through Samaria. If he was in the Jordan valley (and so it seems) the direct way would have been due north, but the Lord seems to have followed a western road, possibly the less frequented, difficult and fatiguing Wady path that passed by modern Dejân. We may conjecture that the’ ’necessity’ of journeying through Samaria was in the providential decree, for later ’ Jerusalem, Judaea, Samaria and to the ends of the earth’ was to be the Apostolic programme.

5-30 Meeting with the Samaritan Woman —The narrative is a little sketch of divine pedagogy. It not only shows Jesus thirsting and seeking a soul but reveals his method.

5. The place named Sichar (Sychar) was scarcely the ancient Sichem, replaced since Seleucid days by the city which Titus later rebuilt as Flavia Neapolis (Nablur, nearly a mile WNW. of Sichem). Though excavations of 1914 and 1926-8 have revealed that Sichem was still inhabited in the reign of Tiberius, nevertheless the name Sychar, the Onomasticon, the Madaba Map and many Itineraries rather favour the modern village of El ’Askar. This place, at the foot of Ebal to the south-east, is threequarters of a mile to the north of Jacob’s Well, which is close to the foot of Garizim. Joseph’s tomb, Joshua 24:32, in Joseph’s field, Genesis 48:22, is popularly located about half-way.

6. The ’fountain’ of Jacob was really a well supplied from a deep spring. It will be noted that Jesus and the Evangelist keep to the notion of spring (pege), while the Samaritan woman calls it a well (phrear). Tired from the journey—quaerens me sedisti lassus—Jesus sat beside or on the margin of the well. There are two significant details: Jesus sat thus—just as he was in his fatigue (Chrys.) just as a tired man sits—and ’it was the sixth hour’, that is, noon, ’the hour of thirst’ (Nonnus).

7. A woman of Samaria, not the city founded by Omri, but of the land of Samaria, came with her pitcher and rope to procure water. If she came from the township of Sychar, the distance was fairly considerable, and the hour was not the ordinary time (either morning or evening) for drawing water. And as Sychar (’Askar) has a copious spring of its own, the woman most probably came from the fields, and we may be sure that a special Providence arranged the details of that day. There is no reason to believe that the woman was known in Samaria by the symbolic name Photina (Lightsome like Latin Lucina) given to her in the Greek Menaea (Feb. 26) and the Roman Martyrology (March 20). Without any preliminary address, Jesus asked for a drink. St Augustine notes his double thirst, physical and spiritual, for he really thirsted for the faith of a human soul.

8. They were alone, for the disciples—a half-dozen perhaps—had gone in a body to buy food from Samaritans who could prove hostile.

9. The woman recognizing a Jew by his speech or by his dress, Numbers 15:37 f., called attention to the national hatred between Jews and Samaritans. The descendants of Sargon’s and Esarhaddon’s colonists from Cutha and other eastern cities were regarded as mixed pagans and schismatics. They had been rejected from partnership in the temple of Zorobabel in the 6th cent. marked as defiant schismatics when the apostate Jewish priest, Manasses, erected a temple on Garizim about 400 b.c., ranked with the hated Edomites and Philistines by Ben Sira, Ecclus 50:28; and their reciprocal animosities had survived the destruction of the Samaritan temple by John Hyrcanus in 129, b.c. Josephus ( Ant. 8, 11 and 20, 6) joins the Gospels, Luke 9:53; John 8:48, in showing that in our Lord’s time friendly relations were not to be expected between Jews and Samaritans. 10. From the thought of national hatreds, however, and from regarding him simply as a Jew, Jesus raises the mind of the woman to God’s love and to the gift from heaven which his own presence is to her. He has asked for a drink, but he can give her ’living water’—the symbol being that of a beverage like bubbling water from a spring (not dormant water from a cistern) figuring by its freshness a living and life-giving energy.

11 f. The woman now shows the impression made on her fundamentally good heart, for she addresses Jesus as Kyrie (Sir), but shifts the theme to the difficulty of a man with no hauling apparatus getting water from a well 100 ft deep, (this being a fair average from the recorded soundings), and also to the unlikely supposition that the stranger is greater than the Patriarch Jacob. She thought: either he means he can get water from this well—but how could he without a bucket, 11, or else he means he can get it from some other well or spring better than this; in which case he evidently thinks himself superior to Jacob, who made this well. No doubt, she suspects that he might be, after all.

13 f. Jesus turns the comparison of himself and Jacob to a comparison of the two waters. The water of Jacob’s well relieves thirst only for a time, the water that Jesus gives is itself a perpetual spring, efficacious for life everlasting. The theological name for it is ’sanctifying grace’. Jesus certainly did not set the physical law of water seeking its own level before the Samaritan woman, but this illustration proposed by Menochius is a good one.

