Tonight, I led our home group through a passage in John 4. It is the story commonly know as Jesus and the woman at the well.
I knew a little about the story before I decided to teach on it, but after studying, I found it to be very interesting. I found several interesting facts that gave the story more depth than I had anticipated. We had a great discussion while working our way through the passage. When we got to verse 12, I thought of something that I had not thought of before and had not seen mentioned when I was studying the passage.
Prior to verse 12, Jesus asks the Samaritan woman for a drink of water. She gives him a little attitude and says, "Who do you think you are?" (My paraphrase.) He responds to her with something along the lines of, "If you knew who I was you would be asking ME for water." (Again, my paraphrase.) Then, we get to verse 12.
Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his flocks and herds? - John 4:12 (TNIV)It occurred to me in the midst of talking about this passage that Jesus is a descendant of Jacob and the lady says "Jacob drank from this well, as did his sons." In a matter of speaking, Jesus is a son of Jacob. That just really stuck out to me. I don't have much else to say about it. It just seemed like something was there.
What do you think?
Labels: bible, church, home group, Jesus, John
posted by Shannon Smith @ 10/07/2009
3 Comments
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3 Comments:
I never noticed that before in this passage. Gotta love that about the Scriptures. My initial thought is that Jesus knew she would mention Jacob... and that he would have an opportunity to show her that, in fact, he IS greater that Jacob.
And Jacob was a highly revered figure in that part of the world... the last of Israel's great patriarchs.
Something else I never noticed... the woman refers to Jacob as "OUR father". Even though Samaritans followed a somewhat pagan version of the faith of the Hebrews... she still referred to Jacob as OUR father.
That makes some sense. Do you think she would have known that the messiah was going to come from the lineage of Jacob?
And as for the "our father" bit, we noticed that last night, too.
I had given a little history on the Samaritan-Jewish relationship and talked about the differences in their religious beliefs. So, the fact that she said OUR father Jacob stuck out to us, too.
I pulled a little info from here, where it says:
[The] hostility was based on both race and religion. After the Assyrian Exile in 722 BC, the remaining Jews intermarried with Gentile colonists and formed a hybrid worship of God, complete with a different temple and an edited Old Testament. The Jews thus viewed them as HALF-BREED HERETICS, and the Samaritans returned their hatred.
A couple of centuries earlier [before this story takes place], the Jews had destroyed the Samaritan Temple. The Samaritans returned the favor by littering the Jewish Temple with human bones, thus defiling it. By the first century AD, the hatred was so bad that the rabbis taught it was ritually defiling to touch any utensil handled by a Samaritan (sugchrontai in vs 9). Since Samaria lay between Galilee and Judea, pious Jews normally walked the 20+ extra miles around Samaria rather than go through it.
Which makes me think that their "edited" Old Testament must have included Jacob.
Thanks for chiming in.
Here my thoughts on the subject. First, it reminds us of the duality of Christ. Christ was fully human born through a human lineage that included Jacob. Second, the statement seems easy to answer for us looking on this side of the question, of course Jesus is greater than Jacob, he was around when the earth was created and when the first man was formed. So its a reminder that Jesus was also fully divine.
To me the best thing is the motivation behind the statement itself. The samaritan woman makes a statement she thinks will be considered completely absurd by any Jewish man. After all Jacob is one of the forefathers of the Jewish faith, who would ever claim to be greater than him! This is the same type of claim made again and again by the Pharisees as they speak of "the God of Abraham and Moses" as they interact with Jesus. However, after her interaction she realizes that Jesus is greater than Jacob and goes to spread the word about Him. I think this is paralleled today as people meet and accept Jesus as Savior. We sit on the throne of our lives and that anyone (especially a man living 2000 years ago who claimed to be God) can know better than us what our lives need seems absurd. Yet time and again, a meeting with Jesus results in changed lives, transformed marriages, and altered eternities. Then those same people can't wait to make the case to the people in their lives that they once considered so crazy.
Just my thoughts, obviously I'm not the smartest guy around, but hey you asked!
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