Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to John · About this commentary
In Spirit and Truth
John 4:16-26
16 Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come here.” · WEB
The conversation turns to her marriages, then to a mountain, and ends with the plainest self-disclosure in the book.
"Go, call your husband, and come here" John 4:16.
The instruction looks like a change of subject and is the next step in the same one. She has asked for the water; this is what stands between her and it, and nothing can be given to a person who is managing a conversation.
"I have no husband" John 4:17. It is true, and it is the smallest true thing she can say.
"You said well, 'I have no husband,' for you have had five husbands; and he whom you now have is not your husband. This you have said truly" John 4:17–18.
He agrees with her twice, which is a strange kind of gentleness — the technically accurate answer is accepted and then filled in. Nothing is said about how the marriages ended, and the account does not supply it. In that society a woman rarely had the power to end one; five losses may be tragedy as easily as scandal, and the sixth arrangement is named as what it is without a word of comment.
What has happened is that she has been known — the same thing that undid Nathanael under his fig tree John 1:48, and the thing she reports to the town in a minute John 4:29.
"Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped in this mountain, and you Jews say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship" John 4:19–20.
This is often read as a diversion, and it is at least half a real question. She is standing in the shadow of Mount Gerizim, where the Samaritan temple had stood until it was destroyed by a Judean king, and the dispute over the two sites was the whole religious quarrel of her people. A woman with five marriages behind her, told she has been seen through, asks the one question that matters if she is going to worship anywhere at all: where.
"Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father" John 4:21.
The answer does not adjudicate. It announces that the question is being retired — which is a startling thing to say about the temple, and it is the same claim made two chapters earlier when he called his body the temple John 2:21.
"You worship that which you don't know. We worship that which we know; for salvation is from the Jews" John 4:22.
And then he does adjudicate, in one sentence, and not in her favor. The book will not have the two positions treated as equally informed. The Samaritans kept only the books of Moses; the promises, the prophets and the line run through the other side, and salvation is from the Jews is stated flatly by the man who is himself the salvation in question.
It is worth pausing on how this sits with everything around it. He is dismantling the claims of Jerusalem while affirming that the truth came through it, which is not a contradiction but a description of a thing being fulfilled rather than abolished.
"The hour comes, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth" John 4:23.
And now is is the phrase that changes it from prophecy to announcement. The new arrangement is not being scheduled; it is beginning at that well.
In spirit and truth is often taken to mean sincerely and correctly, which is not wrong and is much too small. Spirit here is what verse twenty-four says God is; the worship is to be conducted on the level of God's own reality rather than at a location. And truth in this book is not accuracy but the thing itself as against the shadow — the reality that Moses and the temple pointed at.
"For the Father seeks such to be his worshipers." The clause is easy to pass over and it is the heart of the paragraph. God is described as looking for people. That is why a tired man is sitting at a well in the wrong country at noon.
"I know that Messiah is coming... When he has come, he will declare to us all things" John 4:25. Even the Samaritans expected one, and her instinct is to defer the whole matter to him.
"I am he, the one who speaks to you" John 4:26.
The first open declaration in the Gospel, and the wording in the Greek is the bare I am that this book will use again at its sharpest moments John 8:58. He has told nobody in Jerusalem, and he tells a Samaritan woman with a complicated history, alone, at a well, because she asked.
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