Verses 1-54
Chapter 4
4:1-9 So when the Lord
learned that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and
baptizing more disciples than John (although it was not Jesus himself
who was in the habit of baptizing but his disciples), he quilted Judaea
and went away again to Galilee. Now he had to pass through Samaria. He
came to a town of Samaria, called Sychar, which is near the piece of
ground which Jacob gave to Joseph, his son, and Jacob's well was there.
So Jesus, tired from the journey, was sitting by the well just as he
was. It was about midday. There came a woman of Samaria to draw water.
Jesus said to her: "Give me to drink." For his disciples had gone away
into the town to buy provisions. So the Samaritan woman said to him:
"How is it that you who are a Jew ask a drink from me, a Samaritan
woman?" (For there is no familiarity between Jews and Samaritans.)
First of all, let us set the scene of this incident. Palestine
is only 120 miles long from north to south. But within that 120 miles
there were in the time of Jesus three definite divisions of territory.
In the extreme north lay Galilee; in the extreme south lay Judaea; and
in between lay Samaria. Jesus did not wish at this stage in his ministry
to be involved in a controversy about baptism; so he decided to quit
Judaea for the time being and transfer his operations to Galilee. There
was a centuries-old feud between the Jews and the Samaritans, the cause
of which we will shortly see. But the quickest way from Judaea to
Galilee lay through Samaria. Using that route, the journey could be done
in three days. The alternative route was to cross the Jordan, go up the
eastern side of the river to avoid Samaria, recross the Jordan north of
Samaria and then enter Galilee. This was a route which took twice as
long. So then Jesus had to pass through Samaria if he wished to take the
shortest route to Galilee.
On the way they came to the town of Sychar. Just short of Sychar
the road to Samaria forks. The one branch goes north-east to
Scythopolis; the other goes west to Nablus and then north to Engannim.
At the fork of the road there stands to this day the well known as
Jacob's well.
This was an area which had many Jewish memories attached to it.
There was a piece of ground there which had been bought by Jacob (Genesis 33:18-19). Jacob, on his deathbed, had bequeathed that ground to Joseph (Genesis 48:22). And, on Joseph's death in Egypt, his body had been taken back to Palestine and buried there (Joshua 24:32). So around this area there gathered many Jewish memories.
The well itself was more than 100 feet deep. It is not a
springing well of water; it is a wet into which the water percolates and
gathers. But clearly it was a well so deep that no one could gain water
from it unless he had something with which to draw the water.
When Jesus and his little band came to the fork in the road
Jesus sat down to rest, for he was tired with the journey. It was
midday. The Jewish day runs from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. and the sixth hour is
twelve o'clock midday. So the heat was at its greatest, and Jesus was
weary and thirsty from travelling. His disciples went on ahead to buy
some food in the Samaritan town. Something must have been beginning to
happen to them. Before they had met Jesus it is entirely unlikely that
they would have even thought of buying food in any Samaritan town.
Little by little, perhaps even unconsciously, the barriers were going
down.
As Jesus sat there, there came to the well a Samaritan woman.
Why she should come to that well is something of a mystery, for it was
more than half-a-mile from Sychar where she must have stayed and there
was water there. May it be that she was so much of a moral outcast that
the women even drove her away from the village well and she had to come
here to draw water? Jesus asked her to give him a drink. She turned in
astonishment. "I am a Samaritan," she said. "You are a Jew. How is it
that you ask a drink from me?" And then John explains to the Greeks for
whom he is writing that there was no kind of come and go at all between
the Jews and the Samaritans.
Now it is certain that all we have here is the briefest possible
report of what must have been a long conversation. Clearly there was
much more to this meeting than is recorded here. If we may use an
analogy, this is like the minutes of a committee meeting where we have
only the salient points of the discussion recorded. I think that the
Samaritan woman must have unburdened her soul to this stranger. How else
could Jesus have known of her tangled domestic affairs? For one of the
very few times in her life she had found one with kindness in his eyes
instead of critical superiority; and she opened her heart.
Few stories in the Gospel record show us so much about the character of Jesus.
(i) It shows us the reality of his humanity. Jesus was weary
with the journey, and he sat by the side of the well exhausted. It is
very significant that John who stresses the sheer deity of Jesus Christ
more than any other of the gospel writers also stresses his humanity to
the full. John does not show us a figure freed from the tiredness and
the struggle of our humanity. He shows us one for whom life was an
effort as it is for us; he shows us one who also was tired and had to go
on.
(ii) It shows us the warmth of his sympathy. From an ordinary
religious leader, from one of the orthodox church leaders of the day the
Samaritan woman would have fled in embarrassment. She would have
avoided such a one. If by any unlikely chance he had spoken to her she
would have met him with an ashamed and even a hostile silence. But it
seemed the most natural thing in the world to talk to Jesus. She had at
last met someone who was not a critic but a friend, one who did not
condemn but who understood.
(iii) It shows us Jesus as the breaker down of barriers. The
quarrel between the Jews and the Samaritans was an old, old story. Away
back about 720 B.C. the Assyrians had invaded the northern kingdom of
Samaria and had captured and subjugated it. They did what conquerors
often did in those days--they transported practically the whole
population to Media (2 Kings 17:6). Into the district the Assyrians brought other people--from Babylon, from Cuthah, from Ava, from Hamath and from Sepharvaim (2 Kings 17:24).
Now it is not possible to transport a whole people. Some of the people
of the northern kingdom were left. Almost inevitably they began to
inter-marry with the incoming foreigners; and thereby they committed
what to the Jew was an unforgivable crime. They lost their racial
purity. In a strict Jewish household even to this day if a son or a
daughter marries a Gentile, his or her funeral service is carried out.
Such a person is dead in the eyes of orthodox Judaism. So then the great
majority of the inhabitants of Samaria were carried away to Media. They
never came back but were assimilated into the country into which they
were taken. They are the lost ten tribes. Those who remained in the
country inter-married with the incoming strangers and lost their right
to be called Jews at all.
In course of time a like invasion and a like defeat happened to
the southern kingdom, whose capital was Jerusalem. Its inhabitants also
were carried off to Babylon; but they did not lose their identity; they
remained stubbornly and unalterably Jewish. In time there came the days
of Ezra and Nehemiah and the exiles returned to Jerusalem by the grace
of the Persian king. Their immediate task was to repair and rebuild the
shattered Temple. The Samaritans came and offered their help in this
sacred task. They were contemptuously told that their help was not
wanted. They had lost their Jewish heritage and they had no right to
share in the rebuilding of the house of God. Smarting under this
repulse, they turned bitterly against the Jews of Jerusalem. It was
about 450 B.C. when that quarrel took place, and it was as bitter as
ever in the days of Jesus.
