Moving Beyond Israel - Reflections on John 4:5-42, Third Sunday in Lent, Year A

by John C. Holbert on Tuesday, January 20, 2026

         The obvious key to this long and famous passage concerning Jesus and the woman at the well of Samaria is the notion that Jesus’s ministry is not to be a confining one, limited to his fellow Jews, but will, of divine necessity, be a ministry that will spread well beyond such limitations. John’s Gospel indicates this bursting of the boundaries of Judaism in several ways, both subtle and overt. 

         There is first an odd note in John 4:2 that claims “Jesus himself did not baptize, but only his disciples,” a clear contradiction of John 3:22 as well as the just mentioned 4:1 where Jesus is said plainly to be one who baptizes people! This problem has led more than a few commentators to suggest that John 4:2 is a rather clumsy addition to the original text of John. However, this claim that Jesus and many of Jesus’s followers along with John the Baptizer are in fact prolific in their ministry of baptism—there are said to be a plethora of baptizers!—is the reason why the Pharisees are uncomfortable with Jesus and his disciples and apparently are anxious for him to leave Judea (John 4:1-3). All this baptismal activity is creating more and more followers of Jesus. Thus, however confusing this multiplicity of baptismal actions may be, and whether or not Jesus himself joins into that ministry, it becomes the reason that Jesus heads north toward Galilee. It obviously makes it all too plain that Jesus’ ministry is becoming increasingly popular, and the Pharisees are only too glad to see the back of the man.

         After that rather peculiar and subtle suggestion why Jesus must leave Judea and head north, John now becomes far more direct concerning the expanding work of the divine Word of God, Jesus. There were two quite well-known ways for a Jew to journey north to Galilee from Judea: go straight through Samaria, the shorter way, or travel via the east side of Jordan, thus avoiding Samaria entirely. The latter route was longer, but for any Jew far safer, because the relationships between Jews and Samaritans had long been a fraught one. Though Jews and Samaritans shared much in common— Hebrew language and a Hebrew Bible, though the Samaritans worshipped on Mt. Gerizim rather than in Jerusalem, a difference that could be traced back to the destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians some 750 years prior to the time of Jesus—those differences over the years had hardened, making each group deeply suspicious of the other. Though it was true that the centralized Roman government had improved travel conditions in the region of Samaria, there remained dangers for Jews who wished merely to pass through on their way north. 

         But John’s precise wording of Jesus’s trip is important. “But he had to pass through Samaria” (John 4:40). The Greek edei is to be translated “had to.” John says that Jesus went this way under divine constraint, not because the way was shorter. Jesus thus goes into Samaria as the result of divine necessity; he simply must, according to John, move into a world beyond Israel. This is John’s unique way of describing the expanding ministry of Jesus. We should also note at this point the wider and richer meaning of the most famous verses from John’s Gospel, namely John 3:16-17. “For God so loved the cosmos,” it says in Greek, and Jesus has come “in order that the cosmos might be saved (or “made whole”). The use of cosmos suggests that the work of Jesus is far broader and more comprehensive than merely the world as we know it; that work bears cosmic significance, however small first-century people imagined that cosmos to be.

         Now that Jesus, under divine direction, is in Samaria, he meets the famous woman at the well of Jacob, in the city of Sychar, a place of unknown location. In their fabulous dialogue, where the woman first names Jesus “Jew,” (John 4:9), but later calls him “sir,” using the Greek kyrie, which of course translated as “Lord” bears richer connotations for Jesus’s fuller identity in the Gospel, and finally leads her to suspect that Jesus may in fact be Messiah (John 4:25, 29)., in the end this woman becomes the first evangelist for Jesus (John 4:39).

         When the disciples return from their trip into the city to buy some food, and see Jesus conversing openly in the middle of the day with a woman, they were “dumbfounded” (NRSV “astonished”) that he was speaking with a woman” (John 4:27). The Greek thaumazien expresses sheer amazement and shock. Indeed, the questions that John says no one asks Jesus: “What do you want?” Or “Why are you speaking with her?” bear more than a whiff of sexual innuendo. Goodness, master, they imply, a woman in broad daylight? What must you be thinking? And what will all these Samaritans think? In these ways, too, John makes it certain that the ministry of Jesus is ever expanding, including both Samaritans and even their women! 

         This wonderful passage, replete with sermon opportunities, can hardly be plumbed in one short essay. But it certainly implies that this Jesus, the Word of God made flesh, is under the call of his God bound to bring the message of that God well beyond the borders of Judea, well beyond the boundaries of Galilee, well beyond even the limitations of the known world. Jesus’s work is nothing less than cosmic in scope, and he bids all of his followers to join him in that vast work.