Abstract
Jesus’s encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well is a paradigmatic text for the Church, showing new possibilities for how the Church can engage the world, specifically engagement through invitational conversation and acts of charity at modern-day community wells. A Place at the Table is a pay-what-you-can café in Raleigh, North Carolina. Patrons can pay the suggested price, less than the suggested price, redeem a token worth the cost of a meal, or pay by volunteering at the café. Patrons who are able to “pay it forward” can further support the mission by tipping or buying meal tokens for others. At this café, a space reminiscent of an ancient “community well,” thirsty travelers receive the life-giving waters of acceptance, connection, and sustenance. The custom of hospitality is a life-giving and transformational practice for the Church, a viable and tangible way to connect with its neighbor and draw all persons into the experience of God’s love.
In large letters on the outside windows of a downtown café are three significant words: ALL ARE WELCOME. These words are significant because they speak a good news message that every person, regardless, is beloved. Regardless of gender, race, economic means, or religious affiliation, all are welcome here. And more than that, all belong. All are a part of our kinship and friendship circle. All are our community and the community is blessed by the presence of all. The invitation is to share life and connect with all persons through the love gift of relationship at a place reminiscent of an ancient “community well,” a space where thirsty travelers are refreshed and filled.
Opened in January 2018, A Place at the Table articulates its mission as community and good food for all regardless of means. It is a pay-what-you-can café, the first of its kind in Raleigh, North Carolina. Patrons can pay the suggested price, less than the suggested price, redeem a token worth the cost of a meal, or pay by volunteering at the café. Patrons who are able to “pay it forward” can further support the mission by tipping or buying meal tokens for others. 1 Thirsty souls, people carrying broken cisterns and panting from their labors, enter the doors of the café every day. The struggle for healing, acceptance, and belonging is real; good food, coffee, and community tables are our shared common ground. Through invitational dialogue and acts of hospitality, life is shared and, in that connection, transformation is possible.
In the presence of economic and sociocultural barriers, mutual desire, hunger, and thirst cross and transcend them. A cup of coffee and a plate of waffles are the life-giving elements sustaining all persons regardless of means. Courage and movement on the shared common ground of hunger and thirst create a circle of kinship. In the grace-filled space of noonday conversations at the community tables, friendships and kinship circles form. Those gathered give and receive food, drink, and share stories at these rectangular circles in which holistic fullness and healing occur. In this sharing of lives, guest/host roles shift. The movement from outsider to insider is the movement of love; all are welcome and accepted as God’s beloved, regardless.
The life-giving waters of acceptance, connection, and sustenance are for all persons at this community café. Water, coffee, and food are free, freely offered and freely given. The pay-what-you-can model exemplifies courage and desire, the desire to love people by providing for their need regardless of means, background, belief, age, ethnicity, or gender. It is radical hospitality, and it is transformative. Thirsty and hungry souls are offered life and delight, invited to feast on cheesy grits and turkey-bacon-avocado club sandwiches alongside the marginalized, abused, addicted, and forgotten, an inclusive circle of humanity. The community café and communal table become a non-divisive ground of healing and delight. They embody the kinship-feast-centered-abundant ethic; all bodies and souls are filled and full, regardless.
The custom of hospitality is a freeing and life-giving practice at this community café. Invitational conversation and acts of charity transform the social and public space. The love gift of relationship is given and received; friendships and kinship circles form. Sharing life and connecting with all people, regardless, is transformative. And all of these dynamics are on display in the encounter between Jesus and a Samaritan woman at a literal community well.
A paradigmatic text: John 4:7–15
While the pay-what-you-can café and the Samaritan woman’s well exist miles and millennia apart, the two places bear striking similarities. Both are spiritually charged sites for hospitality and deep conversation, and both reveal that discourse and acts of charity invite relationship. In the biblical encounter, Jesus shows new possibilities for sharing life and connecting with all people through invitational dialogue and acts of hospitality. Specifically, conversations at community wells offer a life-giving paradigm for the Church as a viable and tangible way for the Church to connect with its neighbor and draw all persons into the experience of God’s love.