It had further been embittered when the renegade Jew, Manasseh, married a daughter of the Samaritan Sanballat (Nehemiah 13:28)
and proceeded to found a rival temple on Mount Gerizim which was in the
centre of the Samaritan territory. Still later in the Maccabean days,
in 129 B.C., John Hyrcanus, the Jewish general and leader, led an attack
against Samaria and sacked and destroyed the temple on Mount Gerizim.
Between Jews and Samaritans there was an embittered hatred. The Jews
contemptuously called them Chuthites or Cuthaeans after one of the
peoples whom the Assyrians had settled there. The Jewish Rabbis said:
"Let no man eat of the bread of the Cuthaeans, for he who eats their
bread is as he who eats swine's flesh." Ecclesiasticus depicts God as
saying: "With two nations is my soul vexed, and the third is no nation;
they that sit upon the mountain of Samaria, and the Philistines, and
that foolish people that dwell in Sichem" (Ecc 50:25-26).
Sichem or Shechem was one of the most famous of Samaritan cities. The
hatred was returned with interest. It is told that Rabbi Jochanan was
passing through Samaria on his way to Jerusalem to pray. He passed by
Mount Gerizim. A Samaritan saw him, and asked him: "Where are you
going?" "I am going to Jerusalem," he said, "to pray." The Samaritan
answered: "Would it not be better for you to pray in this holy mountain
(Mount Gerizim) than in that accursed house?" Pilgrims from Galilee to
Jerusalem had to pass through Samaria, if, as we have seen, they
travelled by the quickest way; and the Samaritans delighted to hinder
them.
The Jewish-Samaritan quarrel was more than 400 years old. But it
smouldered as resentfully and as bitterly as ever. It was small wonder
that the Samaritan woman was astonished that Jesus, a Jew, should speak
to her, a Samaritan.
(iv) But there was still another way in which Jesus was taking
down the barriers. The Samaritan was a woman. The strict Rabbis forbade a
Rabbi to greet a woman in public. A Rabbi might not even speak to his
own wife or daughter or sister in public. There were even Pharisees who
were called "the bruised and bleeding Pharisees" because they shut their
eyes when they saw a woman on the street and so walked into walls and
houses! For a Rabbi to be seen speaking to a woman in public was the end
of his reputation--and yet Jesus spoke to this woman. Not only was she a
woman; she was also a woman of notorious character. No decent man, let
alone a Rabbi, would have been seen in her company, or even exchanging a
word with her--and yet Jesus spoke to her.
To a Jew this was an amazing story. Here was the Son of God,
tired and weary and thirsty. Here was the holiest of men, listening with
understanding to a sorry story. Here was Jesus breaking through the
barriers of nationality and orthodox Jewish custom. Here is the
beginning of the universality of the gospel; here is God so loving the
world, not in theory, but in action.
4:10-15 Jesus answered
her: "If you knew the free gift that God is offering you, and if you
knew who is speaking to you, and if you knew who was saying to you:
'Give me to drink,' you would have asked him, and he would have given
you living water." The woman said to him: "Sir, you have no bucket to
draw with and the well is deep. Where does this living water that you
have come from? Are you greater than our father Jacob who gave us the
well, and who himself drank from it with his children and his cattle?"
Jesus answered her: "Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst
again; but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never
thirst again for ever. But the water that I will give him will become a
well of water within him, springing up to give him life eternal." The
woman said to him: "Sir, give me this water, so that I will not thirst,
and so that I will not have to come here to draw water."
We have to note that this conversation with the Samaritan woman
follows exactly the same pattern as the conversation with Nicodemus.
Jesus makes a statement. The statement is taken in the wrong sense.
Jesus remakes the statement in an even more vivid way. It is still
misunderstood; and then Jesus compels the person with whom he is
speaking to discover and to face the truth for herself. That was Jesus'
usual way of teaching; and it was a most effective way, for, as someone
has said: "There are certain truths which a man cannot accept; he must
discover them for himself."
Just as Nicodemus did, the woman took the words of Jesus quite
literally when she was meant to understand them spiritually. It was
living water of which Jesus spoke. In ordinary language to the Jew
living water was running water. It was the water of the running stream
in contradistinction to the water of the stagnant cistern or pool. This
well, as we have seen, was not a springing well, but a well into which
the water percolated from the subsoil. To the Jew, running, living water
from the stream was always better. So the woman is saying: "You are
offering me pure stream water. Where are you going to get it?"
She goes on to speak of "our father Jacob." The Jews would, of
course, have strenuously denied that Jacob was the father of the
Samaritans, but it was part of the Samaritan claim that they were
descended from Joseph, the son of Jacob, by way of Ephraim and Manasseh.
The woman is in effect saying to Jesus: "This is blasphemous talk.
Jacob, our great ancestor, when he came here, had to dig this well to
gain water for his family and his cattle. Are you claiming to be able to
get fresh, running stream water? If you are, you are claiming to be
wiser and more powerful than Jacob. That is a claim that no one has any
right to make."
When people were on a journey they usually carried with them a
bucket made from the skin of some beast so that they could draw water
from any well at which they halted. No doubt Jesus' band had such a
bucket; and no doubt the disciples had taken it into the town with them.
The woman saw that Jesus did not possess such a traveller's leather
bucket, and so again she says in effect: "You need not talk about
drawing water and giving it to me. I can see for myself that you have
not a bucket with which to draw water." H. B. Tristram begins his book
entitled Eastern Customs in Bible Lands with this personal experience.
He was sitting beside a well in Palestine beside the scene of the inn
which figures in the story of the Good Samaritan. "An Arab woman came
down from the hills above to draw water; she unfolded and opened her
goatskin bottle, and then untwined a cord, and attached it to a very
small leather bucket which she carried, by means of which she slowly
filled her skin, fastened its mouth, placed it on her shoulder, and
bucket in hand, climbed the mountain. I thought of the woman of Samaria
at Jacob's well, when an Arab footman, toiling up the steep path from
Jericho, heated and wearied with his journey, turned aside to the well,
knelt and peered wistfully down. But he had 'nothing to draw with and
the well was deep.' He lapped a little moisture from the water spilt by
the woman who had preceded him, and, disappointed, passed on." It was
just that that the woman was thinking of when she said that Jesus had
nothing wherewith to draw water from the depths of the well.
