John 4:19 The woman said to him, “Sir, I perceive that you are a
prophet.”
4:23-24 “...But the hour is coming and now is, when the true
worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth,
for such the Father
seeks to worship him. God is Spirit and those who worship him must worship in
spirit and truth.”
Jesus' encounter with the Samaritan woman while the occasion for the Gospel to develop a lengthy argument about the nature of God also contains a running dialogue that gives the occasion a ring of authenticity which contributes to the power of what Jesus says in addition to that of the exchange itself. To my mind, it offers one of the finest bits of humor in Scripture because it is obvious that her calling Jesus a Prophet contains a play on words provoked by his awareness of her irregular marital status. But it is the setting itself which is particularly significant - Jesus is in Samaria presumably because it offers the most convenient way of moving between Judea and Galilee. It was, however, not the usual way getting to Galilee because of the bitter rivalry between Jews and Samaritans which often led to travelers from Galilee being attached as they traveled on to Jerusalem.
The nature of the dispute offers the opportunity for the lengthy pronouncements that Jesus makes in the course of the 4th chapter of John. The Samaritan sect was based upon the Pentateuch (Genesis etc.) But its cultic center was in the temple on Mount Gerizim. The dispute has its source in the Hebrew text of Deut. 27.4 where God ordered the Israelites after they had crossed the Jordan into the Promised Land to build an altar on Mount Ebal for burnt offerings. The Samaritan Pentateuch substitutes Gerizim for Ebal on the basis of Deut 11:29, 27:12 where Ebal is the mount of cursing and Gerizim is the mount of blessing. Also in the area is Jacob’s tomb which once again figures prominently in the current dispute between Israeli fundamentalists and Palestinians.
Alas, the Samaritan affair if we may use such terminology, has the familiar ring of religious disputes throughout the ages, including their intractability for resolution. Jesus, however, uses the request for a drink of water and the crucial metaphor which it represents to launch a discourse about the nature of spirituality (my words) which offers the opportunity to go beyond the limits of bodily existence and therefore to provide a vision of religious life which absorbs and transforms the centuries-old dispute between Jew and Samaritan. Since the argument has been over which place of worship, Jerusalem or Gerizim is the right one, he proclaims a new venue which is based not upon the place of worship but the attitude of whose who worship.
Now, I want to jump forward 6 centuries and consider taking a trip into the Arabian peninsula and along its course discover that your well-being was constantly threatened by the presence of mutually hostile and violent Byzantine Christian communities - each claiming and enforcing the truth of its particular slant on Christian life and worship. Of course, the same situation to a greater or lesser degree had existed happened somewhat earlier in western Christendom and had been dealt by the Great Ecumenical Council and the dogmatic decrees which they had issued. But our traveler in the later 6th century was in territory where neither the Decrees nor the ability to enforce them existed. The resulting levels of corruption and social chaos made life miserable and its victims longed for relief in another world.. Interestingly, this was also a world in which Jesus was a familiar figure as the result of both Gospel based and folk stories. This may well account for the fact that he played an important role in the life of Muhammed and his followers as they too sought alternatives for the current level of religious strife, degeneration. and corruption. What I want you to imagine is another story like that of the Samaritan woman at the well perceiving the Muslim Jesus standing before her:
Jesus said, “O Lord, tell me about this nation that will obtain your mercy.” God said, "It is the nation of Muhammad, a nation of scholars, god-fearing, pious, self-restrained, pure of heart, and wise as though they were prophets. They are satisfied with a little bounty from me and I am satisfied with a little of good works from them. I lead them into paradise because they say, ‘There is no God but God.’ O Jesus they are the majority of the inhabitants of paradise, for no people’s tongues have ever been more humbled by uttering ‘There is no god but God’ than theirs, and no people’s necks have ever been more humbled by prostration than theirs.”
Muhammed proposes a spiritual trajectory which aims to cut across the incessant quarrels and debates of the “People of the Book” - earlier religious communities possessing divine scriptures which they have deliberately perverted for personal gain or through misunderstanding or in pursuit of blind imitation. The stories in the Qur’an and in the tradition which helps sustain it contains stories of those prophets whose moral conduct contrasts glaringly with the conduct and belief of their followers. The true followers of these prophets have always been and will always be “Muslims”. In this context Jesus does emerge a very different person -the Qur’an tilts backward to his miraculous birth stories rather than forward to his passion. This is why he is frequently referred to as”the son of Mary” and why he and his mother frequently appear together. At his side she confirms his miraculous pure birth. But his ‘death’ is equally miraculous: he is lifted up to God, where according to later Islamic tradition he remained alive and waiting to fulfil his appointed role at the end of time. His speech and the divine pronouncements about him rather seem to echo the career of Muhammed. He bears a message of God’s unity which confirms earlier prophetic messages and there are passages in the Qur’an that remind Jesus himself and mankind as a whole that God is the ultimate creator and master of the life and destiny of Jesus, as of all Creation. The true Jesus is cleansed of the perversions of his followers and is a prophet totally obedient to his Maker and offered up as the true alternative to the Jesus of the Incarnation, Crucifixion and Redemption.
As Christians we are quick to reject this picture, primarily, I believe, because it doesn’t leave much room for us to be in terms of our faith. We argue that the Muslim Jesus is, in fact, a product of pure fabrication and cannot obviously be taken seriously by anyone who wishes to know that truth about Him. And so We immediately take refuge in the doctrinal statements upon which so much emphasis has been placed in the development of Christianity to this day. Personally I find much more difficult to accept the ascetic, world denying paradise in the next world Jesus which is the person that appears in the majority of the more than 300 references to Jesus which is an integral party of Muslim tradition and piety . I long for an Islam that would be able to produce a cultural/historic understanding of its faith such as we Christians have experienced in the last century or two. Some kind of common ground needs to be found that will enable us to go beyond the fact Christians and Muslims share a stance about Revelation which does not appear to leave much room for the other to exist. I want to find a way to escape from the anger that arises whenever we try to talk about each other often with a stance that suggests that the other does not exist or is at least totally deaf.
We need to begin somewhere as contemporary events remind us. After all, it is significant that one faith tradition has reached out and made the central figure of another a key figure within its own - thereby reinforcing and sharing common elements of piety. It may be a no little importance that in the last generation most of the knowledge we commonly share about Jews, Christians and Muslims is a view which is based upon the practices and claims of the most extreme adherents of our traditions. There is now a new imperative for our religious community - one which requires us to understand that the very content which has driven the ecumenical movement is increasingly irrelevant to what constitutes the nature of human spirituality and the cultural and historic cloaks within which it is concealed..
For God is Spirit and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth
The Rev. Roger A. Balk, Ph.d.For further reading:
1. Diana L. Eck, A NEW RELIGIOUS AMERICA, Harper San Francisco, 2001
2. Tarif Khalidi, THE MUSLIM JESUS, Harvard, 2001