JOHN187 - It’s Not Just Any Well, It’s THAT Well

0:17 Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Labour Podcast. And there was a president in my country called John F. Kennedy. He was a really big deal, but he got assassinated in November of 1963. Now, a bunch of you are sitting here going, Are you really going to explain JFK? Like, I think we know who JFK is.

0:34 Yeah, but not everybody does. Because it's a long time ago. And some people, you know, they were born more recently. For people who were alive back then, John F. Kennedy's administration and his subsequent assassination are like the biggest deal ever, totally left a mark. For people who have been born more recently, that event has kind of been replaced in terms of cultural national trauma by the events of September 11th.

0:59 But the Kennedy thing, I mean, it's still a huge deal, but it was a very big deal when I was young, because everybody, when I was in school, all my teachers and everybody, they could tell you where they were when they were kids and the whole Kennedy thing happened, what they heard about it. I mean, it just made a mark, right?

1:16 But part of the reason that the Kennedy assassination was such a big deal was because of what Kennedy was like. He was young, he had an attractive family, he was kind of New England nobility, and he was raising his kids in the White House, and then boom, and just you know, in a blink of an eye in Dallas, Texas, he gets shot and he's gone.

1:38 And it kind of felt like the world has changed forever, the country has changed forever. Well, that happened in again, November of 1963. I want you to imagine with me a hypothetical documentary from 1993 that was maybe on PBS or something. This doesn't exist. I'm just making things up for the sake of the exercise.

2:01 But imagine that this is it's going to be a documentary about looking back on the Kennedy assassination. Okay, well, that's interesting. Yeah, but now imagine that it's going to be hosted by John F. Kennedy Jr. JFK Jr., he was a big deal back then, an attractive younger gentleman. He was in media and stuff.

2:21 He died, I think, in a plane crash in the late 90s or early 2000s. Back then, he was alive. And imagine this documentary was going to be hosted by JFK's own son. Well, see, now the stakes are ratcheted up, right? Okay, well, now imagine that you start watching the documentary and the camera is pretty tight there on JFK Jr.

2:42 walking and talking, but then it pulls back to reveal that we're in Dallas, Texas. We're outside the Texas school book depository where the shooter took aim at JFK Jr.'s dad. We're right there at the plaza where JFK died in 1963. Okay. Well, now all of a sudden, you as a viewer intuitively know that the setting of this documentary, this conversation that you're about to witness with JFK Jr.

3:12 is really important to the story. The fact that we're here forces you as a viewer to conjure to mind all the history and everything, all the feelings, all the backstory of the event. Well, likewise, in John chapter four, the more John the Evangelist tells us about the scene, the setting of this upcoming conversation between Jesus and a Samaritan woman at a well, the more he tells us about the setting, the more we realize, oh wow, where this is happening really, really matters.

3:46 And in the same way that you, as a modern audience member, could feel the weight and implications without being told how to feel of JFK Jr. doing a documentary about his dad's assassination in Dallas at that intersection. So the original audience to John could absolutely feel, without even being told how to feel, that the entire redemptive story of the Bible and the Jewish people is completely meant to be in view here.

4:17 You, reader, are supposed to feel things because where this conversation is about to happen between Jesus and this Samaritan woman really matters. So in John 4.4, we get the first hint, the general location that this is going to happen, and it's in a whole, it's in a region of Samaria. Now he, Jesus, had to go through Samaria.

4:40 Yeah, but Samaria is big. I mean, it could be anywhere, right? It's just in Samaria is interesting enough, and we've processed that through over the last week and a half or whatever on this little history side quest we've been doing. But now today we move on to John 4.5, and the camera on this conversation pans around a little bit, zooms in, pulls back, whatever, and we realize that we're not just anywhere in Samaria, we're at the intersection.

5:05 We're at the place where so much of this happened. We're at the place that demands that we think about the whole story, John 4.5. So he, Jesus, came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob's well was there. And now, my friends, we get to go have Bible fun.

5:30 I love it when the text lobs big juicy softballs at us like this, where it references something historically just in passing. It assumes the original audience knows, but you and I don't know. So we have to go look it up and figure out what the connection is. All right. Well, I can look at a map and figure out that this Sikar place is we don't know for sure the exact pinpoint of this little village, but we know absolutely for sure that this is right in between the mountains of Ebal and Gerizim.

6:04 I mean, right in the heart of Samaritan territory, but it wasn't always Samaritan territory. There's a long history with these two twin mountains. Standing next to each other, Ebal and Gerizim are both like 3,000 feet tall and change. I don't remember the exact number, but like give or take, right at 3,000 feet.

6:26 They're twin mountains, twin sisters that stand on either side of a T-shaped valley. At the intersection of the capital T is Shechem. And somewhere right in there on the shoulder, running up to one of these two twin mountains that are right next to each other with a little valley in between, is this little shoulder of land.

