JOHN176 - Tengo Que Ir
John 4:4
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Music by Jeff Foote
1 SPEAKER_00: From time to time, I'll have these epiphanies about
English, which is that's my first language, it's one I was
raised with.
Of course, I learned English just by hearing it and absorbing
it.
It's not like when I'm two years old that somebody is explaining
all the grammatical architecture behind English to me.
I just feel it.
But every now and then, I'll actually slow down for a minute
and think about what I am saying and the grammatical architecture
behind it, and it'll kind of blow my mind a little bit.
I had an incident like this years ago when I was learning
Spanish and I came across the phrase tango que ear.
If you don't speak Spanish, it sounds fancy.
Maybe it's confusing, but not really.
I mean, even if you don't speak Spanish, you've heard people say
tango in Spanish.
It just means I have.
And then if you tag on K and I, I R, which means to go at the
end of that, you get I have to go.
That's how that formulation works.
And I remember encountering this for the first time and thinking,
that's so funny.
The the Spanish speaking people use I have to express
obligation.
That's not what I have is for.
I have is for possessing something.
You funny, funny Spanish speakers.
And then I thought for like two more seconds and realized, oh
yeah, we do that too.
I have to go, I have to study, I have to eat, I have to work out.
Yeah, we use our most basic possession verb to express
obligation.
Huh.
Well, that's kind of interesting.
And also it comes into play in John 4.4 in a way that I think
has pretty meaningful theological ramifications for
how we read the story that flows out of this.
And John 4.4, it just simply says, now he, this is Jesus, now
he had to go through Samaria.
So it's a basic expression of obligation.
Jesus had to go through Samaria.
Now, there's a little bit of ambiguity here in what this
phrase means.
Are we talking about some kind of outside obligation that was
inflicted on him, like maybe by God the Father?
Or are we talking about geography, like, oh, I have to
go through Cheyenne on my way to Fort Collins, which makes sense
if you're from where I'm from.
I think this really is actually an important question.
What kind of Jesus had to go through Samaria kind of
situation are we talking about here?
So, number one, the most obvious obligation that Jesus could feel
here would just be a geographical one, like I
mentioned a minute ago.
That the best way to get from where Jesus was to where he
needed to go was to go through Samaria.
And this is actually a pretty easy thing to look up and
investigate, because we know where Jesus was at the end of
John chapter 3.
He's down on the Jordan River near Jerusalem, he's in Judea,
he was baptizing alongside John the Baptist.
John the Baptist endorses him.
The Pharisees shift their concern from being worried about
John the Baptist to being concerned about the bigger
threat now, which is Jesus.
And in John 4 3, it says, When the Lord learned of this, he
left Judea and went back once more to Galilee.
If you go and look at an ancient map, you will see that there are
two ways to get from Judea in the south up to Jesus'
homestomping grounds, which is Galilee in the north.
And which route you would take would depend on whether you were
by the Dead Sea or coming directly from Jerusalem.
Those are both down south.
So remember, anytime we visualize a map of the Holy Land
of Israel in the time of Jesus, we're just going to do this.
Start by visualizing a vertical skinny oval.
That is the Dead Sea.
It's down south.
Coming out the top of the oval is a straight line that goes
north about twice the length of the oval that is the Dead Sea.
And that straight line is the Jordan River.
Then up at the tippy top of that, there's just a nice round
circle.
And that is the Sea of Galilee, which is, you know, imagine a
quarter the size of the Dead Sea.
So you can kind of picture this.
Jerusalem is down south, just west of the top of the Dead Sea.
Galilee is a region up north around Galilee.
And between the two, west of that line, that is the Jordan
River, right in the middle, is the vaguely defined region of
the Samaritans, which is where Jesus has to travel through.
We are told in the verse we're looking at today that he did not
take the Jordan River route to get back north.
So what that tells me is that a little bit of time has elapsed
since Jesus was out baptizing by John the Baptist, and Jesus has
made his way back into Jerusalem.
Maybe that's where he and his disciples heard about the
pressure from the Pharisees, and now they're going to go north.