But the Jews had another way of using the word water. They often
spoke of the thirst of the soul for God; and they often spoke of
quenching that thirst with living water. Jesus was not using terms that
were bound to be misunderstood; he was using terms that anyone with
spiritual insight should have understood. In the Revelation that promise
is: "To the thirsty I will give water without price from the fountain
of the water of life" (Revelation 21:6). The Lamb is to lead them to springs of living waters (Revelation 7:17). The promise was that the chosen people would draw water with joy from the wells of salvation (Isaiah 12:3). The Psalmist spoke of his soul being thirsty for the living God (Psalms 42:1). God's promise was: "I will pour water on the thirsty land" (Isaiah 44:3). The summons was that every one who was thirsty should come to the waters and freely drink (Isaiah 55:1).
Jeremiah's complaint was that the people had forsaken God who was the
fountain of living waters and had hewed themselves out broken cisterns
which could hold no water (Jeremiah 2:13). Ezekiel had had his vision of the river of life (Ezekiel 47:1-12). In the new world there would be a cleansing fountain opened (Zechariah 13:1). The waters would go forth from Jerusalem (Zechariah 14:8).
Sometimes the Rabbis identified this living water with the
wisdom of the Law; sometimes they identified it with nothing less than
the Holy Spirit of God. All Jewish pictorial religious language was full
of this idea of the thirst of the soul which could be quenched only
with the living water which was the gift of God. But the woman chose to
understand this with an almost crude literalism. She was blind because
she would not see.
Jesus went on to make a still more startling statement that he
could give her living water which would banish her thirst for ever. The
point is that again the woman took this literally; but in point of fact
it was nothing less than a Messianic claim. In the prophetic vision of
the age to come, the age of God, the promise was: "They shall not hunger
or thirst" (Isaiah 49:10).
It was with God and none other that the living fountain of the
all-quenching water existed. "With thee is the fountain of life," the
Psalmist had cried (Psalms 36:9). It is from the very throne of God that the river of life is to flow (Revelation 22:1). It is the Lord who is the fountain of living water (Jeremiah 17:13). It is in the Messianic age that the parched ground is to become a pool and the thirsty ground springs of water (Isaiah 35:7).
When Jesus spoke about bringing to men the water which quenches thirst
for ever, he was doing no less than stating that he was the Anointed One
of God who was to bring in the new age.
Again the woman did not see it. And I think that this time she
spoke with a jest, as if humouring one who was a little mad. "Give me
this water," she said, "so that I will never be thirsty again and will
not have to walk to the well day after day." She was jesting with a kind
of humouring contempt about eternal things.
At the heart of all this there is the fundamental truth that in
the human heart there is a thirst for something that only Jesus Christ
can satisfy. Sinclair Lewis in one of his books draws a picture of a
respectable little business man who kicked over the traces. He is
talking to the girl he loves. She says to him: "On the surface we seem
quite different; but deep down we are fundamentally the same. We are
both desperately unhappy about something--and we don't know what it is."
In every man there is this nameless unsatisfied longing; this vague
discontent; this something lacking; this frustration.
In Sorrell and Son Warwick Deeping tens of a conversation
between Sorrell and his son. The boy is talking about life. He says that
it is like groping in an enchanted fog. The fog breaks for a moment;
you see the moon or a girl's face; you think you want the moon or the
face; and then the fog comes down again; and leaves you groping for
something, you don't quite know what. Wordsworth, in the Ode on the
Intimations of Immortality, speaks of,
"Those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realized."
Augustine talks about "our hearts being restless till they find rest in thee."
Part of the human situation is that we cannot find happiness out
of the things that the human situation has to offer. As Browning had
it:
"Just when we're safest, there's a sunset touch,
A fancy from a flower-bell, someone's death,
A chorus ending from Euripides--
And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears
As old and new at once as Nature's self.
To rap and knock and enter in our soul."
We are never safe from the longing for eternity which God has
put in man's soul. There is a thirst which only Jesus Christ can
satisfy.
4:15-21 The woman said
to him: "Sir, give me this water, so that I will not thirst, and so
that I will not have to come here to draw water." Jesus said to her:
"Go, call your husband, and come back here." The woman answered: "I have
not got a husband." Jesus said to her: "You spoke well when you said,
'I have not got a husband.' For you have had five husbands, and the one
you now have is not your husband. This is the truth that you have told."
The woman said to him: "Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our fathers
worshipped in this mountain and you say Jerusalem is the place where we
ought to worship." Jesus said: "Woman, believe me, the hour is coming
when you will worship the Father neither in this mountain nor in
Jerusalem."
We have seen how the woman jestingly asked Jesus to give her
the living water in order that she should not thirst again and might be
spared the tiring journey to the well. Suddenly and stabbingly Jesus
brought her to her senses. The time for verbal by-play was past; the
time for jesting was over. "Go," said Jesus, "and fetch your husband and
come back with him." The woman stiffened as if a sudden pain had caught
her; she recoiled as if hit by a sudden shock; she grew white as one
who had seen a sudden apparition; and so indeed she had, for she had
suddenly caught sight of herself.
She was suddenly compelled to face herself and the looseness and
immorality and total inadequacy of her life. There are two revelations
in Christianity: the revelation of God and the revelation of ourselves.
No man ever really sees himself until he sees himself in the presence of
Christ; and then he is appalled at the sight. There is another way of
putting it--Christianity begins with a sense of sin. It begins with the
sudden realization that life as we are living it will not do. We awake
to ourselves and we awake to our need of God.
Some people have held, because of this mention of the five
husbands, that this story is not an actual incident but an allegory. We
have seen that, when the original people of Samaria were exiled and
transported to Media, people from five other places were brought in.
These five different people brought in their own gods (2 Kings 17:29);
and it has been held that the woman stands for Samaria and the five
husbands for the five false gods to whom the Samaritans, as it were,
married themselves. The sixth husband stands for the true God, but, they
worship him, not truly, but in ignorance; and therefore they are not
married to him at all. It may be that there is a reminder of this
Samaritan infidelity to God in the story; but it is far too vivid to be a
manufactured allegory. It reads too much like life.
Someone has said that prophecy is criticism based on hope. A
prophet points out to a man or a nation what is wrong; but he does so
not to push them into despair but to point the way to cure and to
amendment and to rightness of life. So Jesus began by revealing to this
woman her own sinful state; but goes on to tell her of the true worship
in which our souls can meet God.