6:49 I think that might even be kind of what Shechem means. I might be misremembering that. Don't quote me on that at a party. You might look dumb. I seem to remember somewhere along the way hearing that linguistically the word shoulder in the ancient language is related to this town or this region. And there's this spring that had some kind of architecture around it for harvesting fresh water that was given to Jacob way back in the day.

7:15 Now, Ebal and Gerizim, at this T intersection where the town of Shechem sits in between them, is a place that has all kinds of connections to the timeless covenant of God with his people. And we probably won't get to that today, we'll get to it tomorrow. But the history here starts back at about the two-thirds mark of Genesis.

7:37 There's a guy named Jacob. Jacob is the son of Isaac, Isaac is the son of Abraham, and Jacob is kind of like Odysseus. He lived a little bit before Odysseus of Odyssey fame, if Odysseus was a real person, but the characters are similar. They're crafty and their craftiness gets them into trouble at times, but it also is sort of their saving grace.

8:06 They're bold, they're witty. And it, you know, Odysseus and Jacob both kind of come off weird to a modern audience because our sensibilities and our ethics are different, and it's not the ancient Bronze Age. So Jacob's kind of a mixed bag throughout the middle of Genesis, but you know, he gets a lot of stuff right.

8:28 He squares up a weird blood feud of his own making with his brother Esau. He sort of stabilizes himself and his descendants. He starts to acquire land and build a name for himself, which is in keeping with things that God promised him and his fathers before him. And eventually Jacob comes to be called Israel.

8:50 That's where Israel gets the name. He's one of these name change characters in the Old Testament. So Jacob gets done patching things up with his brother Esau in Genesis 33. And then after that, he comes from Paden Aram. This is verse 18 of Genesis 33, and he arrived safely at the city of Shechem in Canaan and camped within sight of the city.

9:11 So this is pre-conquest. This isn't Israelite territory at this point. The Samaritans won't be a thing that exists for another thousand plus years at this point. This is very early Bible history. So he sets up at this ancient town of Shechem, right at the intersection of this capital T between the mountains of Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim, in the middle of a land that now literally bears his name, Israel.

9:38 And for a hundred pieces of silver, he bought from the sons of Hamor, who is the father of the patriarch of Shechem, the plot of ground where he pitched his tent. Then we turn the page into chapter 34, and what we see is that as time passes, those Canaanite inhabitants of the land get crossways with Jacob.

9:56 This isn't surprising. Jacob has gotten crossways with pretty much everybody he's interacted with because he's clever and scheming and also virtuous and also, at least by our standards, sometimes not. But the Canaanites who live in Shechem are pretty crappy and they do something really ugly in chapter 34.

10:18 I don't have a time to unpack it all. You can go read it if you want to. And in just a bizarre set of circumstances and series of events, Jacob outwits them and defeats them with his sword and his bow. And he takes this shoulder of land in this narrow little T-shaped valley between Ebal and Gerizim for himself.

10:42 Then a few chapters later, a whole bunch of things happen. Jacob has a bunch of kids. The kids go through a bunch of stuff. They sell out one of their brothers named Joseph into Egypt. Eventually, old man Jacob comes to Egypt where his son is reconciled with his brothers. And now Joseph becomes the one man who had no choice but to try to keep his family together.

11:05 And at the very end of Jacob, now Israel's life, he's going around and he's doing inheritance stuff. He's given land to all of his kids. And here in Genesis 48, 21, and 22, he gives this land to Joseph. Then Israel, Jacob, said to Joseph, I am about to die, but God will be with you and take you back to the land of your fathers.

11:28 So this conversation is happening in Egypt. And to you, as one who is over your brothers, I give the ridge of land I took from the Amorites with my sword and my bow. That chunk of land has this timeless spring that I believe still runs to this day that you can still drink fresh water from. That chunk of land given there in Genesis 48 is the same chunk of land that in John chapter 4 is occupied by the Samaritans.

11:58 And that's not even the half of it. There's still more history here involving these twin peaks of Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim and the town of Shechem and the inheritance of Joseph in this well. There's yet more theological symbolism and history here that we'll get into tomorrow. But even with just what we've looked at today, you can see it, right?

12:18 If you're watching a documentary with JFK Jr. from the 1990s about the assassination of JFK, and it's in Dallas at the plaza, the intersection where the incident happened, it's intentional. That's meant to call to mind for the viewer all the history that is relative to the event. And so likewise, as we're seeing here, John is giving us these specific geographic details because this is happening at the scene of something very big historically, really even bigger than the Samaritan Jewish divide.

12:53 This is a place that is one of the timeless locations that is a reminder of the whole redemptive work of God and the whole covenant of God between himself and his people. And that, not just some random place, that place, that very specific, very ancient place tied to God's redemptive plan. That place is where this conversation is about to happen between Jesus and this Samaritan woman.

13:23 That's intentional and it's a big deal.