Well, if you're starting from the Dead Sea, the way to get
north is follow the Jordan River.
It's hot and it's miserable, but it's travelable.
That is the road by which Jesus will later at the end of his
life come back south down through Jericho and then up into
Jerusalem to face the crucifixion.
But it is very well documented inside and outside of the Bible
that geographically, far and away, the best and fastest route
to get from Jerusalem to Galilee or vice versa was to go through
the land of the Samaritans.
And there's this north-south road that runs between the two.
That's a very direct line, and it goes through this valley that
runs right through Samaritan territory.
Now, for reasons we'll discuss in the future, culturally it
wasn't ideal for Jews to go through Samaritan territory, but
it was such a great time saver that they did it.
Three different times, the ancient historian Josephus tells
us about this route.
Here's a quote from Josephus's Antiquities of the Jews, Book
20, section 118.
Josephus writes, It was the custom of the Galileans when
they came south to the holy city at the festivals to take their
journeys through the country of the Samaritans.
And at this time there lay in the road they took a village
which was called Guinea, which is a totally separate
conversation about a political incident that happened at
another time.
Josephus confirms three different times that this was
the route that people took, and three different times Josephus
indicates things could get pretty spicy when you were
coming and going through there because of, well, to put it
lightly, cultural differences between the Samaritans and the
Jews.
So one way that we could read John 4 4, now he, Jesus, had to
go through Samaria.
I mean, a natural read would be that was the road.
That's the way you would go.
But then why would John tell us that?
Like if that's just the obvious route, why would he mention it?
So maybe we're being told this so that we'll think Jesus was a
good trip planner, but I'm not totally satisfied with that.
So another possibility here is that when the text says, now he
had to go through Samaria, that we're actually supposed to
wonder if it was God, the Father, who was making him go
through Samaria.
This is not unprecedented in the Bible.
In Acts chapter 16, there's a situation on Paul's second
missionary journey where he's like, I want to go up to the old
stomping grounds of the northern Galatians and be in the province
of Asia.
But the Holy Spirit prevents him from doing so and presents Paul
instead with a vision of people in Macedonia, which is a long
ways away.
That's the ancient homeland of Alexander the Great.
And Paul's like, okay, I'll do whatever the Holy Spirit says.
I guess I am not supposed to take that route.
I am supposed to take this route.
So maybe what we're getting here is something in that style,
where we're to understand it as the father or the spirit guiding
the son's steps on this one of two possible routes for very
important theological purposes.
But a third way we could read this seemingly innocuous
itinerary verse would be as an acknowledgement of the original
audience's hesitation about passing through that particular
part of the world.
For reasons we're going to talk about tomorrow, there is all
kinds of bad blood between Jewish people and the Samaritans
back in the day.
There's this weird little enclave in the middle of Galilee
and Judea, the historic homelands of the people of
Israel.
There's this weird little enclave in the middle where this
sort of half Jewish, half something else people live.
And there's all kinds of tension, all kinds of bad blood.
And John would know that his audience would have some real
hesitations about anyone going through that neighborhood, and
would have huge hesitations about someone who's supposed to
be the Jewish Messiah going through the very unclean,
dangerous, I might add, region of the Samaritans.
And tomorrow we're going to get into the history of all of that
and try to put ourselves in the shoes of the original audience
so we can encounter this text more like them.
So when John 4.4 says now he had to go through Samaria, we're
getting some kind of an expression of obligation.
But is it a light expression of obligation?
Like, well, when you go from Decatur to Birmingham, you got
to go through Coleman.
You just you have to.
Or is it an expression of theological obligation?
The father obligated the son to do this, or is it an expression
of double obligation, whereby the author of this letter is
like, hey, I have to tell you, he had to go there.
I know that none of you, dear readers, think he should have
gone there, but just stick with me and see what happens in the
story that unfolds.
And I suppose it could be all three, but what it can't be is
useless.
That line is there for a reason, it's doing a lift, it's doing
work, and our time is well spent trying to figure out what work
it is doing.
I think we've made some lovely progress on that today, and I
think we'll make more progress on that tomorrow.
Okay, I have to go now.