And said unto the woman, Now we believe, not because of thy saying: for we have heard him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world.
And said unto the woman, Now we believe, not because of thy saying, х ouk (G3756) eti (G2089) dia (G1223) teen (G3588) seen (G4674) lalian (G2981)] - or, 'No longer do we believe because of thy saying;'
For we have heard him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world - or, according to the order in the original, 'that this is indeed the Saviour of the world, the Christ.' What a marvelous simplicity and docility do these Samaritans display! They first credit the woman's simple testimony, and let her bring them to Jesus; then they are satisfied by one brief interview with Himself that He is the Christ, and invite Him to visit them; and when He condescends to do so, His two days' stay not only brings over manymore to the same faith in Him, but raises that faith to a conviction-never reached by the Jews, and hardly as yet attained by His own disciples-that as the Christ He was "the Saviour of the world." And yet, beyond the supernatural knowledge which He had displayed in His interview with the woman, He does not appear to have performed any miracle before these Samaritans. Is there anything in the Gospel History more remarkable than this? those were two precious days, surely, to the Redeemer Himself! Unsought, He had come to His own, yet His own received Him not; now those who were not His own had come to Him, been won by Him, and invited Him to their town that others might share with them in the benefit of His wonderful ministry. Here, then, would He solace His already wounded spirit, and have in this outfield village-triumph of His grace a sublime foretaste of the inbringing of the whole Gentile world into the Church. Olshausen correctly notes this as 'a rare instance of the Lord's ministry producing an awakening on a large scale.'
Remarks:
(1) Did He who, when the time to suffer arrived, "set His face like a flint," withdraw from Judea to Galilee when Pharisaic jealousy at Jerusalem would have come too soon to a head, and arrested the work given Him to do? Let His followers learn from Him this wisdom of the serpent while manifesting, with Him, the harmlessness of the dove. Needless exposure is as much to be avoided as a cowardly flight, in times when the truth cannot be confessed without personal danger.
(2) In what a light do the condescension, the zeal, the skill, the patience, which Jesus bestowed upon the woman of Samaria place the value of a single soul! Apart from all that followed, what a rescue was effected in that one cause! See a similar care of one soul in the case of the Ethiopian eunuch, with a view to whose illumination Philip the Evangelist was taken out of full and glorious work in the city of Samaria, away to the desert road from Jerusalem to Gaza (Acts 8:26, etc., on which see). "Brethren," says James, "if any [one] of you х tis (G5100) en (G1722) humin (G5213)] do err from the truth, and one convert him, let him know that he which converteth a sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death, and shall hide a multitude of sins" (see the notes at James 5:19-20). And observe how casually this woman of Samaria was gained. Jesus and she were each on their own business at this well; He on His way from Judea to Galilee, and she come from the neighbouring village to draw water.
Doubtless such meetings of Jewish men and Samaritan women at that well were customary enough; and had Jesus preserved the usual silence, nothing had come of it. But the opportunity was to Him too precious to be lost. Though the thirst was as real as the weariness, and water as desirable as repose, He certainly disregarded the national antipathies, not so much to mark His superiority to them and disapprobation of them, nor yet merely to slake His thirst, but to draw this woman into a conversation which should not cease until He had gained her soul. O, if such casual opportunities of usefulness were embraced by the followers of Christ as by Christ Himself, how many might be won to Him without ever going out of their way! All that is wanted is that love of souls which burned in Him, that constant readiness to avail ourselves of openings for Christian usefulness, the present sense of the truth upon the heart, and a spirit of dependence upon Him for that power to open the mind and heart which He possessed and we must get from Him.
If we could but say with Him-and just in proportion as we can say with Him -"My meat is to be doing the If we could but say with Him-and just in proportion as we can say with Him - "My meat is to be doing the will of Him that sent me, and to finish His work;" if we do but remember that this was said of what He had been doing for one soul, and that of the fruit He was reaping in that one case, He said, "I have meat to eat that ye know not of" - we should need no stimulants to follow Him, and hardly any directions for doing it. But who can tell what may issue out of one conversion? Think of the little maid of Israel (2 Kings 5:1-14.) See what this once disreputable woman of Samaria did for her fellow-villagers; and who shall say what widespread influences, preparing Samaria for the eventual reception of the Gospel, may not have flowed from the precious events of those two days which Jesus spent there? (See the notes at Acts 8:9-13.) No conversion ought to stand alone. Every disciple of the Lord Jesus should feel himself, like this woman, a missionary for Christ, and every conversion should be like a wave of the sea, begetting another. So that the pains taken on one soul-while of itself, if it issue in conversion, it will be "meat" to any who have the Spirit of Christ-ought to be taken with all the more eagerness and hope, as we have ground to believe that we are thus, in all likelihood, doing good on a large scale.
