John 4:1-43 contains the well known story of Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman at the well. While commentaries about this passage are generally good, there is one detail of the story that I believe gets consistently misinterpreted.

After Jesus and the woman get past the awkwardness of a Jewish man talking to a Samaritan woman, Jesus offers her living water. This leads into Him revealing His supernatural power by telling her she has had five husbands but is not married to the man she is currently with. At that point, the woman recognizes Jesus as a prophet and immediately asks Him about the proper locale of worshipping God: Jerusalem, as the Jews claimed, or Mount Gerizim, as the Samaritans claimed?

Now, I have heard a number of commentators claim that in asking this question, the Samaritan woman was “changing the subject,” trying to deflect the conversation away from her own sin that Jesus had called out. This view, however, completely misses the historical context. Let’s consider a few aspects of the situation.

First, Jesus clearly saw Samaritans as part of Israel (Acts 1:8), but the Samaritans only recognized the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) as Scripture. As a result, they did not recognize the Temple in Jerusalem (which was in Judea, not Samaria) as the proper place to worship God. Instead, they deduced from the Torah that they should worship on Mount Gerizim. This obviously created great tension between Jews and Samaritans.

Second, there had been about 400 years of “silence” between the writing of the Old Testament and the birth of Jesus. We know that prophets still existed (Luke 2:36), but there had been no new Scripture, nor had prophets guided the people as a whole. The theological divisions between Jews and Samaritans had grown up and festered during this prolonged time of silence. What they really needed was a prophet to arbitrate the conflict.

Now, think about the various issues that plague modern Christians by dividing us to a seemingly irrevocable extent: baptism (method, meaning, age), communion (same), Calvinism vs. Arminianism, whether any particular church bureaucracy is the “true church,” etc. Christians just can’t seem to bridge such divides, and as a result, we remain in permanent schism.

Now imagine that one day Jesus Himself walked into your house and offered you several hours of His undivided attention. You could ask any question or broach any topic. After discussing your personal life to your satisfaction, wouldn’t you (if you were a Christian) be eager to ask Him questions like: “Hey, are we supposed to baptize babies? Do the Son and the Holy Spirit both proceed from the Father, or just the Son? Can you go to heaven without being baptized?”

That’s exactly what the Samaritan woman was doing. After a discussion of her personal life, she addressed the single most urgent theological divide between the Jews and the Samaritans, the two main bodies of Israelites. In fact, because the disagreement over location of worship came from their differing views on the Old Testament, this question would basically resolve the more fundamental question of whether the Prophets and Writings were Scripture.

This view of the situation is confirmed by the fact that Jesus did not redirect the conversation back to her personal life but instead answered her question exactly as asked. He confirmed that the Jewish view is correct (verse 22), but He also informed her that the disagreement was no longer relevant, for in the New Covenant, worship is not tied to a physical location (verses 23-24).