21. Encounter with the Samaritan Woman II (Jn 4:1-26)

John Chapter 4:1-26
Then when the Lord knew that the Pharisees heard that Jesus made more disciples and baptized more than John (2) (though truly Jesus Himself did not baptize, but His disciples), (3) He left Judea and went away into Galilee again. (4) And it was needful for Him to pass through Samaria. (5) And He came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the piece of land Jacob gave to his son Joseph. (6) And Jacob’s fountain was there. Then being wearied by the journey, Jesus sat thus on the fountain. It was about the sixth hour. (7) A woman came out of Samaria to draw water. Jesus said to her, Give Me some to drink. (8) For His disciples had gone away into the city that they might buy provisions. (9) Then the Samaritan woman said to Him, How do You, being a Jew, ask to drink from me, I being a Samaritan woman? For Jews do not deal with Samaritans. (10) Jesus answered and said to her, If you knew the gift of God, and who is the One saying to you, Give Me to drink, you would have asked Him, and He would give you living water. (11) The woman said to Him, Sir, You have no vessel, and the well is deep. From where then do You have living water? (12) Are You greater than our father Jacob who gave us the well, and he and his sons and his livestock drank out of it? (13) Jesus answered and said to her, Everyone drinking of this water will thirst again; (14) but whoever may drink of the water which I will give him will not thirst, never! But the water which I will give to him will become a fountain of water in him, springing up into everlasting life. (15) The woman said to Him, Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw. (16) Jesus said to her, Go, call your husband and come here. (17) And the woman answered and said, I have no husband. Jesus said to her, Well did you say, I have no husband. (18) For you have had five husbands, and now he whom you have is not your husband. You have spoken this truly. (19) The woman said to Him, Sir, I perceive that You are a prophet. (20) Our fathers worshiped in this mountain, and you say that in Jerusalem is the place where it is necessary to worship. (21) Jesus said to her, Woman, believe Me that an hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem. (22) You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is of the Jews. (23) But an hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. For the Father also seeks such, the ones worshiping Him. (24) God is a spirit, and the ones worshiping Him must worship in spirit and truth. (25) The woman said to Him, I know that Messiah is coming, the One called Christ. When that One comes, He will announce to us all things. (26) Jesus said to her, I AM! the One speaking to you.

Arcana Celestia 9818 by Emanuel Swedenborg
Many places in the Word use the term ‘spirit’, and when they use it in reference to a person his ‘spirit’ means goodness and truth inscribed on the understanding part of his mind and consequently on the life of that part of it. The reason why ‘spirit’, when attributed to a person, has this meaning is that inwardly a person is a spirit, indeed inwardly is in the company of spirits.

[3] From this one may know what ‘spirit’ means when used in reference to the Lord, namely that it is Divine Truth emanating from His Divine Good, and that when this Divine Truth flows in and is received by a person it is the Spirit of truth, Spirit of God, and Holy Spirit; for it flows directly from the Lord, and also indirectly through angels and spirits…when used in the Word in reference to a person, ‘spirit’ means goodness and truth inscribed on the understanding part of a person’s mind and consequently means the life of that part of it. For there is the life of the understanding part, and there is the life of the will part. That of the understanding part consists in knowing, seeing, and understanding that truth is indeed truth and good is indeed good. But the life of the will part consists in willing and loving truth for truth’s sake and good for goodness’ sake.

That the life of the understanding, or the life of truth, is meant becomes clear from the consideration that in the natural sense ‘spirit’ is used to mean human life and breath. And drawing breath, which is the work of the lungs, corresponds to the life of truth, which is the life of faith and consequently of the understanding, whereas the beating of the heart corresponds to the life of the will and so of love.

[13] Once people know what ‘spirit’ present in a person means they may know what is meant by ‘spirit’ when this term is used in reference to Jehovah or the Lord. Everything a human being has, such as face, eyes, ears, arms, and hands, also heart and soul, He is said to have. Thus spirit as well is attributed to Him, and in the Word it is called Spirit of God, Spirit of Jehovah, Spirit of His mouth, and Spirit of Holiness or Holy Spirit. The fact that the term is used to mean Divine Truth emanating from the Lord is clear from a large number of places in the Word. The reason why Divine Truth emanating from the Lord is meant by ‘Spirit of God’ is that all of a person’s life comes from there, as does the heavenly life possessed by those who receive that Divine Truth in faith and love. The Lord Himself teaches in John that this is what ‘Spirit of God’ means,

The words which I speak to you, they are spirit and they are life. John 6:63.

‘The words’ which the Lord spoke are Divine Truths.

‘The Spirit’ which those believing in the Lord were to receive from Him means the life coming from the Lord that is the life of faith and love, as is evident from the specific expressions used in these verses. For ‘thirsting’ and ‘drinking’ means the desire to know and understand truth; and ‘rivers of living water’ which will flow from the belly are God’s truths. From this it is clear that ‘the Spirit’ which believers were to receive, also called ‘the Holy Spirit’, means the life brought by Divine Truth emanating from the Lord. This life, as stated just above, is called the life of faith and love, being the spiritual and heavenly life itself present in a person.


 

This morning we consider the content of the Lord’s discussion with the Samaritan woman around Jacob’s well or fountain. We saw last week that by the well or fountain we have what corresponds to the Word itself. In the area known as Samaria we have what represents that part of the human mind that corresponds to the understanding faculty. We saw this in the fact that each of the great divisions of the land of Canaan in New Testament times is a symbol for different parts of the human mind through which the Lord as Divine Truth makes his presence known and felt. Judea in the south represents the things of the affections or will, Samaria in its position between Judea and Galilee represents the thinking operations of the mind in relation to spiritual life and Galilee to the north represents external life where our affections and thoughts become expressed in activities to do with both inner and outer dimensions of life.

Samaria concerns itself with those things to do with our thinking on spiritual matters, and as place represents the state of our beliefs in spiritual matters. In broad terms what this journey of the Lord from Judea to Galilee represents is an arising within of an affection or desire to see what is good and true expressed in our life. This shift in or state of life is described in natural terms as the Lord making a journey. Inwardly it is the progressive states of change we undergo whereby what is spiritual becomes established in us. This shift in state begins in the inner Judea of our minds where the Lord with His disciples are baptising, that is where the principles of spiritual life drawn from the Word are being used by us to have our affections purified from selfish tendencies. As our affections are purified from self interest so there is a need to get our thinking straight so that the desires we have to see good become a matter of life have appropriate thought structures through which what is genuinely good and true can be promoted.

Desiring good and being able to see it come into being are two very different states of life. In the spiritual or religious life two things are needed if we are to enter into the full potential of what the Lord has created us to be. These are charity and faith. Charity is loving good and faith is right belief. By right belief we mean beliefs that are able to bring goodness into life. So true charity and true faith work together to produce what is good. If we desire good but have wrong beliefs then the good we do will be misplaced. For example, desiring to do good without knowing that all good is from the Lord (without a right belief) means that we will attribute the good we do to ourselves. If this is done the good is not really good, but something of the self that is done to look good, or draw attention to ourselves, or is perhaps used to promote ourselves over others, or give us a sense of superiority over others whom we secretly look down on. A sure sign that we are taking the good to ourselves is when we take offence when our “good” actions are rejected, rebuffed in some way, or questioned.

But a right belief, in this case that all good is from the Lord, puts us in a different relationship to the good we seek to do. This belief, when held and made conscious in us, enables us to see what of the self is concealed in the good we seek to perform. If I do good and take credit for it and have this truth called to mind I am then in a position where I can call on the Lord to have the leaven of self removed with a view to having the good I desire come into life untainted. I am able to recognise that even my desire for good is not from me but from the Lord in me. Any desire we have for good is from the Lord, it is really His desire in us and it is this spiritual fact that is captured in this story in the statement that, He, i.e. the Lord, must needs go through Samaria.

The straightening out of beliefs in regard to the spiritual life centres on the well. This is the point of meeting between the Lord and the Samaritan woman. The well is the Word and this clearly demonstrates that the point of meeting between us and the Lord is the Word. The Samaritan woman embodies a couple of things, on one level she embodies the desire or affection for truth that those have who acknowledge the Word in its literal sense and return to the well seeking from it what might quench their thirst. This is illustrated by her dependence on Jacob’s well for water. There is demonstrated here a love for the Word, of being engaged with it and drawing from it what is needed. But without an awareness of a deeper understanding we can find the literal sense confusing and often contradictory and so can hold beliefs that are inconsistent and even work against each other. We may hold that God is love, yet find ourselves being judgemental of others and justifying this attitude from a literal reading of the Word by which we see ourselves as having God on our side and being against those who don’t believe like we do, or behave in the way we think they should behave.

The confusion a literal reading of Scripture brings is captured in the content of the woman’s conversation. At the well the Lord speaks and challenges the woman to consider her need to keep returning to the well to get the water she needs. This is how the Word begins to challenge us. The Word promises water from which we will never thirst again, that will spring up within to be a well of living water. Surely this is the kind of water, or truth, we desire above all else, and our affection for truth, the Samaritan woman within us knows it. Natural truth or the Word understood literally cannot transform us inwardly, so when this is all we draw from we will thirst again because the issues we seek to have dealt with in our lives are only temporarily satisfied. Without a deeper understanding of the Word we keep returning to the same states of life which drive us back to the well for a temporary fix.

The Lord points out to the woman what is possible – that He can give water that can bring about a real and lasting transformation of our very essence and being. He teaches her from the well, gives her a vision of what is possible, in the same way the Lord teaches us from the well of the Word giving us a vision of what is possible. Through this very passage we are in contact with great potential and possibilities, can we say with the Samaritan woman…

Joh 4:15 … give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw.

How strange then is the Lord’s response, for He doesn’t give her what she asks but asks her to…

Joh 4:16 …Go, call your husband and come here.

We may well wonder what this has to do with receiving the living water the Lord speaks of, but as we shall now see without this disclosing of the state of life and a person’s acknowledgement of its condition there can be no reception of the Lord. To be married spiritually is to have goods and truths joined together in the human mind. This is the goal of spiritual life, for it is in this marriage that the Lord dwells, bringing unity within our self centred on the Word. The affection for truth that arises in the hearts of all who seek the kingdom of heaven yearns for those truths that it can be one with and in that process of seeking may join with ideas and concepts that at first appear to hold promise but are soon found lacking and so are separated from. Until the inner sense of the Word is opened this affection has no husband. That is it has no truth that can satisfy its longing. This woman having had five husbands speaks to the same question as her need to return again and again to the well in an effort to find what will fill her lack. She is truly us all, as we seek to know the Lord in His Word.

The Lord speaking to her discloses her life and brings to consciousness her state. As we seek to know the Lord in His Word so the Word opens our life and brings to view our state of life…

Joh 4:17-18 And the woman answered and said, I have no husband. Jesus said to her, Well did you say, I have no husband. (18) For you have had five husbands, and now he whom you have is not your husband. You have spoken this truly.

Here we see an important principle of spiritual life – we must speak truly in response to the questions the Word asks of our own states of life if we are to enter into the true meaning of worship. Simply put our worship is how we live in response to the truths we have. Do we use them to examine our outer and inner life? This activity is what worship is from the perspective of Spiritual Christianity. And like this woman our responses to the challenges the Word sets for us leads us in a process of gaining clarification as to the nature of true worship. The woman says…

Joh 4:19-20 Sir, I perceive that You are a prophet. (20) Our fathers worshiped in this mountain, and you say that in Jerusalem is the place where it is necessary to worship.

Here is a recognition that the Lord is a prophet. This represents a deepening awareness that the Word is from God and that there is more to it than what lies on its surface. Here is Divine teaching able to penetrate into and reveal the states of our life. It reveals confusion on the question of worship. On “this” mountain, or Jerusalem. This mountain refers to worship in ignorance or a worship that lacks inner truths to guide and direct it. It is a state of living from a simple acknowledgement that God is and that one should life a good life, but there is little understanding as to who God is or what living a good life constitutes from a spiritual perspective. We can see that this is what is meant here, for the woman doesn’t yet see that the one who sits on this well is the Lord Himself, and in the Lord’s own words to her that Jerusalem represents worship from an understanding that comes from being in possession of truths that teach who the Lord is and how he is to be worshipped in the good of life.

The Word now reveals a deep truth and it is that…

Joh 4:24 God is a spirit, and the ones worshiping Him must worship in spirit and truth.

This opens the way for the greatest revelation of all. In stating that God is a spirit, we have reinforced for us the truth that God is the Word, the Divine Truth or the light that enlightens every one born into the world and that in this light is the life of every human being. The term spirit used in relation to God refers to the life of truth, or that which proceeds from the Lord’s Divine Human which is what is understood in the New Church to be the holy spirit. To worship in spirit and truth is to be in the life of truth or to live from what truth teaches and so be in the good of life.

The woman who is our affection for truth is now moved to declare its hope…to consider or make conscious its deepest felt expectation, the expectation that lies deep in the heart of all those seeking to worship in spirit and truth…

Joh 4:25 The woman said to Him, I know that Messiah is coming, the One called Christ. When that One comes, He will announce to us all things.

This woman’s conversation with the Lord represents our own developing sense of Word. The affection for truth leads us to the Word in its literal sense, to water which can only quench our thirst temporarily. But we return again and again and as we look to the Word we see that it speaks of living water, of an abundant and full life, it speaks of this one called the Christ who when He comes will announce all things. Those who read the Word and in response to it ask for that living water it promises are lead on a journey, for they ask not with the lips but with their life through a willingness to respond to the truths they have. They live in the hope and expectation that the Christ will come, not realising that He is fully present upon the well they draw from. We engage with the Word and the Heavenly Doctrines without realising that these are the very living presence of the Lord with us, and as we are in conversation, that is as we meditate and learn of them so the Lord begins to reveal Himself as being within the Word. At first we regard it as merely teaching from God; we have yet to see that Divine teachings cannot be separated from the Lord Himself and that full impact of John’s opening statement that God is the Word must and will be felt if we heed the message of the Gospel. We need not look anywhere else for the Lord says to the woman as the Word says to us…

Joh 4:26 …I AM! the One speaking to you.

Amen.

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