By Jill Roberts and Michael Canalé
God’s timing is always so interesting. Last week, Michael brought up the fact that, thus far, we have only written about the men who were the disciples and apostles of Jesus and wasn’t it time to spotlight the women who followed him. We quickly decided that this would be the subject of this week’s blog.
Then…God’s timing. Last Sunday night, I did what I always do on Sunday night – listened to the Sunday morning service podcasts from Rock Harbor and Mariner’s Churches, located here in California. Both featured women beautifully preaching from the pulpit – Christine Caine at Mariners and Kathleen Doyle at Rock Harbor. Monday night I, again, followed my tradition and listened to Mike Erre’s Voxology podcast. Subject?… an interview with Beth Allison Barr, regarding her newly released book, The Making of Biblical Womanhood, parts of which devoted itself to the women who followed Jesus. I told Michael that it was surely God-ordained timing for this blog to be written. The prominence of these two women who were preaching and an author, who was writing about this subject, might, at first blush, be perceived as a new development in Church practice and leadership. This perception would be a misconception. Two thousand years ago, Jesus was at the very vanguard of a movement like that of the expanding role of women in many of our churches today. Jesus set this precedent and the heart of the visionary who authored it was the very heart of Jesus himself. Always the defender of the marginalized in society, women in that culture were natural recipients of Jesus’ love and advocacy. This was apparent in many instances.
A few weeks ago, Michael and I wrote about the Samaritan Woman, or the Woman at the Well. At that time, we approached this iconic story from the point of view that it was a prime example of how Jesus would leave the ninety-nine and go in search of the one who had gone astray. This is certainly the most widely recognized aspect of this passage of Scripture. Today, we return to this story but for an entirely different reason, one less discussed but critical to the subject of our blog and its underlying theme of Jesus and women. Michael started us in this series by stating so well that Jesus’ disciples were players in a play Jesus was writing. Today, the Samaritan Woman takes center stage in that play and in a way we will go so far as to say, that most Bible readers have not considered. It will exemplify Jesus’ revolutionary and progressive view of women in Christian ministry; it will advance the point that this Woman at the Well possessed a theological mastery that Jesus used to prepare her to preach – two thousand years ago!
Clearly, the Bible passage in John which records the encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan Woman, reveals him confronting her sin. As stated, we have studied this in an earlier blog. What we are spotlighting now is quite separate. Our focus is on Jesus’ and the woman’s theological conversation and its amazing outcome.
The threshold question is, aside from her sin, what was it about this disenfranchised. SAMARITAN who was also a WOMAN and, therefore, further marginalized, that brought Jesus, to enter into a dialogue with her? A close examination of their conversation very quickly gives the explanation we are looking for. As she was at the well to draw water, Jesus began the conversation by telling her about a different kind of water – the “living water,” he could provide. She listened and then responded,
“Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than OUR father, Jacob, (a Jew), who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock.” (emphasis added)
(John 4:11-12) NIV
As Jesus knew so well when he said that he had to go through Samaria,” (John 4:4) NIV, this woman was no ordinary sinner. Here was a SAMARITAN woman who called Jacob, a JEWISH patriarch, OUR father. Further, she had an apparent theological pedigree that enabled her to know the Jewish history of Jacob and his sons.
The encounter continues. When confronted with the fact that she had had several husbands and now was living with a man, not her husband, she, in a matter-of-fact manner, answered him, saying,
“Sir…I can see that you are a prophet.”
(John 4:19) NIV
This woman not only knew the word, “prophet,” but used it quickly and appropriately to describe the supernatural ability of Jesus to know and size up her life. Jesus goes on in this theology exchange: (Thank you to James Hurley and his study of “Women in Church Leadership,” who first used the word theology in relation to the Samaritan Woman.)
“You Samaritans worship what you do not know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come, when true worshippers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in the truth…”
(John 4:22-23) NIV
This Samaritan woman doesn’t scratch her head and wonder what Jesus is talking about when he speaks of a coming time, a coming age, in the timeline of God. Not at all! This woman answers Jesus like a seminary student at the top of his or her academic game:
“The woman said, ‘I know that the Messiah,’ (called Christ) ‘is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”
(John 4:25) NIV
What in Heaven’s name is this! Now, we’re starting to see that when Jesus had to go through Samaria, he knew that it would not be an ordinary woman awaiting him there. This woman/student of the heart of Judaism, that is, the awaiting of the Messiah, is at perfect intellectual ease conversing about her awareness of the coming of the Messiah, but, more amazingly, also has the UNDERSTANDING of what is going to happen when he arrives, i.e. “He will explain everything.” And to whom will he explain everything? Tellingly, she doesn’t say that he will explain it to “you Jews;” she says that he will explain it all to US! What other reasonable inference can we possibly draw here but to interpret her US as describing someone awaiting the Messiah’s explanation of all to HER! In living her sinful, isolated life, she had turned to a personal consideration of the Messiah! Michael says it so well:
“God is who you turn to when you have no other choices.”
