The Story of Jesus. Roy A. Harrisville

here. Further, this birth is undiscoverble by those who have not undergone it. In a sentence reminiscent of the Jewish wisdom teacher, Jesus says, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). To all of which Nicodemus responds: “How can these things be?” only to be reprimnded for an obtuseness suggestive of deficient learning: “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?” (John 3:10). Continuing his reprimand, Jesus appeals to the testimony of witnesses which Nicodemus should have allowed: “We speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen, yet you do not receive our testimony.” According to Mosaic law, two witnesses sufficed to sustain a charge,11 and to whom would that “we” refer, if not “the one who descended from heaven” (John 3:13) and the one from whom he descended? The inability to understand hides a refusal to receive. Then, curiously, Jesus says: “If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things?” (John 3:12). The refusal to receive has become a refusal to believe. But how could that “birth from above. . .by water and Spirit” be taken to be “earthly things”? Nicodemus has been conceded some grasp of the situation. The Pharisee has at least understood that the “birth” of which Jesus speaks has to do with being, with existence. He has tumbled to the ontological aspect of the event, though he construes it entirely in terms of an earthly, human activity, entrance into the womb a second time, an event he rejects, disbelieves. Then follows the first passion prediction in the Fourth Gospel, prefaced by the statement that “no one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man.” Whether a post-Easter titular use or no, “Son of Man” here is a self-reference, and the word of his ascent is a prolepsis, the anticipation of an event yet to occur, the hour of his “going to the Father” (John 14:12), the “hour” of his glorification, for this evangelist synonymous with his crucifixion (John 17:1). Faith in this “Son of Man,” not the apocalyptic figure of Jewish hope, masked, incognito, suspected of being this one or that, but the one “lifted up,” crucified, gives eternal life. “For,” Jesus continues (use of the indeclinable particle is argumentative, gives the reason for the statement preceding), it was love of the world that God gave his only Son, “gave” being another prolepsis, another anticipation of an event yet to occur. The term used for that event (“gave” = edoken in the Greek), willed by both Father and Son, would reflect the Old Testament concept of sacrifice as atonement. And if the evangelist was not only at odds with members of the synagogue whio refused Jesus as Messiah, but also with Gnostics and their notion of earth as evil, and the body as a prison, this was one more shot across their bow. Nor was this “sending” of the Son a condemnation of the world, but a salvation through faith in him. Faith, then, would decide the issue whether the world would return the love it had been shown in the “lifting up” or the “giving” or the “sending” of the Son of Man. And that lifting up, that giving or sending was a “light” to which those would come who “do what is true,” or as the original reads, “who do the truth.” This curious phrase appears nowhere else in the New Testament, and however construed it leaves no room for truth as an abstraction, a mere correspondence of thought and reality pursued with the mind, but a coherence realized in action, in something done, in a coming to “the light.” On the other hand, those who would not come to “the light” loved “darkness” because their evil risked exposure. “Light” and “dark” make up a pair used to illustrate every fundamental theological idea of the Old Testament. None better contrasts chaos and creation; none more adequately reveals glimpses of the holiness of God, expresses the experience of the Creator, or conveys the prophecy of the revelation of the Being of God and his judgment. The pair is forerunner of some of the greatest New Testament utterances. And so they appear here in a context which for many is the most signal utterance in the Gospel of John: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (John 3:16). Ultimately, Nicodemus will have negotiated the hurdle, will have come to “the light.” With Joseph of Arimathea he brought myrrh and aloes with which to wrap the body of Jesus (John 19:39–40).

      Jesus’ conversation with the woman at the well occurs at Sychar, near Shechem, chief city of the Samaritans. The inhabitants of the region, the “Northern Kingdom,” originally comprised the tribes of Ephraim, Manasseh, Issachar, Asher, and Zebulun. Led by their reading of II Kings, historians have traditionally described the Samaritans as a mixed race, resulting from a massive transmigration during the Assyrian occupation in approximately 721 BC Taking its lead from II Chronicles, current research tends to regard the inhabitants as retaining their Jewish identity, despite the Assyrian military campaigns. For example, in II Chronicles 30, King Hezekiah of Judah issues an invitation to “all Israel and Judah. . .also to Ephraim and Manasseh,” to come to Jerusalem to keep the Passover. The division between Judaeans and Samaritans may not have occurred till the third century BC when the Israelites of Samaria built their sanctuary to Yahweh at Mt. Gerizim. From that point the Samaritan religion as we know it began to harden, with its sole appeal to the Pentateuch as scripture mediated by Moses, appeal to the altar at Gerizim as built by Joshua at Moses’ command, and its prospect of a final day of vengeance and recompense initiated by the Messiah or Taheb. The New Testament as well as the Mishnah reflect ambivalence toward the Samaritans. For instance, the New Testament records that Jesus encountered resistance in the Samaritan villages (Luke 9:52–53), and instructed the disciples not to go there (Matthew 10:5–6), but it also notes that Jesus healed a Samaritan (Luke 17:11–19), and that a Samaritan figured large in his most famous parable (the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:29–37). The Book of Acts, chapter 8, refers to Samaria as an early mission field. Likewise, the Mishnah allows the Samaritan to share the Common Grace, to pronounce the “Amen” after the Benediction, to care for produce and sell wine designated for tithing.12 But it also records the saying of Rabbi Eleazar ben Hyrcanus, one of the most prominent scholars of the first and second centures AD, and the sixth most frequently mentioned in the Mishnah, that “He that eats the bread of the Samaritans is like to one that eats the flesh of swine.”13 Jesus encountered the Samaritan woman on his way from Judea through Samaria to Galilee. Seeing her at the well he asked her to give him a drink, to which she replied “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (John 4:9), to which the evangelist adds his note that the one has nothing to do with the other, reflecting one of the coontradictories noted above. Then follows an extended exchange about water in which the woman, just as Nicodemus, trips over the double entrendre, construes Jesus’ reference to the “living water” he will give as one part hydrogen and two parts oxygen, and he without a bucket and the well deep. To Jesus’ correction, but this time without tracing the error to a lack of learning, the woman asks for a water that will never again need drawing from Jacob’s well. The woman has tripped again, but, just as Nicodemus, has caught at least a glimpse of Jesus’ intent. She acknowledges him as the one able to furnish such an uncommon element: “Sir,” she says, or “Lord” (Kyrie in the Greek), “give me this water” ( 4:15). Then Jesus abruptly breaks off the dialogue to tell the woman to go, call her husband. She replies that she has none, Jesus agrees, notes she has had five, and is not married to number six. Addressing Jesus as “Lord” for the second time, the woman in astonishment says, “I see that you are a prophet” (4:19), and proceeds to engage in a theological conversation reflecting the competition between Jews and Samaritans over the central sanctuary: “Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem” (4:20). Then, majestically (“Woman, believe me”), Jesus gives worship a character sufficient to render site irrelevant: “The hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. . .when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth” (4:21, 23). Curiously, between those two phrases, Jesus denies that to the Samaritan and asserts that only the Jew has a worship aware of its object: “You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews” (4:22). Having just rendered worship sites irrelevant, it cannot mean that Judaism is an exception, but rather that despite its clinging to geography the reltivizing of site has its origin in Judaism, and God for its author: ”For the Father seeks such as these to worship him” (4:23b). To this the woman responds, “I know that Messiah is coming” (4:25). There is nothing askew in her response. Just as