The woman's question comes strangely to us. She says, and she is
obviously troubled when she says it: "Our fathers say--that we ought to
worship here on Mount Gerizim; you say that we ought to worship in
Jerusalem; what am I to do?" The Samaritans adjusted history to suit
themselves. They taught that it was on Mount Gerizim that Abraham had
been willing to sacrifice Isaac; they taught that it was there that
Melchizedek had appeared to Abraham; they declared that it was on Mount
Gerizim that Moses had first entered an altar and sacrificed to God when
the people entered the promised land, although in fact it was on Mount
Ebal that was done (Deuteronomy 27:4).
They tampered with the text of scripture and with history to glorify
Mount Gerizim. The woman had been brought up to regard Mount Gerizim as
the most sacred spot in the world and to despise Jerusalem. What was in
her mind was this. She was saying to herself: "I am a sinner before God;
I must offer to God an offering for my sin; I must take that offering
to the house of God to put myself right with him; where am I going to
take it?" To her, as to all her contemporaries, the only cure for sin
was sacrifice. Her great problem was, where was that sacrifice to be
made? By this time she is not arguing about the respective merits of the
Temple on Mount Gerizim and the Temple on Mount Zion. All she wants to
know is: Where can I find God?
Jesus' answer was that the day of the old man-made rivalries was
coming to an end; and the time was on the way when men would find God
everywhere. It had been Zephaniah's vision that men shall worship God
"each in his place" (Zephaniah 2:11). It was Malachi's dream that in every place incense would be offered as a pure offering to the name of God (Malachi 1:11).
Jesus' answer to the woman was that she did not need to go anywhere
special to find God, neither to Mount Gerizim nor to Mount Zion. She did
not need to offer sacrifice in some special place; true worship finds
God in every place.
4:22-26 "You do not
know what you are worshipping. We do know what we worship, because the
world's salvation has its origin among the Jews. But the hour is
coming--the hour is now here--when the real worshippers will worship the
Father in spirit and in truth; for it is worshippers like that that the
Father is looking for. God is Spirit; and those who worship him must
worship him in spirit and in truth." The woman said to him: "I know that
the Messiah, he who is called Christ, is coming. When he has come he
will announce all things to us." Jesus said to her: "I who am speaking
to you am he."
Jesus had told the Samaritan woman that the old rivalries were
on the way out, that the day was coming when controversy about the
respective merits of Mount Gerizim and Mount Zion would be an
irrelevancy, that he who truly sought God would find him anywhere. For
all that Jesus still stressed the fact that the Jewish nation had a
unique place in God's plan and revelation.
The Samaritans worshipped in ignorance, he said. There was one
sense in which that was factually true. The Samaritans accepted only the
Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament. They rejected
all the rest of the Old Testament. They had therefore rejected all the
great messages of the prophets and all the supreme devotion of the
Psalms. They had in fact a truncated religion because they had a
truncated Bible; they had rejected the knowledge that was open to them
and that they might have had. Further, the Jewish Rabbis had always
charged the Samaritans with a merely superstitious worship of the true
God. They always said that the Samaritan worship was founded not on love
and knowledge, but on ignorance and fear. As we have seen, when the
foreign peoples were brought in to dwell in Samaria, they brought their
own gods with them (2 Kings 17:29). We are told that a priest from Bethel came and told them how they should fear the Lord.(2 Kings 17:28).
But all the probability is that they merely added Jehovah to their list
of gods because they were superstitiously afraid to leave him out.
After all he was the God of the land in which they were living and it
might be dangerous not to include him in their worship.
In a false worship we may detect three faults.
(i) A false worship is a selective worship. It chooses what it
wishes to know about God and omits the rest. The Samaritans took as much
of scripture as they wished and paid no attention to the rest. One of
the most dangerous things in the world is a one-sided religion. It is
very easy for a man to accept and hold such parts of God's truth as suit
him and to disregard the remainder. We have seen, for instance, how
certain thinkers and churchmen and politicians justify apartheid and
racial segregation by appeal to certain parts of scripture, while they
conveniently forget the far greater parts which forbid it.
A minister in a great city organized a petition to help a man
who had been condemned for a certain crime. It seemed to him that this
was a case where Christian mercy ought to operate. His telephone bell
rang, and a woman's voice said to him: "I am astonished that you, a
minister, should be lending your weight to this petition for mercy."
"Why should you be surprised?" he asked. The voice said: "I suppose you
know your Bible ... .. I hope so," he said. "Then," said the voice, "are
you not aware that the Bible says, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a
tooth'?" Here was a woman who took the part of the Bible which suited
her argument and forgot the great merciful teaching of Jesus in the
Sermon on the Mount.
We would do well to remember that, although no man will ever
grasp the whole orb of truth, it is total truth that we should aim at,
not the snatching at fragments which happen to suit ourselves and our
own position.
(ii) A false worship is an ignorant worship. Worship ought to be
the approach to God of the whole man. A man has a mind and he has a
duty to exercise it. Religion may begin with an emotional response; but
the time comes when that emotional response has to be thought out. E. F.
Scott said that religion is far more than merely the strenuous exercise
of the intellect, but that nonetheless a very great part of religious
failure is due to nothing other than intellectual sloth. To fail to
think things out is in itself a sin. In the last analysis, religion is
never safe until a man can tell, not only what he believes, but why he
believes it. Religion is hope, but it is hope with reason behind it (1 Peter 3:15).
(iii) A false worship is a superstitious worship. It is a
worship given, not out of a sense of need nor out of any real desire,
but basically because a man feels that it might be dangerous not to give
it. Many a person will refuse to walk beneath a ladder; many a person
will have a pleased feeling when a black cat crosses his path; many a
person will pick up a pin with the idea that good luck will follow; many
a person will have an uncomfortable feeling when he is one of thirteen
sitting at a table. He does not believe in these superstitions, but he
has the feeling that there might be something in them and he had better
play safe. There are many people whose religion is founded on a kind of
vague fear of what might happen if they leave God out of the reckoning.
But real religion is founded not on fear but on the love of God and
gratitude for what God has done. Too much religion is a kind of
superstitious ritual to avert the possible wrath of the unpredictable
gods.
Jesus pointed to the true worship. God, he said, is spirit.
