Jesus Doesn’t Care About Your Culture War (John 4:27-42)
The Dissidents Guide to John, Part 7
Making it Weird
John 4:27
Just then his disciples returned and were surprised to find him talking with a woman. But no one asked, “What do you want?” or “Why are you talking with her?”
The disciples arrive at Jacob’s well, and immediately, there’s tension in the air. They’re caught off guard. Visibly uncomfortable.
To understand why, we need a little background: the Samaritans were the estranged cousins of the Jewish people. They shared a tangled family history—same roots in the Torah—but centuries of division had left deep scars. Different scriptures. Different temples. Different worship practices. And a mutual, well-worn hatred.
It’s no wonder the woman at the well is skeptical of Jesus’ presence. But notice: it’s not just her. The disciples are also a bit uneasy about the conversation they walk in on.
John draws our attention to this moment of separation. He wants us to see it and feel it. The disciples say nothing—but their silence speaks plenty. These are the men Jesus personally chose to be his disciples, despite their flaws: a tax collector, a violent zealot, a handful of rural fishermen. A real patchwork of status and reputation. And now they struggle to extend it to a Samaritan woman.
The Disciples are We
John doesn’t tell which disciples were there, but honestly, maybe that’s the point. Maybe we’re supposed to see ourselves in their place—standing silently at the well, uncertain, uncomfortable with Jesus crossing a social and cultural boundary we never would have dared to cross.
The structure of the book of John, with its character studies and discourses, is the perfect writing with which to practice the ancient practice called Ignatian prayer, wherein the reader imagines themself in the story. It is a type of meditative prayer that allows us —as modern day disciples, to put ourselves in the sandals of Jesus’ disciples as they learned from his presence among them.
In this case, we are the insiders. The chosen ones, already gathered close to Jesus. And still—still—we are slow to understand grace when it moves beyond our borders.
The Woman’s Response (John 4:28–30)
Then, leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people, “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?” (John 4:28-29)
This woman becomes the first true evangelist in John’s Gospel. Not Nicodemus. Not the Temple rulers. Her.
After a single, transformative encounter, she drops everything and runs to gather her people. Contrast that with Nicodemus—one of the religious elite—who demanded signs and then slinked back into the shadows, still in the dark. She, the societal outcast, sees Jesus for who he is. She recognizes him not in triumph or spectacle, but in his tiredness (John 4:6 tells us he was “tired from the journey”).
Perhaps in our Ignatian prayer practice we might ask ourselves: are we more like Nicodemus, seeking God only in the extraordinary? Or are we able to see him even in exhaustion, in the smallness, the brokenness, and the tiredness of humanity?
Eat Something (John 4:31–34)
Meanwhile his disciples urged him, “Rabbi, eat something.” But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about.” (John 4:31–32)
The woman rushes off to share her story, and the disciples urge Jesus to eat. (After all, they had gone into town to buy food.) But there’s something ironic here:
They’re happy to buy from the Samaritans, but not to break bread with them.
They’ll take their resources, but not share their tables.
Even more telling—they say nothing to the townspeople about the Messiah at the well. It’s almost like they want to keep Jesus for themselves. This Messiah is not for others, but for them and their people.
So when they tell Jesus to eat the Samaritan food, he told that that he hadn’t come for their food, but for something else entirely. In this moment, the disciples become like Nicodemus—near to the source of light, but unable to see what this Samaritan woman can see, that the Messiah had come for their cultural and social enemies.
John wants us to see it clearly: as long as we are content maintaining our separations—our walls, our prejudices—we remain blind to the work of God right in front of us.
The Real Harvest (John 4:35–38)
Jesus shifts the conversation to what matters most.
Don’t you have a saying, ‘It’s still four months until harvest’? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest. (John 4:35)
The village was about .8 miles from the well, and the text tell us that “They came out of the town and made their way toward him” (V30). So as these Samaritan villagers walk towards Jesus, he takes this opportunity to tell them that he has come to reunite the people of God with their lost Samaritan brothers and sisters.
The villagers become the backdrop to his teaching, and as he holds his hand out towards them and says “open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest!”, what is it that they see in those fields?
Samaritans. The Samaritans are the harvest.
The old proverb, “four months until harvest,” was a way of saying: Relax. Be patient. There’s no rush.
Jesus flips it.
“No,” he says. “It’s happening now. No more waiting. No more talking about reconciliation. No more theologizing about who belongs and when. The family reunion has begun.”
And so the old prophecies are coming true—right before their eyes:
Ezekiel 37:22 — “I will make them one nation in the land…”
Hosea 1:10–11 — “Judah and Israel will be gathered together…”
Isaiah 11:12–13 — “He will gather the scattered people…”
Jesus is declaring the broken family “restored.” Through himself. Right there and right then.
And How Does It End?
Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony… They urged him to stay with them, and he stayed two days. And because of his words many more became believers. (John 4:39–41)
They didn’t just believe because of what they heard—they believed because they encountered him. Words aren’t enough. Presence matters. Embodiment matters. (But that’s probably a whole sermon for another day.)
For the Dissident:
We are always standing somewhere around the well. Watching Jesus cross a boundary we’re not ready to cross. The real question is—will we follow him across it?
There are so many waiting outside the church, many kicked out, many unwelcome, many oppressed and condemned. But they are not strangers, they are our brothers and sisters and we cannot separate by culture war what Christ has included by the cross.
The fields are ripe for the harvest, and there are so many that we have yet to make space for. The time is now.
I appreciate how you highlight v. 47. It’s so easy to overlook the importance of that comment. I love how Raymond Brown ties that into the end of an essay on the role of women in the church:
“In researching the evidence of the Fourth Gospel, one is still surprised to see to what extent in the Johannine community women and men were already on an equal level in the fold of the Good Shepherd. This seems to have been a community where in the things that really mattered in the following of Christ there was no difference between male and female—a Pauline dream (Gal 3:28) that was not completely realized in the Pauline communities. But even John has left us with one curious note of incompleteness: the disciples, surprised at Jesus’ openness with a woman, still did not dare to ask him, “What do you want of a woman?” (4:27). That may well be a question whose time has come in the church of Jesus Christ.”
🙌🏼🙌🏼🙌🏼