Further thoughts on Jesus at Jacob's well

Woman at the Well, Jun Jamosmos

Because everything has more than one meaning . . .

Jacob's well represents tradition, our spiritual heritage, everything that was revealed in the distant past and has been handed down to us. In days of old, when giants walked the earth, certain of our fathers dug down even to the waters of truth, from which we today may drink, provided we have something to draw with. To try to duplicate their feat on our own would be foolhardy, and anyway, why reinvent the wheel? Art thou greater than our father Jacob? Gimme that old-time religion, it's good enough for me.

To these old-time wells came even Jesus himself and said, "Give me to drink." Even Jesus himself scorned not to sit at the feet of the doctors, both hearing them and asking them questions.

But Jesus went further, because he was greater than Father Jacob -- and he challenged us to be greater still. ("He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do.") To him, the corn of God's revealed word was not merely something to consume -- for man doth not live by bread alone -- but to plant, that it may bring forth fruit an hundredfold. Vary the metaphor from food to drink, and we have the well of water within oneself, springing up unto everlasting life.

"The hour cometh," said Jesus, "when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father. But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him."

He was announcing the end of temples, the end of holy sites, the end of ritualized or institutional worship -- not that those things are bad, but the hour cometh, and now is, when they are simply no longer possible. When Jesus prophesied the destruction of the Temple, his words had a meaning beyond the literal. It was the idea of the Temple that would, inexorably, be destroyed -- leaving spirit and truth as the only viable modes of worship.

The key thing about spirit is that it is active and creative, as opposed to passive and receptive matter -- and it is in this sense that "God is a spirit," and that they who worship him must (now) be spirits, too. Only what is done in spirit can be done in truth, since truth is a property of free and creative thought, the prerogative of spirits. Nothing secondhand, nothing abstract, nothing institutionalized can be true in the fullest sense; the law came by Moses, but grace and truth by Jesus Christ.