Immediately a man grasps that, a new flood-light breaks over him. If God
is spirit, God is not confined to things; and therefore idol worship is
not only an irrelevancy, it is an insult to the very nature of God. If
God is spirit, God is not confined to places; and therefore to limit the
worship of God to Jerusalem or to any other spot is to set a limit to
that which by its nature overpasses all limits. If God is spirit, a
man's gifts to God must be gifts of the spirit. Animal sacrifices and
all man-made things become inadequate. The only gifts that befit the
nature of God are the gifts of the spirit--love, loyalty, obedience,
devotion.
A man's spirit is the highest part of him. That is the part
which lasts when the physical part has vanished. That is the part which
dreams the dreams and sees the visions which, because of the weakness
and faultiness of the body, may never be carried out. It is the spirit
of a man which is the source of his highest dreams and thoughts and
ideals and desires. The true worship is when man, through his spirit,
attains to friendship and intimacy with God. Genuine worship does not
consist in coming to a certain place nor in going through a certain
ritual or liturgy nor even in bringing certain gifts. True worship is
when the spirit, the immortal and invisible part of man, speaks to and
meets with God, himself immortal and invisible.
This passage closes with a great declaration. There had opened
before this Samaritan woman a vista which bewildered and staggered her.
Here were things beyond her understanding, things full of wonder. All
that she could say was: "When the Messiah, the Christ, the Anointed One
of God comes, then we will know all about it." Jesus said to her: "I who
am speaking to you am he." It is as if Jesus said this is not a dream
of the truth; this is the truth itself.
4:27-30 Upon this his
disciples came up; and they were in a state of amazement that he was
talking to a woman; but no one said: "What are you looking for?" or,
"Why are you talking to her?" So the woman left her water-pot, and went
away to the town and said to the people: "Come and see a man who told me
all things that I have done! Can this be the Anointed One of God?" They
came out of the town and were coming to him.
There is little wonder that the disciples were in a state of
bewildered amazement when they returned from their errand to the town of
Sychar and found Jesus talking to the Samaritan woman. We have already
seen the Jewish idea of women. The Rabbinic precept ran: "Let no one
talk with a woman in the street, no, not with his own wife." The Rabbis
so despised women and so thought them incapable of receiving any real
teaching that they said: "Better that the words of the law should be
burned than deliver to women." They had a saying: "Each time that a man
prolongs converse with a woman he causes evil to himself, and desists
from the law, and in the end inherits Gehinnom." By Rabbinic standards
Jesus could hardly have done a more shatteringly unconventional thing
than to talk to this woman. Here is Jesus taking the barriers down.
There follows a curiously revealing touch. It is the kind which
could hardly have come from anyone except from one who had actually
shared in this scene. However staggered the disciples might be, it did
not occur to them to ask the woman what she was looking for or to ask
Jesus why he was talking to her. They were beginning to know him; and
they had already arrived at the conclusion that, however surprising his
actions were, they were not to be questioned. A man has taken a great
step to real discipleship when he learns to say: "It is not for me to
question the actions and the demands of Jesus. My prejudices and my
conventions must go down before them."
By this time the woman was on her way back to the village
without her water-pot. The fact that she left her water-pot showed two
things. It showed that she was in a hurry to share this extraordinary
experience, and it showed that she never dreamed of doing anything else
but come back. Her whole action has much to tell us of real Christian
experience.
(i) Her experience began with being compelled to face herself
and to see herself as she was. The same thing happened to Peter. After
the draft of fishes, when Peter suddenly discovered something of the
majesty of Jesus, all he could say was: "Depart from me; for I am a
sinful man, O Lord" (Luke 5:8).
Our Christian experience will often begin with a humiliating wave of
self-disgust. It usually happens that the last thing a man sees is
himself. And it often happens that the first thing Christ does for a man
is to compel him to do what he has spent his life refusing to do--look
at himself.
(ii) The Samaritan woman was staggered by Christ's ability to
see into her inmost being. She was amazed at his intimate knowledge of
the human heart, and of her heart in particular. The Psalmist was awed
by that same thought. "Thou discernest my thoughts from afar.... Even
before a word is on my tongue, lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether" (Psalms 139:1-4).
It is told that once a small girl heard a sermon by C. H. Spurgeon, and
whispered to her mother at the end of it: "Mother, how does he know
what goes on in our house?" There are no wrappings and disguises which
are proof against the gaze of Christ. It is his power to see into the
depths of the human heart. It is not that he sees only the evil there;
he sees also the sleeping hero in the soul of every man. He is like the
surgeon who sees the diseased thing, but who also sees the health which
will follow when the evil thing is taken away.
(iii) The first instinct of the Samaritan woman was to share her
discovery. Having found this amazing person, she was compelled to share
her find with others. The Christian life is based on the twin pillars
of discovery and communication. No discovery is complete until the
desire to share it fills our hearts; and we cannot communicate Christ to
others until we have discovered him for ourselves. First to find, then
to tell, are the two great steps of the Christian life.
(iv) This very desire to tell others of her discovery killed in
this woman the feeling of shame. She was no doubt an outcast; she was no
doubt a byword; the very fact that she was drawing water from this
distant well shows how she avoided her neighbours and how they avoided
her. But now she ran to tell them of her discovery. A person may have
some trouble which he is embarrassed to mention and which he tries to
keep secret, but once he is cured he is often so filled with wonder and
gratitude that he tells everyone about it. A man may hide his sin; but
once he discovers Jesus Christ as Saviour, his first instinct is to say
to men: "Look at what I was and look at what I am; this is what Christ
has done for me."
4:31-34 Meanwhile his
disciples asked him: "Rabbi! Eat something! have food," he said to them,
"of which you do not know." "Surely," his disciples kept saying to each
other, "someone can't have given him something to eat?" "My food," said
Jesus to them, "is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete
his work."
This passage follows the normal pattern of the conversations of
the Fourth Gospel. Jesus says something which is misunderstood. He says
something which has a spiritual meaning. It is at first taken with an
uncomprehending literalism and then slowly he unfolds the meaning until
it is grasped and realized. It is exactly the same as Jesus did when he
talked to Nicodemus about being born again, and when he talked to the
woman about the water which quenched the thirst of the heart for ever.