15. The woman is deeply impressed. Her answer should not be regarded as sarcastic, but as expressing the naïveté of imperfect understanding. She wants the water, for she now vaguely believes that Jesus is a worker of wonders.

16 f. There is an obstacle, and Jesus reveals it in the moral disorder of this woman’s life. ’Call your husband’ would have seemed a very natural remark, for a long public colloquy with a woman was not according to custom. The woman’s denial that she had a husband was evasive, equivocal, and perhaps a lie, and it concealed ugly facts which Jesus with merciless mercy unmasked, asserting that her words were literally true.

18. The woman’s record of five husbands in the past followed by the state of unlawful concubinage in the present would imply that she had contracted five lawful marriages (beginning probably from her fifteenth year), though we cannot tell for certain. It is possible that she may have been divorced by more than one husband. In any case, she is at present an adulteress.

19 f. In acknowledging Jesus to be a prophet she implicitly admits it, and is already sympathetically meeting the light of truth. She raises the question of the true religion in terms of the rival claims of Garizim and Jerusalem.

21-24. Jesus’ answer, introduced by a solemn. ’Believe me’ and a respectful title of address ’Woman’, says that the time of particularist cults and local sanctuaries is nearing its end. For the first time in the Gospel record Jesus calls God ’Father’, to be adored as such even by the Samaritans. These, heretofore accepting as inspired only the Pentateuch which they often misinterpreted as well, have adored ’what (they) know not’ (i.e. know very imperfectly); but the Jews, being the people destined to give the world Messianic salvation have been progressively enlightened by Prophets and Psalmists and adore what they know. Worship in spirit and in truth is interior worship (not excluding bodily acts and ceremonies) carried out in the light of a full revelation. The hour of that spiritual, Catholic, perfect worship has come, for the Revealer is present. Such worship ’in spirit and truth’ is the only worship proportioned to the pure spirituality of God.

25. The woman remarks that clarification on these points must come from the Messias, known by the Samaritans from the Pentateuch and called Tabeh (’the Returned’ or ’the Converter’).

26. Thereupon Jesus pronounces the first great ’I am’ of Jn. The Christ is sitting beside Jacob’s Well and is revealing himself to a Samaritan woman. The One vaguely apprehended as a miracle-worker, 15, acknowledged as a Prophet, 19, is really the promised Messias. Such a revelation could be made in Samaria where Messianism was not contaminated with nationalistic and political aspirations.

27-30. Jewish custom was strict in regard to a man conversing with a woman in public. 27. Hence the surprise of the disciples, who concluded that some necessity had occasioned the conversation, but out of respect for their Master they asked no question. Meanwhile the woman (in a state of excitement, for she leaves the pitcher behind) has gone to the city.

29. Forthwith she becomes an apostle. Either Jesus had told her other things from her past life, or the expression ’all I ever did’ is very natural feminine hyperbole. She does not doubt that Jesus is the Messias, but she invites the inhabitants of Sychar to test it for themselves. Her persuasive tone easily moves a people naturally curious and not indisposed to spend an hour on something new.

31-42 Results—31-34. The disciples expected Jesus to eat. He had been hungry as well as thirsty but had undergone the well-known psychological experience of hunger vanishing before a deeper desire, that of converting a soul. This is the satisfying food that his disciples did not know. They thought that he had received something to eat. He explained that the doing of his Father’s will and the accomplishment of his Father’s work was the supreme satisfaction of all his desires—it was ’his food’.

35-38. The Father’s work, which is Christ’s work, is to be also the work of the disciples. It results in the gathering of a spiritual harvest. A remark recently made by the disciples, perhaps at the very moment that they came in view of the Plain of Machneh and the fertile valley between Ebal and Garizim, is taken by Jesus as his introductory sentence; moreover, a sufficient sprinkling of white in the garments of the approaching Samaritans would justify the verb of ocular vision.

35. ’Do not you say’, etc. : this remark cited from the mouth of the disciples marks a date— January a.d. 29, four months from the wheat harvest. The suggestion that it is a proverb meaning that ’everything takes time’ is not likely, and seems excluded by the assignment of a minimum space of four months between sowing and reaping instead of the ordinary or maximum, namely five or six. Besides, the opposition is between four months hence and this moment; see Bover Bi 3 ( 1922) 442-4. The golden or yellowing harvest of the British Isles is a white harvest under the Palestine sun. From the harvest already in view and represented by the troop of Samaritans Jesus passes to the reapers.