(3) How vividly does the reality of our Lord's human nature-His warm, quivering humanity-His identity with ourselves, not only in all the essential properties but in all the sinless infirmities of our nature, come out here! He is weary with a journey, just as we are; His tongue, like ours, is parched with thirst; He feels, as we do, the cravings of hunger: So He rests Him by Jacob's well, as we should do in like case, and asks, as a thirsty man would do; for a drink of water from the woman of Samaria; and He is provided by His disciples with victuals from Sychar, just as other men. And the life-like, minute lines of detail are so drawn that we feel as if we saw and heard the whole, and the very children that read it feel the same. And yet this is the loftiest and deepest of all the Gospels. Nay, in the dialogue which the Evangelist reports between Jesus and the Woman, these details seem but like the finest net-work of gold in which are set jewels of heavenly luster and incomparable price-the jewel of unfathomable Dignity, Authority, Grace, Penetration, Patience, in this Petitioner for water; besides all the jewels of spiritual truth never before uttered in such a style. No wonder that this should be regarded as emphatically the Gospel of the Person and Grace of the Lord Jesus, and that our Evangelist should get the surname of "the divine."
(4) Mark how Jesus holds Himself forth here as the sovereign Giver, the authoritative Dispenser of the living water; which living water is nothing less than a well-spring of eternal satisfaction opened up in a man's soul, never to dry up. Such a claim on the part of a mere creature would not be more offensive than ridiculous. Search the whole Scripture, and see if anything approaching to it was ever taken into the lips of the most eminent and inspired servants of God. But how majestic, appropriate, and self-evidencing are such claims from the lips of this Speaker! As we read and re-read this dialogue, we feel ourselves in the presence of Grace Incarnate-enshrined, too, not in celestial humanity, but (O wonder of wonders!) in weary, thirsty, hungry flesh, just like our own; sitting down beside us, talking with us, breathing on us its tender love, and laying its warm, fleshly hand upon us, drawing us with cords of a man and bands of love. See the note at Matthew 11:28, and Remark 5 at the close of that section.
(5) With what charming simplicity and transparent clearness does one line of this dialogue express the unsatisfactoriness of all earthly satisfactions - "Everyone that drinketh of this water shall thirst again." Under the figure of cold waters to a thirsty soul, it covers the whole field of earth's satisfactions, but stamps them as external to us, and coming into us from without; while it represents the soul as the mere reservoir of them, drying up like other cisterns, and needing to be ever replenished. But what a contrast to this immediately follows. Still keeping to the figure of water, Jesus claims it as His prerogative to open in the soul a fountain of living waters that shall never cease to flow, a spring of enduring satisfaction and eternal freshness; thus expressing, with matchless brevity, force, and beauty, the spirituality, the vitality, the joy, the perpetuity of that religious change which He effects in all that believe on His name. But now,
(6) When we advance to the woman's question about the place where men ought to worship, how wonderful is the breadth and richness of the answer given her. First, our Lord will not dash her by telling her that her countrymen were in the wrong, until He has first told her how soon the whole question will be at an end. But when He does do so, how definite and positive is the verdict pronounced upon the Samaritan worship. Men talk as if sincerity were the only thing of consequence in the worship of God. That the Samaritans were more wanting in this than the Jews there is no evidence; and the very different reception which our Lord met with from the one than the other would seem to show that they were the more unsophisticated of the two. And yet He says the Samaritans knew not the Object they worshipped, while the Jews did, because Salvation was of the Jews. What can this mean, if it be not that the Samaritans worshipped after ideas and modes of their own, and in doing so were wrong; while the Jews followed divinely communicated ideas and prescribed modes, and therefore theirs was, in that respect, the only acceptable worship? But again, when our Lord says that all was right with the Jewish worship, "because Salvation is of the Jews," He enunciates the great truth, that in the worship of sinful men, as all worshippers on earth are, SALVATION must ever be the key-note-Salvation needed, sought, obtained, extolled; that historically the whole economy of salvation in its preparatory form had been entrusted for conservation to the seed of Abraham; and that so long as they occupied the important position of the ordained depositaries of all Saving Truth, Jerusalem must be regarded as the city of divine solemnities, and its temple as the visible dwelling-place of the Most High. (See Isaiah 2:3.) What a recognition is this of the Old Testament and its Faith, and of the Jews and the Jewish Economy as the living embodiment of it up to that time! But further, mark how explicitly our Lord announces the speedy cessation of all religious distinction between Jew and Gentile, and between one place and another for the worship of God.