By this time the disciples had come back with food, and they
asked Jesus to eat. They had left him so tired and exhausted that they
were worried that he did not seem to want to eat any of the provisions
which they had brought back. It is strange how a great task can lift a
man above and beyond bodily needs. All his life Wilberforce, who freed
the slaves, was a little, insignificant, ailing creature. When he rose
to address the House of Commons, the members at first used to smile at
this queer little figure; but as the fire and the power came from the
man, they used to crowd the benches whenever he rose to speak. As it was
put: "The little minnow became a whale." His message, his task, the
flame of truth and the dynamic of power conquered his physical weakness.
There is a picture of John Knox preaching in his old age. He was a done
old man; he was so weak that he had to be half lifted up the pulpit
steps and left supporting himself on the book-board; but before he had
long begun his sermon the voice had regained its old trumpet-call and he
was like "to ding the pulpit into blads (to knock the pulpit into
splinters) and leap out of it." The message filled the man with a kind
of supernatural strength.
Jesus' answer to his disciples was that he had food of which
they knew nothing. In their simplicity they wondered if someone had
brought him food to eat. Then he told them: "My food is to do the will
of him who sent me."
The great keynote of Jesus' life is submission to the will of
God. His uniqueness lies in the very fact that he was the only person
who ever was or who ever will be perfectly obedient to God's will. It
can be truly said that Jesus is the only person in all the world who
never did what he liked but always what God liked.
He was God-sent. Again and again the Fourth Gospel speaks of
Jesus being sent by God. There are two Greek words used in the Fourth
Gospel for this sending. There is apostellein (Greek #649) which is used seventeen times and pempein (Greek #3992)
which is used twenty-seven times. That is to say, no fewer than
forty-four times the Fourth Gospel speaks, or shows us Jesus speaking,
about his being sent by God. Jesus was one who was under orders. He was
God's man.
Then once Jesus had come, again and again he spoke of the work that was given him to do. In John 5:36 he speaks of the works which his Father has given him to do. In John 17:4
his only claim is that he has finished the work his Father gave him to
do. When he speaks of taking up and laying down his life, of living and
of dying, he says: "This commandment have I received of my Father" (John 10:18).
He speaks continually, as he speaks here, of the will of God. "I have
come down from heaven," he says, "not to do my own will, but the will of
him who sent me" (John 6:38). "I always do," he says, "what is pleasing to him" (John 8:29). In John 14:23
he lays it down, out of his personal experience and on his personal
example, that the only proof of love lies in the keeping of the
commandments of the one a man claims to love. This obedience of Jesus
was not as it is with us, a spasmodic thing. It was the very essence and
being, the mainspring and the core, the dynamic and the moving power of
his life.
It is his great desire that we should be as he was.
(i) To do the will of God is the only way to peace. There can be
no peace when we are at variance with the king of the universe.
(ii) To do the will of God is the only way to happiness. There
can be no happiness when we set our human ignorance against the divine
wisdom of God.
(iii) To do the will of God is the only way to power. When we go
our own way, we have nothing to call on but our own power, and
therefore collapse is inevitable. When we go God's way, we go in his
power, and therefore victory is secure.
4:35-38 "Are you not
in the habit of saying: 'Four months, and the harvest will come'? Look
you! I say to you, lift up your eyes and look at the fields, because
they are already white for the harvesting. The harvester receives his
reward and stores up fruit which makes for eternal life, so that he who
sows and he who harvests may rejoice together. In this the saying is
true--one sows and another harvests. I have sent you to harvest a crop
which your labour did not produce. Others have laboured, and you have
entered into their labours."
All this that was happening in Samaria had given Jesus a vision
of a world to be harvested for God. When he said: "Four months, and the
harvest will come," we are not to think that he was speaking of the
actual time of year that it was in Samaria at that time. If that were
so, it would have been somewhere round about January. There would have
been no exhausting heat; and there would have been no scarcity of water.
One would not have needed a well to find water; it would have been the
rainy season, and there would have been plenty of water.
What Jesus is doing is quoting a proverb. The Jews had a sixfold
division of the agricultural year. Each division was held to last two
months--seedtime, winter, spring, harvest, summer and the season of
extreme heat. Jesus is saying: "You have got a proverb; if you sow the
seed, you must wait for at least four months before you can hope to
begin to reap the harvest." Then Jesus looked up. Sychar is in the midst
of a region that is still famous for its corn. Agricultural land was
very limited in stony, rocky Palestine; practically nowhere else in the
country could a man look up and see the waving fields of golden corn.
Jesus swept his gaze and his hand round. "Look," he said, "the fields
are white and ready for the harvest. They took four months to grow; but
in Samaria there is a harvest for the reaping now."
For once, it is the contrast between nature and grace of which
Jesus is thinking. in the ordinary harvest men sowed and waited; in
Samaria things had happened with such divine suddenness that the word
was sown and on the spot the harvest waited. H. V. Morton has a
specially interesting suggestion about the fields white for the harvest.
He himself was sitting at this very spot where Jacob's well is. As he
sat, he saw the people come out from the village and start to climb the
hill. They came in little batches; and they were all wearing white robes
and the white robes stood out against the ground and the sky. It may
well be that just at this moment the people started to flock out to
Jesus in response to the woman's story. As they streamed out in their
white robes across the fields, perhaps Jesus said: "Look at the fields!
See them now! They are white to the harvest!" The white-robed crowd was
the harvest which he was eager to reap for God.
Jesus went on to show that the incredible had happened. The
sower and the harvester could rejoice at the same time. Here was
something no man might expect. To the Jew sowing was a sad and a
laborious time; it was harvest which was the time of joy. "May those who
sow in tears reap with shouts of joy! He that goes forth weeping,
bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy,
bringing his sheaves with him" (Psalms 136:5-6).
There is something else hidden below the surface here. The Jews
had their dreams of the golden age, the age to come, the age of God,
when the world would be God's world, when sin and sorrow would be done
away with and God would reign supreme. Amos paints his picture of it:
"Behold the days are coming, saith the Lord, when the ploughman shall
overtake the reaper, and the treader of grapes him who sows the seed" (Amos 9:13). "Your threshing shall last the time of vintage, and the vintage shall last the time for sowing" (Leviticus 26:5).
It was the dream of that golden age that sowing and reaping, planting
and harvesting, would follow hard upon the heels of each other. There
would be such fertility that the old days of waiting would be at an end.
We can see what Jesus is gently doing here. His words are nothing less
than a claim that with him the golden age has dawned; God's time is
here; the time when the word is spoken and the seed is sown and the
harvest waits.
There was another side to that--and Jesus knew it. "There is
another proverb," he said, "and it too is true--one sows and another
harvests." Then he went on to make two applications of that.
