LECTURE XIII.

THE WOMAN OF SAMARIA.

LECT.

XIII.

JOHN iv. 15-27.

OUR Lord had just been endeavouring to lead this woman of Samaria from the sign to the thing signified, from the earthly and material water to the heavenly and spiritual. Yet though she listens to Him with greater deference than before, so much so as even to ask a favour of Him, she nevertheless fails to perceive the import of His words. She still takes literally what He spake figuratively. She understood not the kind of water He meant, yet supposed that it must be some very good and useful thing; therefore she says, "Sir, give me this water." The matter had progressed so far, that the woman is now ready to do what the Lord had recommended above", and asks of Him who had first asked of her. But not understanding as yet the spiritual character of the request and of the blessing, she asks, not that she may have everlasting life, but that she might be saved the labour of coming all that way from the city to her daily supply of water. He might possibly be able some supply nearer home; or perhaps she spake

a v. 10.

draw from this well She thought perhaps to point out to her

b Bengel.

XIII.

without thought, like Peter on the Mount of LECT. Transfiguration, scarce knowing what she said. At all events, like the Jews on a similar occasion, she asks for the carnal instead of the spiritual good, saying, Give me this water, as they said afterwards, Give us this bread: meaning all the while the earthly, though He spake of what was heavenly.

There is an apparent abruptness of transition in our Lord's answer, "Go call thy husband, and come hither" but in reality it is the first step towards granting her request. The appeal to her reason and spiritual affections, as contained in our Lord's allusion to the unsatisfactory nature of all earthly sources of comfort, and the alonesatisfying character of the heavenly fountain, had not prevailed: so He proceeds to awaken her conscience, calling her sin to remembrance.

The woman's request is, "Give me this water, that I come not hither:" our Lord's reply is, "Come hither." It was only thus, by going thither, by going to Him who so forgivingly invited her, that she could obtain living water: and, in His apparently unconnected reply, our Lord, "who is able to do exceeding abundantly

cach. vi. 34.

"The first work of the Spirit of God, and of Him who here spoke in the fulness of that Spirit, is to convince of sin. The 'give me this water' was not so simple a matter as she supposed.... The command itself is of course given in the fulness of knowledge of her sinful course of life. In every conversation which our Lord held with men, while He connects usually one remark with another by the common links which bind human thought, we perceive that He knows, and sees through, those with whom He speaks." Alford.

e "Verba illa, neque veniam huc, v. 15. et hæc, veni huc, v. 16. inter se respondent. Bengel.

LECT. even above all that we ask or think," and is XIII. "wont to give more than either we desire or deserve'," takes the very first step towards giving her a better draught than she had asked for.

Our Lord in His direction, "Go call thy husband," used this expression designedly, in order to convince her of the sinful state in which she was living. He employed a term signifying a hallowed relation, and censuring the unhallowed connexion which existed between her guilty partner and herself. And her answer, true in the mere letter, leads Him to lay bare the secret falsehood which lay beneath the literal truth; and also gives Him occasion, like a good physician, to probe the wound more deeply still, and to pave the way for her acknowledgment of Him, first as a Prophet, and afterwards as the Messiah Himself.

He tells her of her past life, "thou hast had five husbands." Of these some perhaps had died, and others had either divorced her, or been divorced by her; for divorces were then shamefully frequent, and for any cause. He tells her of her present state, "he whom thou now hast is not thy husband." The man with whom you are now cohabiting does not stand towards you in the hallowed relation of husband. It is a guilty connexion, unblest either by the sanction or the services of religion, recognised neither by God nor His Church. Probably though a widow, she was cohabiting with the husband of some other

f The Collect for the Twelfth Sunday after Trinity.

"Nunc aditum facit, ad dandam mulieri roganti aquam, meliorem illâ, quam rogârat." Bengel.

XIII.

and deserted woman, for the emphasis seems to be LECT. laid upon the "thy," "he whom thou now hast is not thy husband," but the husband of another: and so they were living in adultery. She was not the single person she made herself out to be. The impression she wished to leave on the mind of this stranger was a false one.

while she spoke the literal truth. lie but an attempt to deceive?

She acted a lie

For what is a

These words of our Lord astonished her not a little. That a stranger to her, one whom she had never seen before, should know all about her, her present state and her past history, should tell her all things that ever she did, filled her with a just surprise. "Such knowledge she knew could not be acquired but by divine revelation, and therefore she justly inferred that He must be at least a prophet:" and "in speaking this her conviction, she virtually confesses all the truth'," acknowledges that the charge was just, and stands convicted and judged, the secrets of her heart made manifest". "The conviction of sin here," however, "lies beneath the surface it is not pressed, nor at the moment does it seem to have worked deeply, for she goes on with the conversation with apparent indifference

Our Lord's answer in vv. 17, 18. affords one of the many instances of the minute force of the original, often overlooked in the use of a translation. Alford calls us to notice, that the word in ver. 18. rendered "truly" is not aλnows but aλno és, "this one word was true:" and this is "further shewn by this emphatic position of the avopa in our Lord's answer," v. 17. compared with the position it occupies in the woman's statement in the

Bloomf. The où is emphatic. She admits the error or the insufficiency of the où 'Iovdaîos of v. 9.

LECT. to it; but our Lord's words" afterwards", "would XIII. tend to infix it more deeply, and we find" pre

sently, "that it had been working during her journey back to the city." It is now however a painful subject to her. She is not yet prepared to make the self-denial which she instinctively apprehends further conversation on the subject may lead to demand. So she attempts to turn it by another and a third allusion to the point in dispute between the Jews and Samaritans. If this be a prophet, she would like to know his opinion thereupon. She does not however put the question directly, but by implication. She does not express any opinion of her own upon it. Indeed by this time she was somewhat in a state of uncertainty, half ready to fall in with the prophet's decision. She therefore just states the practice of her nation; expecting that He will at once resolve the doubt whether this mountain, Gerizim, where, as she

n vv. 25, 26.

o v. 29.

P Alford in v. 18.

q It is with considerable diffidence that the writer ventures to differ in his interpretation of this passage from such a critic as Dean Alford; but in reply to his remark, that such an interpretation would be quite inconsistent with the woman's recognition of our Lord as a prophet, it may be sufficient to observe, that it is much the same as her fathers were in the habit of doing before her: see Ezek. xiv. 1-7. The inconsistency is much the same as that of those who acknowledge that "the eyes of the Lord are in every place, beholding the evil and the good," and yet act sometimes as though they could go from His Spirit, and flee from His presence. It was no more inconsistent than the conduct of Gehazi with Elisha, 2 Kings v. 20-26. Indeed Dean Alford's own remarks on the previous verse seem scarcely consistent with his criticism here; while they rather corroborate the interpretation of the text, into which indeed the writer has incorporated them.

"Quare desiderans, ut hoc offendiculum e medio tollatur, sententiam Viri tam extraordinarii, qualis ei Jesus jam tum apparebat esse, de hoc articulo audire gestit. Ita non solum agnoscit Jesum Prophetam esse, sed . etiam pro suo Doctore recipere incipit. Sic paulatim tenebræ mentis desidebant, et lux vera oriebatur." Lampe.