John 4.19-24.
Since Jesus is a prophet, the Samaritan at the well figured she’d grill him on a then-current Samaritan/Jewish controversy: Which temple is the real temple? Which religion is the true religion? Where’s the one-and-only-one place to serve God? ’Cause Judeans said Jerusalem, and Samaritans said Shechem. Can’t both be right. Right?
- John 4.19-20 KWL
- 19 The woman tells Jesus, “Sir, I see you’re a prophet.
- 20 Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain.
- You Judeans say in Jerusalem
- is the place where we have to worship.”
You might remember the Judeans had a temple. Originally it was a tent, “the tabernacle,” the LORD’s sacred portable temple which traveled with the Hebrews after the Exodus, and stayed at a few different locations for nearly five centuries… till Solomon ben David built the LORD a permanent, gold-covered cedar shrine at some point round 1000BC. This remained standing till the neo-Babylonians burnt it to the ground in 586BC.
But it was rebuilt twice: First in 516BC under Babylonian governor (and descendant of Solomon) Zerubbabel bar Shealtiel; then renovated top to bottom by the Herod family during Jesus’s lifetime, from 20BC to 64CE. Completed just in time to be destroyed six years later by the Romans.
The Samaritans opposed Zerubbabel’s first rebuilding. Eventually they decided to build their own temple, round 432BC. They built it on Mt. Gerizim in Shechem, the hill where Moses had the Hebrews proclaim God’s blessings. Dt 11.29 Since God’s name was proclaimed from there, the Samaritans figured this was the perfect place for the LORD’s name to dwell. Not Moriah, where King David had originally purchased a threshing floor to put an altar. 1Ch 21.28, 22.1 David, the Samaritans figured, picked the wrong site. Moses had picked Gerizim, so Gerizim it was.
You might not know these weren’t the only temples of the LORD in the ancient world. Jeroboam ben Navat, after he became king of the 11 northern Israeli tribes, built two temples—one at Dan in the north, Bethel near the southernmost part of his kingdom. This was so his people wouldn’t visit the Jerusalem temple for worship… and maybe get swayed by the kings of Jerusalem, and become a political problem for him later. Nope; now northern Israel had temples, so they could worship at home! Problem was, Jeroboam also included gold calves to represent God, 1Ki 12.26-29 which you might recall is a huge no-no. Dt 5.8-10 As far as the scriptures are concerned, these temples were heretic, and ultimately destroyed when the Assyrians invaded.
And in Egypt, Israeli communities there also created temples to the LORD, in Elephantine and Leontopolis. Both Judeans and Samaritans knew of them, and Flavius Josephus wrote about ’em. But both considered these Egyptian temples heretic, insisting there’s only one place where God would establish his name. Dt 12.11 And they ran that one place. Or figured they did.
So… which temple was the right one? (Yep, you betcha this was an orthodoxy test. Better answer correctly, Jesus!)
- John 4.21 KWL
- Jesus tells her, “Trust me, ma’am, the hour is come
- when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem
- will you worship the Father.”
Wait, neither? Yep.
You do realize God doesn’t live at your church, right?
As Jesus’s follower Stephen pointed out years later, God doesn’t live in human-made buildings. Ac 7.48-50 In other religions, their gods dwell in the temple… or they dwell in heaven, or somewhere in the cosmos, but sometimes dwell in the temple for a little while to receive worship. But the LORD doesn’t play that.
If you remember your bible, the temple wasn’t even God’s idea. It was King David’s. 2Sa 7.5-7 God only ordered Moses to construct a tent. And the tent was not for the LORD to live in, but for him to visit his people in. He visited Moses and Aaron there. He’d accept worship there. It wasn’t a dwelling-place; it was an office, if anything. A place God got work done.
God chose to pitch his tent among humanity. Heck, he did it again in Jesus. Jn 1.14 Again, it’s not so much to live in, as interact with people in. It’s just Jesus does live in his body, permanently; we can only stretch this metaphor so far before it breaks down entirely.
So what’s with temples? Simple: We humans love temples. We like to create sacred spaces to meet God in. We like ’em a little too much: Our infinite LORD is far easier to fathom once we domesticate him, stick him in our building, build him a box and expect he’ll never go outside its walls. It’s a little like we caged him.
Temples are suitable for metal or stone gods, who don’t speak, don’t move, and need to be defended by iconoclasts. Whereas the Living God can have the neo-Babylonians burn his temple to the ground, or have the Romans tear it apart stone by stone, and neither of these acts of vandalism hinder him at all. Just the opposite: Now that the shrine is no longer taking up all our focus, God’s people can stop thinking of him as limited or regional. We can finally realize he’s unlimited and universal.
You know, like Jesus describes in the next couple verses.