(a) He told his disciples that they would reap a crop which had
been produced not by their labour. He meant that he was sowing the seed,
that in his Cross, above all, the seed of the love and the power of God
would be sown, and that the day would come when the disciples would go
out into the world and reap the harvest that his life and death had
sown.
(b) He told his disciples that the day would come when they
would sow and others would reap. There would be a time when the
Christian Church sent out its evangelists; they would never see the
harvest; some of them would die as martyrs, but the blood of the martyrs
would be the seed of the church. It is as if he said: "Some day you
will labour and you will see nothing for it. Some day you will sow and
you will pass from the scene before the harvest is reaped. Never fear!
Never be discouraged! The sowing is not in vain; the seed is not wasted!
Others will see the harvest which it was not given to you to see."
So in this passage there are two things.
(i) There is the reminder of an opportunity. The harvest waits
to be reaped for God. There come times in history when men are curiously
and strangely sensitive to God. What a tragedy it is if Christ's Church
at such a time fails to reap Christ's harvest!
(ii) There is the reminder of a challenge. It is given to many a
man to sow but not to reap. Many a ministry succeeds, not by its own
force and merits, but because of some saintly man who lived and preached
and died and left an influence which was greater in his absence than in
his presence. Many a man has to work and never sees the results of his
labours. I was once taken round an estate which was famous for its
rhododendrons. Its owner loved their acres and knew them all by name. He
showed me certain seedlings which would take twenty-five years to
flower. He was nearly seventy-five and would never see their beauty--but
someone would. No work for Christ and no great undertaking ever fail.
If we do not see the result of our labours, others will. There is no
room for despair in the Christian life.
4:39-42 Many of the
Samaritans from that city believed on him, because of the woman's story,
for she testified: "He told me all things that I have done." So when
the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay amongst them, and he
stayed there two days. And many more believed when they heard his word,
and they said to the woman: "No longer do we believe because of your
talk. We ourselves have listened to him, and we know that this is really
the Saviour of the World."
In the events which happened at Samaria we have the pattern by
which the gospel so often spreads. In the rise of belief among the
Samaritans there were three stages.
(i) There was introduction. The Samaritans were introduced to
Christ by the woman. Here we see full-displayed God's need of us. Paul
said:. "How are they to hear without a preacher?" (Romans 10:14).
The word of God must be transmitted by man to man. God cannot deliver
his message to those who have never heard it unless there is someone to
deliver it.
"He has no hands but our hands
To do his work today:
He has no feet but our feet
To lead men in his way:
He has no voice but our voice
To tell men how he died:
He has no help but our help
To lead them to his side."
It is at once our precious privilege and our terrible
responsibility to bring men to Christ. The introduction cannot be made
unless there is a man to make it.
Further, that introduction is made on the strength of personal
witness. The cry of the Samaritan woman was: "Look what he has done for
me and to me." It was not to a theory that she called her neighbours; it
was to a dynamic and changing power. The church can expand until the
kingdoms of the world become the kingdoms of the Lord only when men and
women themselves experience the power of Christ, and then transmit that
experience to others.
(ii) There was nearer intimacy and growing knowledge. Once the
Samaritans had been introduced to Christ, they sought his company. They
asked him to stay with them that they might learn of him and come to
know him better. It is true that a man must be introduced to Christ, but
it is equally true that once he has been introduced he must himself go
on to live in the presence of Christ. No man can go through an
experience for another man. Others may lead us to the friendship of
Christ, but we must claim and enjoy that friendship ourselves.
(iii) There came discovery and surrender. The Samaritans
discovered in Christ the Saviour of the world. It is not likely that
they themselves put it exactly that way. John was writing years
afterwards, and was putting the discovery of the Samaritans into his own
words, words which enshrine a life-time's living with and thinking
about Jesus Christ. It is only in John that we find this tremendous
title. We find it here and in 1 John 4:14. To him it was the title par excellence for Christ.
John did not invent the title. In the Old Testament God had
often been called the God of salvation, the Saviour, the saving God.
Many of the Greek gods had acquired this title. At the time John was
writing the Roman Emperor was invested with the title Saviour of the
World. It is as if John said: "All that you have dreamed of has at last
in Jesus come true."
We do well to remember this title. Jesus was not simply a
prophet, who came with a message in words from God. He was not simply an
expert psychologist with an uncanny faculty for seeing into the human
mind. True, he showed that very skill in the case of the Samaritan
woman, but he showed more than that. He was not simply an example. He
did not come simply to show men the way in which life ought to be lived.
A great example can be merely heart-breaking and frustrating when we
find ourselves powerless to follow it.
Jesus was Saviour. He rescued men from the evil and hopeless
situation in which they found themselves; he broke the chains that bound
them to the past and gave them a power which enabled them to meet the
future. The Samaritan woman is in fact the great example of his saving
power. The town where she stayed would no doubt have labelled her a
character beyond reformation; and she herself would no doubt have agreed
that a respectable life was beyond her. But Jesus came and doubly
rescued her; he enabled her to break away from the past and he opened a
new future to her. There is no title adequate to describe Jesus except
Saviour of the World.
4:43-45 Two days after
Jesus left there and went to Galilee. Jesus himself declared that a
prophet has no honour in his own country. But when he came into Galilee,
the Galilaeans welcomed him, because they had seen all that he had done
at Jerusalem at the Feast, for they too had gone to the Feast.
All three synoptic gospels tell of the saying of Jesus that a prophet has no honour in his own country (Mark 6:4; Matthew 13:57; Luke 4:24).
It was an ancient proverb with much the same meaning as our own
"familiarity breeds contempt." But John introduces it in a very strange
place. The other gospels introduce it on occasions when Jesus was
rejected by his own countrymen; John introduces it on an occasion when
he was accepted.
It may be that John is reading the mind of Jesus. We have
already seen that Jesus had left Judaea and set out for Galilee to avoid
the controversy that an increasing publicity was bringing to him. The
hour of conflict had not yet come (John 4:1-4).
It may be that his astonishing success in Samaria had actually
surprised him; his words about the astonishing harvest have the ring of
glad surprise about them. It may well be that Jesus set out for Galilee
hoping to find rest and retirement there, because he did not expect
those of his native country to respond to him. And it may be that
exactly the same happened in Galilee as happened in Samaria, that
against all expectations there was a surge of response to his teaching.
We must either explain the saying in this way or assume that somehow it
has crept into the wrong place.
