The Samaritan Woman's Story

Reconsidering John 4 After #ChurchToo

Caryn A. Reeder

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781514000601
• eBook ISBN: 9781514000618
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Studi biblici

Reader's Choice Award Winner

Most Christians have heard a familiar description of the Samaritan woman in John 4: she was a sinner, an adulteress, even a prostitute. Throughout church history, the woman at the well has been seen narrowly in terms of her gender and marital history. What are we missing in the story? And what difference does our interpretation of this passage make for women and men in the church?

Caryn A. Reeder calls us to see the Samaritan woman in a different light. Beginning with the reception history of John 4, she pulls back layers of interpretation entangled with readers' assumptions on women and sexuality. She then explores the story's original context, describing life for women and expectations regarding marriage and divorce in the first century. With this clarified lens, Reeder's exegesis of the passage yields refreshing insights on what the Gospel says—and does not say—about the woman at the well.

Throughout the book, Reeder draws connections between interpretations of this text and the life of the church. The sexual objectification of the Samaritan woman and minimization of her positive contribution has ongoing consequences for how women are seen and treated—including in the failure of many Christian communities to respond well to accusations of abuse. In the age of #MeToo and #ChurchToo, The Samaritan Woman's Story offers a bold challenge to teach the Bible in a way that truly honors the value and voices of women.

1

WOMEN, SEX, AND SIN IN THE CHURCH

IN MATTHEW, MARK, AND LUKE, Jesus talks about the kingdom of God. In John, Jesus talks about himself, often in lengthy sermons. Other people—John the Baptist, Martha, a man who was born blind—also talk about Jesus. The Gospel of John further explores Jesus’ identity through the narrative structure of sacred times and spaces: Passover, Sabbath, the temple, the wilderness. This Gospel recenters the significance of Israel’s sacred times and spaces on Jesus. He is the manna that feeds God’s people (Jn 6:35). He works on the Sabbath because God is still at work (Jn 5:17). He is the living temple, the presence of God once again camping out among the people (Jn 1:14, 2:19).

This pattern is established in the narrative by John 4, when Jesus passes through Samaria on his way home from the Passover celebrations in Jerusalem. He sits down by a well to rest, and, as readers might expect, the location has theological significance. Jacob and his sons dug the well on the land they purchased from the people of Shechem (Gen 33:19). This place is one of the first pieces of the Promised Land that the people of God possessed, a sort of down payment on Abraham’s covenant.

In this space, Jesus meets a woman. A single man meeting a woman at a well—in the Bible, stories that begin this way end with marriage (Gen 24:10-51, 29:1-30; Ex 2:15-21). But the story in John 4 disrupts the pattern. The woman is not single. Moreover, she’s a Samaritan, and as the story reminds us, Jews and Samaritans have a long history of conflict, division, and animosity.

Instead of romance, this story is about religious tensions and rivalry, with overtones of what we might today describe as racism. The Samaritan woman confronts Jesus with the most important questions of the divide between their two peoples: Where should God be worshiped, in the Jewish temple in Jerusalem or the Samaritan temple on Mt. Gerizim? Whose father is Jacob and, therefore, who should rightly possess this very well beside them? Who are the true people of God, the Jews or the Samaritans?

So, in John 4, Jesus returns to Galilee following Passover, the festival that celebrates God’s salvation of Israel from enslavement in Egypt so that they can be God’s holy people in God’s holy land. On his way home, Jesus sits down by a well that symbolizes this heritage, and he meets a woman who thinks this very same space symbolizes her own heritage. And they have a long, serious, focused conversation on the division between the Samaritans and Jews.

This conversation is remarkable. Often in John’s Gospel, what begins as a dialogue quickly turns into a monologue from Jesus (as happens with Nicodemus in Jn 3:2-21, and the disciples in Jn 4:31-38). But at Jacob’s well, the Samaritan woman is a real partner in the discussion. Her responses and questions indicate her awareness of history, theology, and current events. She is insightful.

In response, Jesus clearly announces the changing identity of the people of God—no longer Jew or Samaritan, but something else. And he clearly announces his own identity as Messiah and “I am.” The woman in turn models the response to Jesus that John’s Gospel expects (compare Jn 1:6-8; 1:32-34; 9:1-38; 20:30-31). Over the course of the conversation, she goes from identifying Jesus as a Jew, to recognizing him as a prophet, to realizing that he may just be the Messiah. She then testifies to his identity in her hometown.

“I am” statements litter John’s Gospel. Sometimes, they are used to explain specific elements of Jesus’ identity (the bread of life, the light of the world, etc.). But sometimes, they are references to God’s name in Exodus 3:14. Jesus’ announcement to the Samaritan woman in John 4:26 is the first of these.

As Jesus’ metaphor in John 4:35-38 anticipates, the nameless Samaritan woman’s testimony leads to a great harvest. Her neighbors listen to her! Because of her words, they follow her back to the well to meet Jesus for themselves. They believe in Jesus on account of the woman’s testimony as well as Jesus’ own words (Jn 4:39-42). While Jesus’ disciples are off buying food, this woman, a Samaritan and relative stranger to Jesus, does the work of God. She is an apostle.

But this isn’t the way the Samaritan woman’s story is usually told in the church. Instead, pastors and teachers focus their attention on one part of the exchange: John 4:16-18.