My particular community ministry is rooted in the biblical and theological foundations of this text. Getting out into the community is the goal, and being a sacred presence and sharing the love of God to and for all persons is the desired fruit. Going outside the walls of the Church may present barriers to cross or transcend and religious, cultural, or socioeconomic impediments, personal prejudices, and fears to overcome. The narrative of the Samaritan woman at the well is a call to have courage and take those steps. The Church can transcend religious and cultural contexts, along with attendant fears and prejudices, for the purpose of life-giving relationship and connection. Practices of hospitality, theologically rich conversation, and charity assist in taking bold steps and finding common ground with one’s neighbor. John 4:7–15 and the broader biblical canonical witness call Christians to go through their own “Samarias” and engage the Other for the purpose of being a loving presence and light. What is needed, if the Church is to take such steps in their communities today, is an honest appraisal of the boundaries they must transcend.
Boundaries in John 4:7–15
Historical boundaries
The story of the woman at the well is unique in being the only Gospel account of Jesus ministering in Samaria. To grasp the uniqueness of this encounter and to appreciate what is taking place in this story, one must set aside cultural assumptions about the gospel stories to understand the Samaritans and their geographical, historical, and religious connection to the land and to the people of Judea. This text raises important questions regarding first-century social networks as well as religious and cultural customs and beliefs. In addition, the situation of the faith community to which the Gospel is addressed is important in understanding the struggle to find common ground with one’s brother, sister, or neighbor.
Samaria is located approximately 42 miles north of Jerusalem, situated between Judea and Galilee. The ancient Northern Kingdom of Israel ruled from this piece of Palestinian land until the Assyrians conquered it in 722/721
There are barriers to transcend on shared common ground in my urban neighborhood. Connecting with persons gathering at the multiple community wells lining the streets of my city is geographically possible. One wonders, however, given the religious and cultural barriers that these persons must transcend, is meaningful connection and relationship actually possible? Jesus and the Samaritan woman are biblical exemplars for connecting with one’s neighbor, as they model courage, desire, and movement on shared common ground.
Religious boundaries
Significant theological obstacles prevent Jews and Samaritans, including Jesus and the Samaritan woman, from finding common ground. Samaritan theology is rooted in Moses as prophet (apostle), Torah as Law, and Mount Gerizim as God’s chosen dwelling place. Their eschatology predicted the coming of a taheb, a messiah who would come like a new Moses to restore true worship on Gerizim, rather than a Davidic messiah who would rule as a prince. They understood the construction of the sanctuary at Shiloh, rather than Gerizim, as the apostasy that precipitated the schism in the Israelite family. 5 Later history includes Samaritan support of Syrian monarchs against Jews and the destruction of the Samaritan temple on Mount Gerizim by a Jewish high priest. 6 First-century Samaritans and Judeans shared a common and complex Israelite lineage. In the text, Jesus and the Samaritan woman boldly occupy this shared and schismatic ground. Can this sharing of ground inform community ministry generally and local church ministry specifically? Schisms and shared ground characterize the historical and modern-day religious landscape within local churches and across denominations. Questions of faith and faithfulness are found inside the walls of the church as well as on the streets outside the church. As local congregations seek to connect with persons in their community, do those in the church assume that the shared ground is more schismatic than faithful? Do they assume that the person they encounter at the bar or restaurant has no faith or the “wrong” faith? Are Christians courageous enough to walk around the corner into that community space, have a conversation with the beautiful Other, and find out? The biblical witness of Jesus and a theology of incarnational presence provide for the possibility of authentic connection between church and community.
Cultural boundaries
First-century social networks and cultural values are important contexts for this text. Social research describes the ancient world’s gender-divided spaces as private/public and insider/outsider. Males occupied public spaces with civic tasks, while females occupied private spaces with domestic tasks. Women’s quarters and clothing were “separated and bolted from” men’s quarters, in order to maintain that “important cultural division.” 7 In addition, cultural values upheld customs of veiling and female silence in public spaces. Women were not to talk to unrelated males in public or private, nor were males to talk about women outside their kinship circle; honor and shame framed the relational spaces of the day. Sociocultural norms regarding honorable and shameful interpersonal contact and space mirrored religious regulations. Historical hostility between Jews and Samaritans resulted in first-century Pharisaic rules warning against Judean contact with Samaritan women due to the associated risk of contracting impurity. The regulation was based on a Levitical text (15:19–27) used to characterize the perpetually unclean nature of Samaritan women as “menstruants from the cradle.” 8 Religious fear of contamination prohibited social interaction between Jews and Samaritans. Thus, when a Jewish (pure) rabbi and a Samaritan (impure) woman meet at a public space, what level of interaction is allowed? Is the relational space contaminated or ruled by improper norms? Is transcending or transforming these norms possible?