It doesn’t need to be a specific place. It does need to be honest.
The Samaritan wanted Jesus to prophesy, and so he did: Forty years later, there’d be no more temple in Jerusalem. The Romans destroyed it. It’s still gone.
Not that we don’t try to create substitutes! Christians still build impressive cathedrals, megachurch campuses, memorials, and prayer centers. As for Jews, they still gather on the west side of the retaining wall Herod built for the temple’s platform; gentiles call it the Wailing Wall, and Jews call it
הַכּוֹתֶל
הַמַּעֲרָבִי/ha-Kotél ha-Maharávi,
“the Western Wall,” or Kotel for short. (They don’t really wail any more than Christians do.) But in revering these sacred spaces, we wholly miss Jesus’s point.
- John 4.22-24 KWL
- 22 “You Samaritans didn’t know who you worship.
- We Judeans knew who we worship:
- Salvation comes from the Judeans.
- 23 But the hour is come, and now is,
- when true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth:
- The Father seeks such people to worship him.
- 24 God is spirit,
- and his worshipers have to worship him in spirit and truth.”
Interestingly, both Judeans and Samaritans had developed, at the time, synagogue-based denominations: Judeans had Pharisees, and Samaritans had Dositheans. These groups claimed—rightly!—we can worship God anywhere. Don’t have to go to temple. Don’t have to go to a prayer room or monastery to pray. You can pray at home, at work, at school, in the park, at Burger King. You don’t have to baptize new converts in a special fountain; any river, the ocean, or a hot tub would do. You can bless anyone anywhere. Worship isn’t limited to a space. Worship is unlimited. Just like our God.
Some of us Christians kinda know this… but it hasn’t really sunk in. I mean yeah, you can have a bible study at an Applebee’s, and pray, and even take holy communion together. But many a Christian will insist it’s not really a church service unless it’s in someplace way more sacred than a restaurant.
And not really a baptism unless the pastor does it. And not really a wedding unless it’s in a cathedral. True, we can pray anywhere, but if we really want God to hear us, better hit the prayer closet. ’Cause these people and places are holier, right? More sacred. More solemn, and therefore more holy.
It’s a rubbish belief, but it’s wormed its way into a lot of Christians. For some of us, so much, we find it impossible to worship unless we’re in a properly-designated sacred space.
But this is exactly what Jesus addresses when he’s talking about “spirit and truth.” We don’t need any specific physical location before we can worship. We only need truth. You can be in a sacred space… or not. But if you’re a hypocrite, it doesn’t matter how holy your location is: Your worship is nullified by your dishonesty.
’Cause that was a constant problem in both the Jerusalem and Shechem temples: Judeans who went through the motions of worship, but didn’t really mean it. Samaritans who burned animals at the altar for their sins, but never bothered to stop sinning. There are phonies in every religion. But Jesus wants none of them in his.
So abolish the hypocrisy! Worship God truthfully. Wherever you are.
Those who don’t know God.
Lastly, I oughta deal with the elephant in the room: You realize Jesus just told the Samaritan her people didn’t really know God.
Did worship him though. Jesus never says they don’t! Frequently you’ll hear various Christians insist people of other religions and Christian heretics might think they’re worshiping God, but in reality they’re worshiping some false god or devil. They loosely get this idea from 1 Corinthians, but Paul and Sosthenes were discussing pagan Greeks who intentionally worshiped lesser gods, 1Co 10.19-20 not pagan Greeks who tried to worship God Most High… and accidentally worshped Zeus instead. God Most High is God. The “higher power” of 12-step groups, if the 12-stepper honestly means God, is God. When Muslims pray to God, they are in fact actually praying to God.
But do they know God? Not really. Because Jesus knows God, Jn 1.18 so we kinda need Jesus if we wanna know God.
That’s not something that any of these people want to hear. Something people find mighty insulting, if they’re dead certain they totally do know God. But it’s true of a lot of religions, and a lot of heretic Christian groups. Plenty of Latter-day Saints, Christian Scientists, Oneness Pentecostals, independent Fundamentalists—and lest you get the idea you’re an exception to this list, any Christian who exhibits no fruit of the Spirit—who don’t know God.
But don’t get the wrong idea; Jesus’s statement is not condemnation. He’s come to fix that!
Salvation comes from the Judeans, Jesus in particular. Despite what antisemites claim, we can’t embrace the LORD, yet dismiss Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, God’s chosen nation of the Hebrews, their prophets, their apostles, and their scriptures. We can’t turn our back on 50 centuries of tradition just because we have some clever ideas. We’re not gonna understand Jesus without understanding him within the context of his people and the Old Testament. That’s why we study it.
And more than anything else, the one thing we Christians oughta do is strive to understand Jesus. Because he’s right and we’re not. We need him.
