us. This is the ringing affirmation of the Fourth Gospel. Physical life, in all its panoply of intimacy and estrangement, is good.
Freedom Following Disappointment
Now that we have come to chapter 4, we need to name and regret a biblical disappointment. If we are going to read John at all, and hear the gospel of John together, then we need to be honest about a scriptural disappointment. As with all of our lives, the Bible itself, the very Word of God, does nonetheless harbor disappointments. Hear the good news: there is even freedom following religious disappointment.
Sometimes our great strengths occasion our most glaring weaknesses. If John is the Bible’s great strength, it would then be possible that here too we might find great weakness. And we do.
Oh, I give no ground with regard to the truth of Scripture. The Bible is freedom’s book, the pulpit is freedom’s voice, the church is freedom’s defense. It is also occasionally true that the Bible is a holy disappointment. Nowhere in Scripture is the height of Christian freedom more powerfully depicted than in John, and yet, at the same time, nowhere is the Bible more of a disappointment.
This gospel is anti-Semitic, at least to our ears after 1940. It was composed in the white heat of one small group leaving a synagogue in order freely to worship what the synagogue could only understand as a second God. It was the charge of ditheism, though denied and controverted, which moved John’s little church out into a free and frightening future. So the Gospel of John speaks roughly of its Semitic mother religion, of its own tradition. The living water is meant to surpass the dead water of Jacob, of Jacob’s well. Notice the way the writer refers with oral scare quotes to “the Jews,” like Robert E. Lee calling Yankees “those people.” Notice the dismissive explication, here and elsewhere, of Jewish rites. Notice that even though salvation is from the Jews, his own people “received him not.” Notice Jesus saying, “All who came before me are thieves and robbers.” We have an obligation to notice. And to regret, to express contrition and compunction. These words from this gospel have done immeasurable harm, from Augustine to Luther to the Third Reich to today, and that is a spiritual disappointment. As Christianity puts its best foot forward, it is really the other one that needs attention. We have two biographies ourselves. That of persecuted, and that of persecutor. Of all religious bodies, we have the most work to do with regard to anti-Semitism.
How are we to find freedom following such spiritual disappointment? By facing facts, by learning from our experience of success and failure, by moving ahead: The fact is that Christianity has been pervasively guilty of latent and patent anti-Semitism and the Gospel of John has been one of its sources. We have and can learn from this failure, by carefully monitoring our use of religious language. And we can move ahead. John is guiding us toward a global vision, an ecumenical spirituality, a universal Truth, a global village green, space for grace and time for freedom. And our Jewish brothers and sisters can teach us to continue, with Jacob, to wrestle with God.
In 1978 Jan and I had dinner with Elie Wiesel in the home of Robert Mcafee Brown. Wiesel survived the death camps and spent 10 silent years in Paris before writing Night. Its pathos, its witness, its question, its challenge need to stay before this generation as well:
Where is God? Where is He? The third rope was still moving, the child was still alive . . . For more than half and hour he stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him full in the face. He was still alive when I passed in front of him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet glazed . . . Behind me I heard the same man asking: Where is God now? . . . and I heard a voice within me answer Him. . . . Where is He? Here he is—He is hanging here on this gallows.1
These things are spoken that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name.
This week you can choose to grow in faith, and so find a fuller part of your second identity. This week you can choose to grow in love, and so open a fuller part of the world’s imagination.
Faith is personal commitment to an unverifiable truth. It involves a leap.
Faith is an objective uncertainty grasped with subjective certainty. It involves a leap.
Faith is the way to salvation, a real identity and a rich imagination. But it does involve a leap.
Now is the time to jump.
All of us are better when we are loved.
Notes from Raymond Brown’s Lectures on John
Union Theological Seminary
Spring 1978
March 30, 1978: The Samaritan Woman
We turn now to the longer narratives. Here John is at his best. Against the many theories of multiple sources, we also must mention the remarkable, flowing nature of the longer narratives. Until now, John has dealt with disciples, Jewish believers, and Nicodemus. Now the disciples are spectators.
Samaritan interlude: there is a possible historical basis for this material. The story may be a parable for the story of the conversion of Samaria. There is nothing in the other gospels about Samaria. Therefore, this story is probably an integral part of the self-understanding of the Johannine community.
Question: Was this Samaritan influx the straw that broke the camel’s back of relations with Judaism? Ditheism? Further, in chapter 8, Jesus is called a Samaritan. So, this may be autobiographical. 4:4 by the way is not meant to be geographical. Sychar: Mount Gerizim was the central place for northern worship. Jacob’s well was given to Joseph, the Samaritan hero. (In Steven’s Acts speech they are buried in Gerizim.) This recalls the meeting of Isaac and Rebecca. The question, then, is a very natural one. Where is the true God worshipped?
How far should one press this symbolism? The sixth hour would have been about noon. (RB doesn’t think much of this). The conflict between Jews and Samaritans is also recorded in Sirach (a great rabbinic text). Again: RB thinks that there were Samaritans in the community of the fourth gospel. The dialogue is very carefully built up. Here as elsewhere in John’s writing there is the enactment of the challenge to believe: you must be open to the gift that only he can give.
“Living waters” refers to flowing waters (7:38–39). But all of this terminology also refers to the Law in Jewish and Samaritan thought, and in Wisdom. Jesus is also speaking of himself as the living water (as in Chapter 6). Food and bread are also wisdom symbols. Jesus is all that the Old Testament says about God. Wisdom, Law, and Word are all found together in the intertestamental works. All this is still true, the gospel argues, but now it is tied to Jesus. Both sides use the same language, except one embodies it in a person, and the other in the law.
At a second level, the symbolism of the Old Testament here also interprets the sacraments of the community, baptism in particular. He uses the same language to refer to two different things. John may here be worried about the community having too static a notion of what they do sacramentally. Therefore he ties in community action with things Jesus did in his own life. Jesus’ talk with the Samaritan woman is concomitant with his talk with people in John’s community.
John never argues purely polemically. He wants in the end to say something meaningful to the community. Purpose and direction are both inward and outward for John. (A crucial point lightly touched). At first he wrote against outsiders, but second he wrote about the nature of their own life. Give me this water. . .”
4:18—The husbands depict the wife as not only Samaritan, but also one who even for Samaria is below par. Of course Jesus knows exactly what type of woman