The proper norm that all are welcome, regardless, guides and invites social interaction at the café. People arrive in various states of cleanliness, some having slept outside the night before or not having showered in a few days. Regardless, we sit together with joy rather than fear, honoring the pure gift of the other’s presence. Suzanne and I sit together often at this community well and share life together. We share coffee, pastries, sugar water (her unique creation), and creative activities such as coloring, crocheting, and card making. Almost every diner, staff member, and volunteer has a Suzanne-crafted picture, key chain, and card. Suzanne’s smile, handmade gifts, and the gift of her presence transform this twenty-first-century public space. Friendship and kinship circles form, and we are given a useful and better framework for understanding the world in which we live and love.
First-century private/public spaces and kinship circles provide a useful framework for understanding the world of and behind the selected text. Kinship groups were nurturing spaces for females and males. The formation of such groups governed private spaces, allowing for social and mutual interaction not available in public spaces. In kinship spaces, males and females shared food, drink, and conversation. 9 Social science and feminist commentaries note a helpful connection and movement in the Samaritan well narrative: public space becomes private space, the “ultimate outsider” becomes an insider, and the “quintessential deviant” is welcome in the kinship circle. 10
Cultural norms and socioeconomic barriers exist in the public downtown space in which I minister and reside. Persons experiencing homelessness, affluent persons, cisgender and transgender persons, young persons, and the elderly all live and move within feet of each other every day. One can find all of the above at the community wells (restaurants, bars) in my neighborhood and at the pay-what-you-can café in the heart of this city. Is a possible barrier for church–community connection a view or norm that persons inhabiting such spaces are “unclean” or that the space itself is “unclean”? Could a “fear of contamination” prohibit social, conversational, and hospitable interaction? Will congregants or Church view a community minister as “unclean” for stepping into such a space? This text and its exemplars are unequivocal in declaring that people can transcend norms for the life-giving purpose of being a loving presence. Churches and congregants can create kinship circles when they invite others or outsiders to share their food, drink, and conversation. They can open doors if they are bold enough to “get outside” and go into community spaces with the light and love of God.
Boundaries in John’s congregation
Finally, the social and religious setting of the Gospel of John is important for understanding first-century tensions and barriers to connection and kinship. Scholars view the social and religious tensions within the first-century Jewish synagogue as determinative for the shape, form, and content of the Gospel of John. Specifically, the evangelist sought to convey not only the life and ministry of Jesus but also the life of the Jewish Christian community and its relationship with Judaism. 11 Thus, this narrative reveals the struggles for healing, acceptance, and equality between the Jewish and Samaritan Christians of the author’s faith community. 12
In summary, this unique account of Jesus ministering among the Samaritan people reveals the historical, sociocultural, and religious milieu of the first century. The transmission of a story about Jesus showing new possibilities for sharing life with all people mirrors the contexts of his time and the current time as well. Struggles for healing, acceptance, and equality exist in present-day communities. Crossing barriers and finding common ground can begin with something as simple and life-giving as a conversation and a cup of coffee. The text of the Samaritan woman at the well calls the Church to take steps of courage. Congregants can transcend religious and cultural norms, along with attendant fears and prejudices. John 4:7–15 and the broader biblical canonical witness are a call to go to and through Samaria and engage one’s neighbor in order to be a sacred light and presence. Biblical and theological witnesses model the life-giving impact of getting out in communities and engaging in the practices of invitational dialogue and acts of hospitality and charity. Church and community can connect on such shared, clean, and faithful ground. This is good news for community ministry generally and the Church broadly.