"There cometh an hour and now is," when a world-wide worship shall be set up. The rending of the veil of the temple in twain, from the top to the bottom, was the signal-note of that mighty event-the death of Christ-which dissolved forever these distinctions. From that time forth the middle wall of partition was broken down, and in every place the true incense and a pure offering was free to rise to heaven (Malachi 1:11). How strange it seems (one cannot avoid adding) that notwithstanding these announcements, and the commentaries on them in Galatians 4:1-31 and the Epistle to the Hebrews throughout, there should be an influential section of the students of prophecy who contend that the temple-services and the ritual distinctions of Jew and Gentile have not been absolutely and finally abolished, and that they will all be re-established during the millennium! Another thing worthy of special notice in this comprehensive reply to the woman of Samaria, is the emphatic manner in which the spirituality of all acceptable worship is proclaimed, and-what is even of more importance-its being based upon the Spirituality of God Himself.
This was as true under the Jewish Economy as it has been since its cessation. But since, under an elaborate external and exclusive worship, this neither was nor could be so manifest, nor yet so fully realized by the worshippers themselves, the Lord here speaks as if only now such a spiritual worship was going to be established, because now for the first time since Moses-and in one sense even since the fall itself-to be stripped of sacrificial rites and the observance of time and place. Once more, in this reply, our Lord raises the woman's views of the glorious Object of worship, saying, "The Father seeketh such to worship Him." This is the more remarkable, because to the unbelieving Jews He never so speaks of God, and seems studiously to avoid it (John 8:38). In the Sermon on the Mount, addressing His own disciples, He calls Him "your Father," and He teaches them in prayer to say, "Our Father." In His own prayers He says ever, "Father," and once His Agony in the Garden drew from Him the emphatic form, "My Father." From these facts we infer that though this woman was not yet within the circle of those to whom He says, "Your Father," this was so soon to be, that He could with propriety invite her to regard Him as "The Father." So much for the dialogue between our Lord and the woman of Samaria. Turning next to that between Him and the disciples on the woman's departure, we may notice,
(7) What rich encouragement it affords to those "fishers of men" who "have toiled all the night" of their official life, and, to human appearance, have "taken nothing." How little might any other than one Eye have seen that the fields of Samaria were white already to harvest; and yet the event proves it to a very remarkable degree, as far as Sychar was concerned. Even so may the desert all unexpectedly rejoice and blossom as the rose; yet never is a harvest reaped that has not first been sown. The sowers may live and die before the harvest-time arrive, and the fruit of their labours be gathered. Yet can the reapers not say to the sowers, We have no need of you. "They that sow in tears shall reap in joy," though others may do the actual reaping work after they are in their graves. And if the work of the latter is the more joyous, it should bind them sweetly to the sowers to recollect that "other men laboured, and they have but entered into their labours." But may not the spiritual eye be trained so as to see what Jesus here saw-the whitening fields, the yellow grain, all invisible to the eye of sense? We have, indeed, much to learn before we come to this, and the Lord overrules our spiritual obtuseness to try our faith, and then overpower us with the spectacle of nations born in a day.
But even then, all might probably be seen by the eye of faith. In Tahiti, after nearly twenty years' missionary labour, not one conversion was known to have occurred, and the abandonment of the Mission was all but agreed on. But on the return of the missionaries to the island, after a native war which had driven them from it, they found that two natives, who, unknown to them, had received serious impressions as servants in their families, and had met together for prayer in their absence, had been joined by a number more, and that little remained for the missionaries but to help forward what God Himself had so marvelously begun. Meanwhile, the Directors in London, urged by one or two of their number, who could not endure to see the Mission abandoned had, after a season of special prayer, despatched letters of encouragement to the missionaries. While these were on their way out, a ship was conveying the news to England of the entire overthrow of idolatry in the island.