Untangling Cliche: "In Spirit & In Truth": The Samaritan Woman's Dialogue
Monday, May 17, 2010 at 4:32PM | by Otter 
From the Mailbag:
There is a thread going on over on the S___ Forums right now about the video from North Point Church. It’s been a pretty good discussion I think. John 4:22-24 has been brought up and I was wondering if you could give me some context and understanding of what Jesus meant when he said that we must worhip God in spirit and truth.
Sure, though it’s tough to be really specific without reading what exactly was said over there.
If I can refer you back to my discussion of John, you’ll see that John’s major interest is in the relationship between spirit and flesh, a union or marriage effected through faith in the logos.
John’s particular target is Judaism.
He hammers it, page after page: “Judaism is nothing. The logos is everything.”
If a person wants to extrapolate from that that more “formal” liturgies are evil and less formal ones are good, they’re adding that out of their own experiences. I’ve no problem with them doing so, but that’s not what John has in mind. It’s not Judaism’s formality that’s offensive. It’s its stance vis-a-vis the logos.
The dialogue with the Samaritan woman needs a few things said about it before it’s trotted out in a conversation about North Point (either fer it or agin’ it).
First, notice that the first few chapters of John after the Prologue are a series of stories about Judaism and its relation to the logos.
John, writing in the first century after Christ (I tend to date the book a bit earlier than most scholars), looks primarily at the sociological reality of Judaism (the “home base”) to overwhelming success of The Way among the Gentiles; and philosophically at the question of what precisely Jesus was in terms of the philosophy of his own time.
The Samaritan Woman’s conversation with Jesus is juxtaposed intentionally against the conversation with Nicodemus because that dialogue represents a lack of comprehension / faith / receptivity of the logos by one who is supposed to be “a [male] teacher of Israel.”
Note here that John throughout his gospel inverts the imagery of the Hebrew prophets, for whom idolatry was best metaphorized as adultery and broken covenant was best metaphorized as divorce.
For John, a woman of Samaria who has had five husbands (and one spare on tap back at the trailer) is a great metaphor for those who stand a far better chance of coming to faith than *spit* Jews. Mary Magdalene becomes a fit first-witness to the Resurrection. The woman caught in adultery hears that the logos does not condemn her.
Jesus and the Samritan Woman
My point is that John is not conspicuously issuing a general dictum here in John 4: it’s not about worship styles. It’s about the collapse of Judaism as John sees it. He’s (possibly after the destruction of the temple in 70 C.E.) explaining why Judaism has been surpassed by a general, universal embrace of the logos.
So what does Jesus mean by “in spirit and truth”?
(1) You needn’t be Jewish;
(2) You must have experienced the union of spirit and flesh that John writes about constantly;
(3) You must have what he calls “life,” a metaphor for this condition of unity.
(4) The destruction of the Temple should speak to you about God’s acceptance of your worship regardless of your status as a Gentile (see (1) above).
I suppose it’s possible from all this to derive some sort of general statement about North Point Church and its practices, but I think that’s forcing scripture to grab its ankles.
Please let me know if this doesn’t help a little bit.
Reader Comments (3)
Very helpful. I did have to go back and re-read what you had written to me before about the gospel of John. It comes together beautifully for me now. Thank you.
It's funny how I had heard the phrase "worship God in spirit and truth" so many times, and really had no idea what it meant. I only within the last few years started questioning things like this, started needing things to make sense to me, needing God to not be the god I had always been taught he was (if that makes any sense). You've helped me with that tremendously.
And I think I actually like the gospel of John a lot more now. Thanks.
Today was my cousin's graduation from a Catholic school. It took place in a church following Mass. Before Mass, a five-year-old cousin got her hands on some little prayer cards and started passing them out to the family. The prayer cards had that well-known picture with the red and white beams of light coming out of Jesus' heart. The back of the card said that the red light represents his blood and the white light represents water, "which makes all souls righteous". I just sat a minute staring at that card thinking, "That water should be wine now."
Victoria, that's a fantastic observation, and a great example of them letting theology change an image's meaning. Nothing wrong with that of course: it's the curse of the author that he launches his text into the world and must abide the interpretations of whomever wishes to pick up the text.
But yes, I think that the image here In The Sacred Heart iconography is of human, material reality being poured out. Awesome, awesome comment... Man. This made my morning!