36-38. Let the apostolic reapers have the joy of their work and of their reward, but let them humbly remember the proverb, ’The sower is not always the one who reaps’. The disciples will reap a harvest which Moses and the Prophets and Jesus himself have sown, as laborious tillers of the soil. This thought, while bringing humility in apostolic success, also brings consolation to those who expend apparently sterile labour in what seems an unpromising apostolic field. Cf.1 Corinthians 3:6-9.

39. The first-fruits of the harvest from that city were those who were convinced by the woman’s faith in the ’Searcher of hearts’. 40. Contact with the Master excited the charity of hospitality in them. Christ accepted, but as his mission was to the House of Israel, stayed only two days—St Augustine’s ’two days on account of the two precepts of charity’ is perhaps not exegesis but is worth recording. 41. No miracles are mentioned; but many more converts surrendered to the power of truth in Jesus’ words. Genuine faith —better than the weak miracle-produced conviction of those in Jerusalem, 2:23—seems like the supernaturalization of an innate sympathy for truth.

42. Besides the human touch in the remark to the woman, note the occumenical title given to the Saviour in keeping with that worship which belongs particularly neither to Garizim nor to Jerusalem. ’Saviour of the world’ occurs only here, as the fruit of Samaritan lips and under John’s own pen, 1 John 4:14; but cf.Genesis 41:45, where the phrase is used of Joseph. For the pagan use of this title, cf. Deissmann, Light from the Ancient East, p 369. Philip the Deacon was the next preacher in Samaria, Acts 8:5 ff.

43-45 Return to Galilee —It is only by the unlikely supposition that Jn is tacitly alluding to the hostility of Nazareth, Luke 4:24, that our Lord’s saying in this context about a prophet in his own country can be referred to any country except his birthplace Judaea, where the proverb had just been verified. Jesus applied the same proverb later to Nazareth, the place of His boyhood, adolescence and hidden life. 45. The enthusiastic welcome of the Galileans is explained by what pilgrims from there had seen Jesus do in Jerusalem—nearly ten months earlier according to our chronology (or two months ago according to those who date these verses June a.d. 28).

46-54 Cure of Officer’s Son —46. In Johannine geography Cana of Galilee is the place where Jesus made the water wine. The name naturally became music to St John the Apostle, the guardian of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The man, whose son was sick at Capharnaum, was not a ruler (ßas??ís??? of the group of MSS to which D belongs, represented by Vg regulus) but a royal officer (ßas??????), an official of Herod Antipas, conjectured by some (with fair plausibility) to be the procurator Chusa, husband of Johanna, Luke 8:3.

47. Hearing of Jesus’ arrival from Judaea, it seems that he came expressly from Capharnaum, seven hours’ journey on foot, though as a royal official he would ride. He must have pressed Jesus to go down to Capharnaum (1,500 feet of descent) that very day, for the boy was dying.

48. Not only did Jesus use reserve towards faith which was mainly the emotional impression produced by miracles, 2:23 f., but he warned against losing the divine significance of miracles by accepting them as merely useful, 6:26, or as feeding the appetite for wonder. Mere wonder-miracles he never worked, Luke 23:8. Hence Jesus combined ’signs and wonders (prodigies)’ in the remark addressed in the plural number to the official and meant for others besides him. His faith was, in any case, far below that of the centurion of Capharnaum, Matthew 8:8 f., for he considered that Jesus had to be present to work a miracle.

49. The repeated pleading of the father is respectful and touching, especially when we consider that the best Gk MSS have my little boy’ instead of ’my son’. 50. Note the brevity of the assurance of Jesus, the fewness of whose words in working miracles (cf.Matthew 8:3; Mark 5:41; Luke 7:14; John 11:43) reminds us of the Fiat of creation. The text can be taken to imply that the believing father set out on the homeward journey at once, but it would have been more in accord with oriental behaviour for him to have spent the night at Cana and to have begun the descent the following day.

51 f. His servants came up to meet him and reported the cure as having happened yesterday at the seventh hour, between 1 and 2 p.m.

53. The father could thus note the synchronism of the cure at Capharnaum and the words pronounced by Jesus twenty miles away at Cana of Galilee. Not only the official became a believing disciple but his whole household, like the household of Cornelius converted in later days by St Peter at Caesarea and the household of Lydia by St Paul at Philippi.

54. St John, with the obvious intention of supplementing the synoptic gospels, here emphasizes two journeys of Jesus from Judaea into Galilee since the events of the Jordan—each arrival being marked by a miracle, one worked at Cana, the other from Cana.