However that may be, this passage and the one before give us the
unanswerable argument for Christ. The Samaritans believed in Jesus, not
because of someone else's story but because they themselves had heard
him speak things whose like they had never heard. The Galilaeans
believed in him, not because someone had told them about him but because
they had seen him do in Jerusalem things whose like they had never
seen. The words he spoke and the deeds he did were arguments to which
there was no answer.
Here we have one of the great truths of the Christian life. The
only real argument for Christianity is a Christian experience. It may be
that sometimes we have to argue with people until the intellectual
barriers which they have erected are battered down and the citadel of
their mind capitulates. But in the great majority of cases the only
persuasion we can use is to say: "I know what Jesus is like and I know
what Jesus can do. All that I can ask you to do is to try him yourself
and to see what happens." Effective Christian evangelism really begins
when we can say: "I know what Christ has done for me," and go on to say:
"Try him, and see what he can do for you."
Here again tremendous personal responsibility is laid upon us.
No one is likely to attempt the experience unless our own lives show its
value. There is little use in telling people that Christ will bring
them joy and peace and power, if our own lives are gloomy, worried and
defeated. Men will be persuaded to try the experiment only when they see
that for us it has ended in an experience which is much to be desired.
4:46-54 So again he
came to Cana in Galilee, where he had made the water into wine. Now
there was a certain courtier whose son was ill in Capernaum. When this
man heard that Jesus had come from Judaea into Galilee, he went to him
and asked him to come down and heal his son, for he was going to die.
Jesus said to him: "Unless you see signs and wonders you will never
believe." The courtier said to him: "Sir, come down before my little lad
dies." Jesus said to him: "Go your way! Your son lives!" The man
believed the word which Jesus spoke to him, and started on his way home.
While he was still on the way down, his slaves met him and said: "Your
son lives!" So he asked them at what hour his condition had improved.
They told him: "Yesterday, at one o'clock in the afternoon, the fever
left him." The father knew that that was the hour at which Jesus said to
him: "Your son lives!" And he and his whole household believed.
This is the second sign which Jesus did after he had come from Judaea into Galilee.
Most of the commentators think this is another version of the story of the healing of the centurion's servant told in Matthew 8:5-13 and Luke 7:1-10;
but there are differences which justify us in treating it as quite
independent. Certain things about the conduct of this courtier are an
example to all men.
(i) Here is a courtier who came to a carpenter. The Greek is basilikos (Greek #937)
which could even mean that he was a petty king; but it is used for a
royal official and he was a man of high standing at the court of Herod.
Jesus on the other hand had no greater status than that of the village
carpenter of Nazareth. Further, Jesus was in Cana and this man lived in
Capernaum, almost twenty miles away. That is why he took so long to get
back home.
There could be no more improbable scene in the world than an
important court official hastening twenty miles to beg a favour from a
village carpenter. First and foremost, this courtier swallowed his
pride. He was in need, and neither convention nor custom stopped him
bringing his need to Christ. His action would cause a sensation but he
did not care what people said so long as he obtained the help he so much
wanted. If we want the help which Christ can give we must be humble
enough to swallow our pride and not care what any man may say.
(ii) Here is a courtier who refused to be discouraged. Jesus met
him with the at first sight bleak statement that people would not
believe unless they were supplied with signs and wonders. It may well be
that Jesus aimed that saying, not so much at the courtier himself, as
at the crowd that must have gathered to see the outcome of this
sensational happening. They would be there all agape to see what would
happen.
But Jesus had a way of making sure that a person was in earnest. He did that to the Syro-Phoenician woman (Matthew 15:21-28).
If the man had turned irritably and petulantly away; if he had been too
proud to accept a rebuke; if he had given up despairingly on the
spot--Jesus would have known that his faith was not real. A man must be
in earnest before the help of Christ can come to him.
(iii) Here was a courtier who had faith. It must have been hard
for him to turn away and go home with Jesus' assurance that his little
lad would live. Nowadays men are beginning to realize the power of
thought and of telepathy in such a way that no one would reject this
miracle simply because it was wrought at a distance; but it must have
been difficult for the courtier. Yet he had faith enough to turn and
walk back that twenty mile road with nothing but Jesus' assurance to
comfort his heart.
It is of the very essence of faith that we should believe that
what Jesus says is true. So often we have a kind of vague, wistful
longing that the promises of Jesus should be true. The only way really
to enter into them is to believe in them with the clutching intensity of
a drowning man. If Jesus says a thing, it is not a case of "It may be
true"; it is a case of "It must be true."
(iv) Here was a courtier who surrendered. He was not a man who
got out of Christ what he wanted and then went away to forget. He and
all his household believed. That would not be easy for him, for the idea
of Jesus as the Anointed One of God must have cut across all his
preconceived notions. Nor would it be easy at the court of Herod to
profess faith in Jesus. He would have mockery and laughter to endure;
and no doubt there would be those who thought that he had gone slightly
mad.
But this courtier was a man who faced and accepted the facts. He
had seen what Jesus could do; he had experienced it; and there was
nothing left for it but surrender. He had begun with a sense of
desperate need; that need had been supplied; and his sense of need had
turned into an overmastering love. That must always be the story of the
Christian life.
Most New Testament scholars think that at this point in the
Fourth Gospel the chapters have somehow become misplaced. They hold that
John 6:1-71 should come before John 5:1-47 . The reason is this. John 4:1-54 finishes with Jesus in Galilee (John 4:54). John 5:1-47 begins with Jesus in Jerusalem. John 6:1-71 again shows us Jesus in Galilee. John 7:1-53
begins with the implication that Jesus had just come into Galilee
because of the opposition which he met in Jerusalem. The changes between
Jerusalem and Galilee become very difficult to follow. On the other
hand John 4:1-54 (John 4:54) ends: "This the second sign that Jesus did, when he had come from Judaea to Galilee." John 6:1-71 begins (John 6:1): "After this thing Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee," which would be a natural sequence. John 5:1-47
then shows us Jesus going to Jerusalem for a Feast and meeting with
very serious trouble with the Jewish authorities. We are in fact told
that from that time they began to persecute him (John 5:10). Then John 7:1-53 begins by saying that Jesus went about in Galilee and "would not go about in Judea, because the Jews sought to kill him" (John 7:1).
Here we have not altered the order; but we must note that to take John 6:1-71 before John 5:1-47 does give an easier and more natural order of events.
-Barclay's Daily Study Bible (NT)