A look at the gaps in the lectionary.
This week: the gap between Epiphany 2C + 3C
The text: John 2:12-4:13
We jump ahead in John from the wedding to a moment in Samaria when Jesus is chatting with a woman by a well. Here’s what we miss:
The tail end of the passage that wasn’t included in the lectionary for last week is significant contextual help:
After this he went down to Capernaum with his mother, his brothers, and his disciples; and they remained there for a few days.
—John 2:12
It reminds us that Jesus, his family, and his disciples visited Capernaum and stayed there for a time. While not a huge part of most people’s sermon prep, I find these details reveal so much about what we avoid thinking about, like Jesus’s mother between his birth and death, his having siblings, or that they may be participating in his mission in any way.
Jesus heads to Jerusalem
Next, Jesus visits the Temple for the famous “cleansing” in which he drives out the dove sellers and moneychangers — in this version, famously with a whip, like he is driving livestock.
The fact that John places this story at the beginning rather than shortly before the climax is often discussed. And while it serves the other gospels well to have it placed then, we are pulled into Jesus’s political and spiritual convictions right away here. After the wedding and now the Temple, there should be no surprise for us in considering what Jesus’s convictions toward the matters of God and creation should be now.
Jesus has real issues with wealthy exploitation and who is being rejected and impacted by all of this.
Visit with Nicodemus
Chapter Three, famous for the oft-quoted verse about God’s love, begins instead with a Pharisee who appears to be breaking ranks from his more skeptical partners in faith. He comes to Jesus under the cover of darkness to speak with him in a clandestine meeting.
The meeting will be significant for Nicodemus, who will show up a couple of more times in the gospel as an apparently secret disciple of Jesus’s. But at this point, he comes off as a bit aloof and confused. As readers, however, we should consider this less as an indictment of Nicodemus and more representative of a guy sticking his neck out and trusting his gut. He senses that Jesus might be something special and he follows a sense of call to him rather than trust in the institution’s telling him to stay away.
This scene also ends in the artistic way that many scenes in John end, with a kind of blurring of time and space as Jesus pontificates about the nature of God, love, and creation, and then suddenly, we’re all somewhere else. Nicodemus is left behind wherever he was, but we keep up with Jesus, following him into a new place.
Dueling Baptists
We appear in the Judean countryside where Jesus is with his disciples (family is gone, too, apparently) and he is baptizing people in a river. John the Baptist is nearby, baptizing people there, too. This has to be awkward, right? Two baptists, doing their thing, not talking. Doubly awkward given how Jesus got his disciples from John. But here they are, hanging out, doing their baptizing thing.
This is when some of John’s disciples get into a conversation about purification with “the Jews” which is just the most problematic and stupid linguistic tic of the evangelist we call John’s and one that made even less sense after “Jew” actually became a word. But let’s just put a pin in that and recognize how dumb it reads now.
The conversations is really between students of one rabbi and some others — most likely members of a religious group, like the Pharisees, or leaders. But the vagueness of the language obscures the nature of the conversation, but not its subject, or its relevance to the evangelist.
The disciples bring this conversation to John the Baptist, who proceeds to pontificate like Jesus did with Nicodemus, while also vocalizing his place below Jesus in the hierarchy.
Into Samaria
The opening to chapter four is full of context told as passing information — the kind of thing that is infuriatingly easy to overlook, but is rich with value to the reader:
Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard, ‘Jesus is making and baptizing more disciples than John’— although it was not Jesus himself but his disciples who baptized— he left Judea and started back to Galilee.
—John 4:1-3
Take that in, for a second. It isn’t Jesus baptizing: it’s his disciples. That is not what we have in mind. This highlights, not only the subversive character of Jesus’s ministry, but his leadership and teaching style. From early on, Jesus is engaging his disciples in the ministry by having them do the work of faith, not merely watching him do it all himself.
As they head back to Galilee, Jesus makes the unusual decision to not go around Samaria, but walk through. This isn’t usually the way the Hebrews approach the Samaritans — generally staying out of each other’s space. But here, Jesus goes for it.
And it is here where he is strangely given an abundance of time without the disciples around. Where he goes and runs into a woman at a well. Again, something Hebrew men and Samaritan women don’t do.
It is a bit like the clandestine meeting with Nicodemus a chapter ago, but in broad daylight. A juxtaposition for the Hebrew Jesus to visit with a Samaritan woman after meeting with a Pharisee — in both cases, a sense of “we better not get caught” is at play for the one visiting with Jesus more than for Jesus himself.
The lectionary doesn’t let us see the opening to the interaction, but it reveals a kind of coy Jesus, asking the woman for a drink, which is more weird by relationship of their origins than by fact of context: they are next to a well. But it is an invitation to service that might strike us as weird, but shouldn’t given how we just read how Jesus works with his disciples — that they did the baptizing. This woman naturally would draw the water herself.
The exchange that ensues relates to water, living water, and what Jesus is there to offer her.
This, of course, is thus far the biggest transgression yet. To offer living water to a Samaritan woman — to treat her as worthy as a Hebrew man. And Jesus doesn’t even bat an eye.
The conversation will continue, but for now, take in what the lectionary skips over. And what it can help us see, not only about this encounter with the woman at the well, but for the story to come.