This was where she was in her life – out of choices. In this state, she looked heavenward. She was a Samaritan woman but she had turned to a Jewish God!
Only after Jesus heard this declaration of the Jewishness of this Samaritan woman, does he say some of the most dramatic words in all of Scripture:
“THEN, Jesus declared, ‘I, the one speaking to you – I am he.”
(John 4:26) NIV
The announcement that he is the Messiah is made to:
1) a woman
2) a Samaritan
3) a person who knew exactly what he meant when he said it
By a well, in a desert wilderness, in Samaria, without a crowd, to a woman who was a sinner of substantial notoriety, Jesus proclaimed the words that, centuries before, God’s prophets had predicted and all the Jewish world had been holding their euphemistic collective breaths to hear. In this truly singular moment, this woman, who shared this historical moment with Jesus, …What did she do?
“Then, LEAVING HER WATER JAR, (For now, she had the “Living Water,” Jesus had spoken of), the woman went back to the town and said to the people, ‘Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?’ They came out of the town and MADE THEIR WAY toward him.” (Emphasis added)
(John 4:28-30) NIV
Now, can we picture the scene? The original twelve disciples, who had been gone during the dialogue between Jesus and the woman, had returned to Jesus’ side just in time to see a large crowd of Samaritans who had “made their way,” in the direction of Jesus. These words strongly imply that there was a rush of people straining to reach Jesus and following a woman so sinful that an hour earlier she had been ostracized by these same folks. What must the disciples have thought! And Jesus, what did he do? We like to think he had a smile on his face as he spoke to his disciples in a teaching moment:
“Don’t you have a saying, ‘It’s still four months until harvest?’ I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! THEY ARE RIPE FOR HARVEST. Even now the one who reaps, draws a wage and harvests a crop for eternal life, SO THAT THE SOWER AND THE REAPER MAY BE HAPPY TOGETHER. Thus the saying, ‘One sows and another reaps,’ is true. (emphasis added).
(John 4:35-37) NIV
Jesus, the sower, the Samaritan woman, the reaper, were “glad together.” In telling a woman he knew to be spiritually “ripe,” that he was the Messiah, he had commissioned her as surely as any ordained soul is commissioned through high pomp and ceremony. Jesus had made her a player in the play he was writing. The results of this were exactly what he knew they would be:
“MANY of the Samaritans from the town believed in him BECAUSE OF THE WOMAN’S TESTIMONY.” (emphasis added)
(John 4:39) NIV
What happened next had to further amaze Jesus’ twelve disciples, men who believed, as did all Jews, except Jesus, that, while traveling, an extra day’s journey to avoid even passing through Samaritan territory, was well worth it.
“So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with them, and he stayed two days.”
(John 4:40) NIV
Yes, Jesus ate, slept and talked with these Samaritans who had invited him because of the testimony of this Samaritan woman. Friends, if this is not her preaching a sermon two thousand years ago, I don’t know what preaching is. When we listen in person or to podcasts of women preaching at Rock Harbor, Mariners and churches across America, we must know that two thousand years ago, a woman also preached a sermon, bringing “many” to belief in Jesus.
In the end, Jesus was the closer:
“And because of his words, MANY MORE became believers.” (emphasis added)
(John 4:41) NIV
As Michael says,
“People found God thousands of years ago, today and a moment ago.”
In this blog, we see Jesus choose the woman, who was “ripe” for salvation, be saved. In this blog, we see Jesus’ view of what a woman can do in bringing so many to faith. In this blog, we are witnesses to Jesus bringing a woman, so unexpectedly steeped in heavy theology, the news that her secret allegiance to the Messiah, birthed and growing in a backwater Samaritan town, would be greatly rewarded, completely affirmed. The Messiah was here on Earth and had carried her into his story with him. As stated, “The sower and the reaper may be glad together.” Has the bar for how to treat a budding woman evangelist ever been set so high as this? Jesus is the author of this because he found in Samaria, a Jew at heart, a strong player in the play he was writing and which he continues to cast today as women go forward preaching and teaching as the Savior intended then and intends today.
POSTSCRIPT:
Next week, our study on Jesus and women continues.
Spot on!
Thank you, John. This is such an encouragement!
Thanks so much, Jill. It does seem that many women immediately “got” him, while men needed to be convinced…
Thank you for this comment, Holly. Yes, with regard to all of those closest to Jesus, no one seemed as learned or as immediately perceptive about his Messiahship as the Samaritan Woman. This conversation is the longest one Jesus had with any one person and, in Michael’s and my opinions, is truly important and illuminating.