John 4:26

Ver. 26. “ Jesus says to her: I who speak unto thee am he. ”

Jesus, not having to fear, as we have just seen, that he would call forth in this woman a whole world of dangerous illusions, like those which, among the Jews, were connected with the name of Messiah, reveals Himself fully to her. This conduct is not therefore, as de Wette claims, in contradiction with such words as Matthew 8:4; Matthew 16:20, etc. The difference in the soil explains the difference in the seed which the hand of Jesus deposits in it.

How can we describe the astonishment which such a declaration must have produced in this woman? It expresses itself, better than by words, in her silence and her conduct (John 4:28). She had arrived, a few minutes before, careless and given up to earthly thoughts; and lo, in a few moments, she is brought to a new faith, and even transformed into an earnest missionary of that faith. How did the Lord thus raise up and elevate this soul? When speaking with Nicodemus, He started from the idea which filled the heart of every Pharisee that of the kingdom of God, and he drew from it the most rigorous moral consequences; for He knew that He was addressing a man accustomed to the discipline of the law. Then, He unfolded to him the truths of the divine kingdom, by connecting them with a striking Old Testament type and putting them in contrast with the corresponding features of the Pharisaic programme. Here, on the contrary, conversing with a woman destitute of all Scriptural preparation, He takes His point of departure from the commonest of things, the water of this well. Then, by a bold antithesis, He wakens in her mind the thought, in her heart the want, of a supernatural gift which may forever quench the heart's thirst. The aspiration for salvation once awakened becomes in her an inward prophecy to which He attaches His new revelations. By the teaching with reference to the true worship, He responds to the religious prepossessions of this woman, as directly as by the revelation of the heavenly things He had responded to the inmost thoughts of Nicodemus. With the latter He reveals Himself as the onlybegotten Son, while still avoiding the title of Christ. With the Samaritan He boldly uses this latter term; but without dreaming of initiating into the mysteries of the incarnation and of redemption this soul which is yet only in the first rudiments of the moral life. Certain analogies have been observed in the outward course of these two conversations, and an argument has been drawn from them against the truth of the two stories. But this resemblance naturally results from what is analogous in the two meetings: on both sides, a soul wholly earthly finding itself in contact with a heavenly thought, and the latter trying to raise the other to its own level. This similarity in the situations sufficiently explains the correspondences of the two conversations, the diversity of which is, moreover, quite as remarkable as the resemblance.