Hospitality
What, then, are the primary themes of the story of the woman at the well? One might begin by noting a rather simple fact: a man and a woman meeting at a well is a familiar biblical scenario, so common that scholars call it a “type-scene.” Past scholarship has depended heavily on the Old Testament stories of Abraham’s servant and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel, and Moses and Zipporah as paradigms for interpreting the interaction at the Samaritan well, categorizing the John 4 text as a betrothal type-scene. But are these stories of bridegrooms and future (or potential) wives the best lens for understanding the encounter?
Andrew Arterbury’s work helpfully identifies this story as a hospitality scene rather than a betrothal type-scene. The portrait of Jesus as a divine visitor or “stranger” who participates in the ancient custom of hospitality connects better with the literary, social, and theological elements of the text. This insight is important for an exploration of how the Samaritan woman’s story might inform contemporary stories because literary texts depicting the custom of hospitality are based on host/guest relationships rather than male/female relationships. 13 As a result, host/guest roles broaden the social and spiritual possibilities for this text and for its contemporary interpreters. The Samaritan or community well becomes a non-gendered, non-divisive ground of hospitality in which sharing a cup of life-giving drink is possible.
Jesus requests a drink from the Samaritan woman, violating religious and social customs with his request. Jewish–Samaritan relationships were regulated by purity concerns, religious and social in nature. Jewish wisdom warned, “He that talks much with womankind brings evil upon himself,” and “He that eats the bread of the Samaritan is like to one who eats the flesh of swine.” 14 Social and religious reality of the day would say that no interaction or invitation should or could occur in this space. The custom of hospitality, however, frees the text and its characters from social or religious deviancy.
In the setting and reality of that day, one can acknowledge and appreciate the social and religious breadths and depths Jesus crossed in this encounter. The custom of hospitality in any day or setting can transform social and spiritual/religious norms and space; it is a freeing and life-giving practice at community wells. The practice of hospitality can free people from social or religious “deviancy” and from “violating” social or religious norms. Unspoken and unwritten customs and norms exist in today’s ecclesial and religious settings. Is spending time with its neighbors acceptable for church members or the Church if the neighborhood community space is a bar? Is conversation with the Other permissible in such a space? Can one go so far as to share a cup or drink?
Departure from normal or acceptable spaces and ways of engagement can be accepted with the non-divisive practice of hospitality and attendant acts of charity. Church members, community spaces, churches, and neighbors can no longer be viewed as deviant (deviating from the norm) if hospitality and invitation are the ground and foundation. Will the Church be as courageous as its God and walk the breadth and depth of this ground? May the Church take such a walk for the purpose of transformation, to bring light and love to those who live, work, and fellowship on the community ground outside the doors of the church.
Transformation
The most well-known verse from John’s Gospel reminds readers: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son” (3:16). God sent his Son in order to give eternal life to “whosoever believeth.” Who qualifies as a “whosoever” believer? How broad is the “world” for whom God sent his Son? The ancient world was a divided world; sociocultural, religious, and gender norms determined who was “in” and who was “out.” The “world” already had a firm grasp of the “whosoevers.” With the good news of God’s love and gift of life blowing fresh across the ears of Jewish Nicodemus, Gospel readers encounter a scene that challenges the world’s divisions and definitions. Can a “whosoever” be an “outsider”? Would God send his Son to a socially deviant place and person?
The Samaritan woman text answers these questions regarding God’s intention of love toward humanity. Jesus intentionally crosses and transcends the borders and divisions of the world to offer life to all people. Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman are invited to drink from the same cup. Jesus’s transforming presence and acts transform places and lives. Jesus’s encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well is a paradigmatic text for the Church. Invitational conversation and acts of charity are transformational ways that the Church can share God’s love gift of life with the world.