THE SAMARITAN WOMAN AND THE CHURCH

[The Samaritan woman] was an outcast and looked down upon by her own people. This is evidenced by the fact that she came alone to draw water from the community well when, during biblical times, drawing water and chatting at the well was the social highpoint of a woman’s day. However, this woman was ostracized and marked as immoral, an unmarried woman living openly with the sixth in a series of men. The story of the woman at the well teaches us that God loves us in spite of our bankrupt lives.

GOT QUESTIONS MINISTRIES, “WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM THE WOMAN AT THE WELL?”

Early in the third century, Tertullian, a Christian theologian in Carthage, described the Samaritan woman as a prostitute.1 In an otherwise positive portrayal of the woman’s intelligence and apostolic zeal, John Chrysostom told his congregation in fourth-century Antioch that the woman was guilty of wicked, shameful sin.2 For John Calvin a millennium later, the woman’s gender and marital history overwhelmed her story. He derided her as an adulterer who forced her husbands to divorce her.3 Nineteenth-century revivalist Dwight L. Moody used John 4 to preach God’s power to save even a “fallen woman” (that is, a prostitute) like the Samaritan woman.4

There are disruptions to this interpretation. Chrysostom’s representation of the woman as an apostle is echoed by Marie Dentière in the sixteenth century and Virginia Broughton in the twentieth century, for instance.5 But the emphatic accusations of adultery and prostitution resound across the centuries to our own day, as the quotation above from Got Questions Ministries indicates. The history of interpretation of John 4:4-42 in the church reflects a consistent association of the Samaritan woman with sexual sin, and a consequent minimization of her presence and contribution to the narrative.

There is a theological purpose to the characterization of the woman as a shocking sinner, as this sermon preached by Charles Spurgeon shows:

I think that I hear one ask, “Do you mean to say that that woman was saved?” Yes, I expect to meet her in Heaven. Among the fair daughters of the New Jerusalem, the woman that was waiting at the well will surely be found! “But she was such a shocking character,” says one. She was a shocking character—I hope that there is not any woman here half as bad as she was, though there may be, and there may even be some worse than she was—but she was saved and so will you be, if you go the same way that she went.6

The Samaritan woman’s story exemplifies the grace of God. Interpreters celebrate John 4:4-42 as a story of hope for all sinners, even those women who sin in the same way the Samaritan woman did.

In addition, interpreters use the story to encourage particular evangelistic practices. Jesus transgresses boundaries—Jew and Samaritan, male and female, respected rabbi and (as one interpreter says) “that kind of woman”—to share the good news of salvation.7 He then convicts the woman of her sexual sin because the condemnation of sin is a necessary step in salvation. In these ways, Jesus’ interaction with the Samaritan woman provides a model for evangelists to follow.8

This version of the Samaritan woman’s encounter with Jesus is quite different from the one I told at the beginning of the chapter. As you may have guessed, I think the common interpretation of this story in the church significantly misrepresents it. Sin is an important theme in John, and Jesus warns people against continuing in sin.9 But sin is not mentioned in John 4:4-42. Neither is forgiveness. Jesus does not tell the woman to repent or change her life, and there’s no indication that she does (or even, as we’ll see in the second part of this book, that she could).

The insistent insertion of sin into the Samaritan woman’s story has several problems. First, when sin becomes the lens for viewing the woman, a particular interpretation of her marital history overrides the rest of the story. The woman’s intelligence, her insight, and the power of her words are diminished (and sometimes disappear altogether). The sexualization of the woman reduces her to an archetypal femme fatale. Instead of a model for discipleship and leadership in the Christian community, her story becomes a warning of the dangers of women’s sexuality.

Second, this representation of the woman as sexual sinner separates her from Jesus’ messages in John 4:4-42. Interpreters sometimes explore the story’s contributions to understandings of God and worship without much attention to the woman.10 Others question the woman’s ability to understand what Jesus says.11 However, the Samaritan woman is a real conversation partner in John 4:4-42. Her responses to Jesus drive the story forward. Notably, she introduces the question of the proper place for worship that sparks Jesus’ message. To reduce the woman to a sinner in need of salvation minimizes her significant contribution in this narrative.

This minimization represents a third major problem with the prevailing interpretation of John 4:4-42. The characterization of the Samaritan woman as an adulterer or prostitute exemplifies the dehumanizing, reductive sexualization of women in the theology and practice of the church. This pattern of interpretation endlessly repeats: Deborah and Jael, Bathsheba, Mary Magdalene, the woman who anoints Jesus in Luke 7:36-50. These women (among many others) are categorized and defined on the basis of gender and sexuality.12

As a consequence, their active participation in the story of Israel and the early church is diminished or lost entirely. The standard interpretations of biblical women impede their identification as leaders. This in turn limits the identification of these women as models for leadership in the church. Men cannot learn from their stories, and women are left without opportunity for active participation in the church or recognition for their contributions to the church.

Moreover, the reductive sexualization of women in the Bible teaches a message about women in the church: they are interesting or worthy of attention only with respect to sexuality. Women become objects of male desire and (consequently) stumbling blocks that cause men to fall into temptation and sin. The sexualization of women in theological tradition places the burden of sexual sin on women, at the same time making women available to men’s gaze, desire, and action. As the history of the church shows ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface: Why John 4, Yet Again? Why Now?
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Women, Sex, and Sin in the Church
• PART ONE: READING THE SAMARITAN WOMAN’S STORY WITH THE CHURCH
• PART TWO: THE SAMARITAN WOMAN IN HER DAY
• Conclusion: Reading the Bible After #ChurchToo
• Discussion Questions
• Bibliography
• Interpreter Index
• Scripture Index
• Notes
• Praise for The Samaritan Woman’s Story
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright