Rude Bluntness or Authentic Conviction

You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. (John 4:22)

I have been pondering and praying over this verse for several days. This is Jesus' response to this woman's inquiry about the right place to worship highlighting the differences between her “denomination” and His. The abruptness of this answer has caught my attention and I have been searching for the real reason He said these words to her in this context for some time now.

As I came back again today and thought about it some more, it suddenly dawned on me what one of the biggest reasons likely was for His making this statement to her. It seems rather rude to just bluntly tell someone that they are wrong and I am right because they belong to a different church than I do. And it certainly does not ring consistent with the spirit that I have seen in the way Jesus related to people most of the time, which is why I have been disturbed for so long about why these words are spoken here.

But I remembered the beginning of this story and it all is coming together much more clearly now. First of all, I have sensed early on that this woman already may well have been harboring doubts about the validity of her own people's religion. But because there was no way she could ever change the fact of her being a Samaritan woman, she may have felt permanently stuck, forced to accept the religion that identified her people and isolated them from the Jewish system of beliefs. She seemed to be branded with the form of religion that had been passed down to her through her hereditary based on the choices of people who had lived many generations before her.

But that still did not prevent her from feeling uncomfortable with the truthfulness of what she had been taught all of her life. Somehow I believe that she had entertained increasing misgivings about her religion but had not been able to freely discuss any of these without stirring up intense animosity and hostility from people in her own culture. Any thought of questioning her religious heritage was considered openly unpatriotic and would bring her scorn and shame. So she had been forced to hide these questions deep inside her as she wondered how these deep tensions could ever be resolved. She had decided long ago that the only hope there was for bringing about real change in her world was for the true Messiah to finally show up and show them the truth.

Of course, the whole idea of a Messiah originated largely in the Jewish religion. But that was not totally the case, for indicators and messages of a coming Messiah pre-dated the existence of Jews themselves. The first promise of a Messiah to come, a deliverer to save lost sinners, was given just after Adam and Eve sinned and the first lamb was killed as a sin offering. God told Eve that in her seed would be born a child that would finally bring about the demise of the serpent who had entrapped them into the slavery of sin. And repeatedly throughout history the promises had been accumulating of a coming Deliverer who was to come and save His people from the stranglehold of sin.

Evidently the Samaritans also clung to a belief in a coming Messiah that would bring about deliverance. I find this fascinating given the strident views of the work and nature of the Messiah as taught by the Jews of that day. The Jews had come to believe that when the Messiah came He would come as a conquerer to make the Jews the strongest nation on earth so they could dominate and control with violent force every other people, especially the ones they hated the most. And Samaritans were certainly very near the top of the list of people the Jews hoped the Messiah was going to prosecute when He came to honor and elevate the Jews to their “rightful” place in the world.

Yet I see this woman, a Samaritan no less, looking forward to the Messiah as her hope for clearing up the confusion in her heart about the real truth about religious issues that troubled her. From this perspective it seems to me that she had a much clearer concept of the true nature of the coming Messiah than most of the Jews believed. This woman somehow had come to realize that the Messiah would be much more oriented to clarifying issues regarding God and religion than He would be in elevating the Jews politically.

Yet there must have been conflicts in her mind about what this coming Messiah was going to look like. She was familiar with the commonly held opinions of the Jews about a Messiah that would feel the same scorn for Samaritans as they cherished. Obviously she did not believe all those lies, which actually made her more mature spiritually than most other people. She also cherished doubts about the accuracy of her own people's religion which is one of the main reasons why I believe Jesus had rendezvoused with her in the first place. Jesus had been alerted to the condition of her heart by the Holy Spirit that always lead Him in every event throughout His life and He knew that this woman was the most open and receptive person in this whole region. God had set up this encounter for just this outcome because in the life of a true believer there is no such thing as a coincidence.

But why did Jesus speak such blunt words highlighting the difference between the religion of the Jews and that of the Samaritans if he always related to people with the utmost kindness and tact? This certainly doesn't seem at first to be a very tactful way to approach this subject.

But as I look more closely I realize that God knew her heart and that these words were not going to be overly offensive to her. She had already been feeling the conviction of God in her heart for some time that her religion was not as valid as that of the Jews, no matter how badly Jewish leaders had distorted and abused the truth they had received from their ancestors. Just because the Jews of her day were so extremely prejudiced did not detract in the slightest from the fact that God had still ordained the Jewish people to be the channel through which the Messiah was to come to save people from the darkness of ignorance and sin.

Jesus, I believe, was very possibly reinforcing some of her convictions about religion that she had already pondered for some time as well as her convictions about the true nature of the coming Messiah. She was actually advanced ahead of what most Jews and Samaritans believed, both in her ideas about religion and in her openness to accept and embrace the true Messiah. Because of the spiritual orientation of her heart, in spite of the obvious immortality of her life and present circumstances, she was actually much more ready to receive and appreciate the true Messiah than nearly anyone else in the whole surrounding country, both Jewish and Samaritan.

So it was necessary for Jesus to affirm to her that her secret belief that the Messiah just might have to come through the Jews was indeed correct. She had already identified Him as a Jew at the very beginning of their conversation together. Jesus was now building on this fact and reaffirming it so that she would move more easily into a state of full belief in Him when He revealed Himself to be the very Messiah she wanted to encounter. These longings for a coming Messiah had been placed in her heart by God Himself and now were being drawn out to experience for herself what the true Messiah had come to do – to preach the gospel to the poor, to release the captives, to open the eyes of the blind (both physically and internally), to heal the brokenhearted and best of all to reveal the favor of God in the world. This was the very kind of news that she longed to know the most and was the very nature of the Messiah that God was sending to people just like her.

So to validate the authenticity of His identity as the true Messiah, it was necessary to correct and affirm in her mind any questions causing confusion about where the Messiah would come from as far as race and ethnicity. He confirmed the fact that the Jewish religion in fact was still the religion that had the most truth left on the earth. This was despite the fact that the Jews themselves had so badly distorted God's reputation, His character and personality to the point where He could hardly be seen at all in the way they treated people or even in their popular teachings. Jesus also pointed out that her religion was in fact lacking in sufficient truth to be reliable to lead her to real salvation. Jesus simply affirmed what I believe she was already suspecting – that the Jews had the best religious information around and that the Samaritan religion really was a counterfeit of that true religion.

It was important to get this better settled in her mind before He revealed Himself as the Messiah. This was because He wanted to eliminate every doubt ahead of time that might prevent her from fully embracing Him as her own Savior when she realized who He really was. He was effectively dealing with her ethnic prejudice against Him as a Jew so that she could embrace her own convictions of truth that had been stirring inside her for some time and now act on them. She was ripe to embrace the fact that her own religion really was inferior to the core Jewish religion. It was largely the prejudices of the Jews against her that made it difficult to justify that conviction in the face of fierce opposition by her own cultural heritage.

And from this perspective it is now also easier to see that she could accept His statement that her religion could not give her all the answers that she was looking for to satisfy the deepest longings of her heart. God had provided through the Jews the channel through which the Messiah was going to come to bless the whole world without any more prejudices of religion, ethnicity, gender or any other kind. The Messiah was in fact going to be far better than even she had ever been able to imagine. And she was about to find that out for herself.