Jesus’s open and accepting manner is an important key to transformation in this narrative. Transformation and reconciliation are the result of Jesus’s (and Christians’) acknowledgment of “the full religious and human capacities of the other.” 15 Jesus’s willingness to engage the Other compassionately and respectfully brings about the transcendence of historical–social–religious contexts necessary to affect movement and change. Jesus’s willingness to engage the “quintessential deviant,” a person who possesses many of the characteristics of the marginalized, reveals the desire of God to transcend margins and transform the marginalized. 16
The willingness of both Jesus and the woman to enter into a difficult space with hospitable attitudes and theologically rich conversations is a life-giving model. The narrative’s action and dialogue give evidence that not only is Jesus willing to drink from her water jar but also she is willing to drink from his spring. The transformative turn in the role of thirsty traveler reveals the transformative power of life-giving conversations and acts. Such reciprocity and intimacy indicate that the space is being socially and culturally transformed; public space is changed into private space. 17 The movement to private social space is also a movement for the woman from outsider to insider status; it is movement toward inclusion in Jesus’s newly formed (and forming) kinship or disciple group. 18 Beyond inclusion lies the intimate knowing inherent in kinship circles. Those in these circles give and receive food, drink, life, and love. Lives are shared, and in the sharing of lives, guest/host roles shift. At the well in Samaria, Jesus and the woman model this shifting, transforming, life-giving movement. It is the movement of mutual love, intimate knowing, and hospitality. It is the movement of the Triune God, a movement for the Church to follow.
Life-giving movement occurs frequently at the café. When Suzanne and I color or crochet at the community table, our bodies sway to the beats and grooves of the music on the café playlist. Others at the table join us in moving and singing, voices and bodies in rhythm with one another. Persons who have transcended societal boundaries by way of a cup of coffee and a communal table find themselves transformed and transported to intimate knowing. Such intimacy and reciprocity indicate that the public space is changed into private space; it is the movement of mutual love.
Suzanne and I share a mutual love for dancing. Conversations often include our favorite songs to dance to and which songs we would include on our dance party playlist. Michael Jackson and several contemporary hip-hop artists make both playlists. Outside the café, would we have the opportunity to engage in such intimate movement together? Is it possible for transformational practices, hospitality, and kinship circles to exist in other public spaces, beyond the life-giving space of our community well?
The non-profit organization that supports the café hosts an annual fall fund-raising event. Shared tables and food, auction items live and silent, persons in fancy attire and casual populate the space. Photo booths, speeches, and donations frame and fill the evening. Sponsorships, purchases, and smiles indicate a successful event. And yet can there be more? Do possibilities exist for transforming the metrics?
Transformational metrics and practices include intimate knowing beyond inclusion. The guest list for the fund-raising event includes persons who volunteer for meals at the café alongside persons who pay for their meals at the cafe. As the successful evening this past September drew near its end, people were cleaning and packing as guests departed. Suzanne approached the emcee and requested several tunes. The music began, and I found myself moving from the outer room to the inner room. Suzanne, a café volunteer, and I danced and moved together with delight. It was the movement of mutual love, intimate knowing, and hospitality. Kinship circles grow beyond the walls of the café. Metrics are transformed and new possibilities exist for engaging the world.
Transformation, movement, and shared lives inform my community ministry both inside and outside the community cafe. Connection with all persons is possible with open, accepting attitudes and respectful engagement of the Other. Conversation and cup-sharing among “deviants,” those willing to deviate from divisive norms for the sake of life and truth, shape the transformational content of text and ministry. A theology of presence with hearts and hands open to both give and receive is a movement of mutual love. This type of movement opens up new possibilities for connection with neighbor.
Principles, practices, and possibilities
The Samaritan woman at the well narrative is a text that speaks a powerful and life-giving message to the Church today. New possibilities exist for how to engage the world. Specifically, new possibilities and transformation exist through invitational dialogue and acts of hospitality at modern-day community wells. The Church is invited to follow Jesus and travel to physically hungry and thirsty places. The necessity to do so is both geographical and divine; the spiritually hungry and thirsty do not necessarily travel to the threshold of the Church’s door on Sunday. Engaging the thirsty at communal wells is a new possibility and path for the Church.
Traveling the path of the thirsty traveler in the Samaritan text reveals several helpful ways the Church can appropriate the text for the purpose of sharing life with all persons. First, Jesus went to the people, and he was comfortable there. He found the common ground of thirst and desire and sat down in that space. His decision to drink from the same common well of desire initially transcended and later transformed cultural, social, and religious lines. The desire for relationship, to love and be loved, forms the heart and soul of God’s creative work and image. Jesus allowed such desire, divine and human, to take him into a potentially difficult space and engage any and all people in that space with God’s love. Do God’s people desire as Jesus desires? Do they thirst to share life and love with all people or only a select few, namely, those who occupy their same circle? Will the Church be open to the new possibility that people who deviate from the Church’s expectations or norms are equally thirsty?
The postmodern United States can be characterized as thirsty; specifically, it is thirsty for connection and community. Sociocultural dynamics reveal a people desiring meaningful connection and conversation. People are gathering in public spaces such as coffee shops, bars, and bookstores (spaces known as “third places”), seeking the pleasures of companionship and stimulating conversation outside of the first place (home) and second place (work). Personal ventures into coffee shops, yoga studios, and athletic facilities on Sunday mornings reveal a good number of persons frequenting “great good places” 19 that are not religious or ecclesial. People are actively seeking physical, emotional, and relational sustenance, and it is occurring with increasing frequency in community public spaces. This postmodern era reveals the Church to be undergoing upheaval in terms of its understanding about sacred community and how best to reach its surrounding secular community. 20 Response in the form of “fresh expressions” of Church has emerged. Can coffeehouses or pubs be “great good places” for sharing the life-giving waters of God’s love? Can people experience spiritual community and church in “third places”? Will the Church take a seat at the coffee table or pull up a stool at the bar, engage in the world’s conversations, and hospitably offer eternal delight to the thirsty?
Those who travel to where the thirsty are can engage persons with invitational conversation and simple acts of hospitality. Mutual respect and open, honest communication can turn strangers into kin over the cup of desire. The desire for connection and love is the shared common ground of humanity. Will people walk the breadth and depth of that sacred ground? My particular community ministry is grounded in a theology of presence that goes to where the thirsty are, the great good places at which the common ground of thirst and desire reside. I delightfully sit down at community tables and share life with all who are thirsty or hungry; the possibility for transformation becomes a reality.
Living the text: Invitation and prayer
The Church is called to study faithfully and consume its life-giving scriptures; they are a gift of God to the body of Christ. Beyond study and consumption is life, specifically, the continual invitation to live out the holy and delightful diet the Church eats and drinks. The Samaritan well passage confesses that Jesus came to feed the spiritual thirst of all people, inviting each one to accept God’s love gift of life. Jesus sits down at a community well and converses with the thirsty person in front of him. Jesus thirsts for the faith of this woman such that he boldly offers what she needs. Cultural backgrounds recede as God’s rule of faith, hope, and love color the conversation. The text, therefore, makes a claim on the Church, which is formed by the life-giving waters of the Holy Spirit. The claim is an invitation to participate in God’s healing story of love.
Participation in God’s healing, restoring narrative requires courage, faith, and creativity. Performance of a text that invites one to ask an Other, who may be a deviant in that context, for a physical drink and conversation leads quickly to the strengthening power of the Spirit. The text and God promise the power and presence of the Spirit for such life-giving acts as well as an attendant delight in life and living. Ecclesial life and delight involve a Church that is willing to be creative and courageous in its engagement with the world. The Samaritan well text offers new possibilities for how to engage the world, specifically through invitational conversation and acts of charity at modern-day community wells. What will the Church’s response be to the creative, courageous call God makes on the Church in this text? Will it be to drink courage and faith from the scriptures and the Spirit, inviting both to transform the Church and move it into difficult–different–other spaces? Will it be to allow the Spirit to take the relational paradigm Christ offers in the text and form congregants into persons in Christ’s image, an image and person of hospitality? Will it be to consider the possibility of embodying a conversational-feast-centered ethic as a part of the Church’s work?
The invitation to embody and live the text is boldly offered by the text and the Triune God. The call to “go through Samaria” is a call to go into new spaces and try new, unexpected things; a call to take faithful risks and habituate courage; and a call to go where the people are and love them with the healing love of God. This is my vocational call as a community minister. It is also the call and heart of the Church. Will the Church accept the timeless invitation to participate in God’s story of love with courage, faith, and creativity? The dialogical, relational, and hospitable witness of John 4:7–15 provides the biblical and theological ground for the people’s feet, hands, and hearts. From this sacred ground, the people can walk outside the doors of the Church to meet and greet their neighbor, with hands and hearts willing to share food, drink, and conversation. Connection, transformation, light, and love are possible.
Judith Jones’s opening prayer in her work The Divine Feminine is an appropriate prayer for the call of the Church to connect with all those who are thirsty: God of mountains and deserts, cities and wildernesses, bless us as we set out on new journeys in uncharted territory. Give us courage to see in the stranger’s face the glory of your creation. Fill us with the living water, your Son Jesus, that we may never know thirst. Help us to discern in each new encounter an opportunity to share what we have found: a well that never will run dry. Amen.
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Footnotes
2.
G. W. Van Beek, “Samaria,” IDB 4:183–85.
3.
T. H. Gaster, “Samaritans,” IDB 4:191–95.
4.
Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh, Social-Science Commentary on the Gospel of John (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998), 98; Judith Kaye Jones, The Women in the Gospel of John: The Divine Feminine (St. Louis: Chalice, 2008), 15.
5.
Gaster, “Samaritans,” 191–95.
6.
Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John, AB 29 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966), 170.
7.
Jerome H. Neyrey, “What’s Wrong with This Picture? John 4, Cultural Stereotypes of Women, and Public and Private Space,” in A Feminist Companion to John, ed. Amy-Jill Levine and Marianne Blickenstaff (New York: Sheffield Academic Press, 2003), 102–104.
8.
Malina and Rohrbaugh, Social-Science Commentary, 99; Brown, Gospel According to John, 170; Robert Kysar, John, ACNT (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1986), 63.
9.
Neyrey, “What’s Wrong with This Picture?,” 100, 101, 114.
10.
Neyrey, “What’s Wrong with This Picture?,” 124. The research of Neyrey, Levine, and Malina and Rohrbaugh on the “socially deviant” scene and “quintessential deviant” person in the text, and the transformation that occurs through the formation of a Jesus kinship group, is a valuable contribution to understanding first-century social dynamics and a theology of presence. See further discussion below under “Transformation” section.
11.
Luke Timothy Johnson, The New Testament: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 104; Kysar, John, 61.
12.
Gerard S. Sloyan, John, Interpretation (Atlanta: John Knox, 1988), 51–54; Sandra Marie Schneiders and John C. Wronski, Written that You May Believe: Encountering Jesus in the Fourth Gospel (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2003), 135. Schneider’s feminist-critical non-historical view suggests the author’s primary purpose for the story was to legitimate the Samaritan mission and to establish equality in the Johannine community, especially in regard to the acceptance of the apostolic leadership of women in this community.
13.
Andrew E. Arterbury, “Breaking the Betrothal Bonds: Hospitality in John 4,” CBQ 72.1 (January 2010): 69.
14.
Charles H. Talbert, Reading John: A Literary and Theological Commentary on the Fourth Gospel and the Johannine Epistles (Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys, 2005), 118.
15.
Sloyan, John, 59.
16.
Malina and Rohrbaugh, Social-Science Commentary, 99; Neyrey, “What’s Wrong with This Picture?,” 124.
17.
Malina and Rohrbaugh, Social-Science Commentary, 99.
18.
Neyrey, “What’s Wrong with This Picture?,” 124.
19.
For an exposition of this phrase, see Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community (Philadelphia: Da Capo Press, 1999).
20.
Some of the best works discussing these concerns in the broader conversation about the “missional” church include the following: M. Scott Boren, Missional Small Groups: Becoming a Community that Makes a Difference in the World (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2010); Darrell L. Guder and Lois Barrett, Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998); Hugh Halter and Matt Smay, The Tangible Kingdom: Creating Incarnational Community: The Posture and Practices of Ancient Church Now (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008); Alan Hirsch, Tim Catchim, and Mike Breen, The Permanent Revolution: Apostolic Imagination and Practice for the 21st Century Church (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2012); Alan J. Roxburgh, Missional: Joining God in the Neighborhood (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2011); Craig Van Gelder and Dwight J. Zscheile, The Missional Church in Perspective: Mapping Trends and Shaping the Conversation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011).
21.
Jones, Divine Feminine, 73.