John 4:1-42 When therefore the LORD knew how the Pharisees had heard that Jesus made and baptized more disciples than John,… The Fourth Gospel may be called the Gospels of the Conversations, for, more than any other, it reports particular interviews of our Lord with individuals. These conversations, too, are real conversations, for Jesus was not like some famous men, who discourse in monologue. Even His addresses to the multitude were often interrupted by the inquiries or remarks of others, and, in smaller companies, He guided the conversation, while apparently taking the lesser part. The "golden silences" of Jesus are very marked, and George Borrow, in that fascinating book, "The Bible in Spain," relates that the taciturn people of the little Republic of Andorra noticed these silences, and said of them, "Jesus played the Andorran." While He spoke with authority, yet He dispelled all feeling of restraint, and even seemed to awaken in others unwonted freedom. Not unfrequently He gave the thought, and let them do the talking. Christ never appears to have saved anything for a large audience, nor feared that any utterance of truth, breathed into the receptive heart of however humble a hearer, could fail of its effect. And these conversations all have a personal turn. They attach great principles to common life, and they lead people through their own needs to the grandest spiritual truths. Jesus evidently has confidence in the living power of truth, and therefore does not press it, but leaves His hearers to follow out the idea and make the application for themselves. If, then, we would understand the effect of our Lord's conversation with the woman of Samaria, we must read it in the message she bore to her people: "Come, see a man which told me all things that ever I did. Can this be the Christ?" This perfect knowledge of the Christ is our greatest safeguard. It is needful, to defend us from plunging farther into sin, that we have the confidence of a loving Saviour. When we are on the verge of temptation, the thought that He knows and grieves over our past sins may win us back. When will we learn the noonday lesson taught at the well of Sychar, that it is the Christ who reveals us to ourselves! It is not for you to find out your sin, but for Him to reveal it to you. With the Psalmist, you ask God to search you, "that you may be led in the way everlasting." You are to become acquainted with your own heart by having Him read it to you; and all you can tell Him will be of that which He has told you before. Repentance now loses its bitterness, because it is the revelation of the Christ. "Once," says Luther, "I thought no word so bitter as repentance; now there is none more sweet, and those passages in the Bible that used to terrify me now smile and sport about me." In the same spirit, says, in his "Confessions," "I will now call to mind my past foulness and the carnal corruptions of my soul; not because I love them, but that I may love Thee, O my God. For love of Thy love I do it; reviewing my most wicked ways in the very bitterness of my remembrance, that Thou mayest grow sweet unto me." The power of such a revelation of the Christ is manifest in the fact, that the largest harvest of souls our Lord ever gathered while on earth was reaped in the two days He spent at Sychar. A soul brought face to face with Him, beholding His glory by being self-revealed, is a fit instrument to convey to others the advent of the Christ. (James G. Vose.) Parallel Verses KJV: When therefore the Lord knew how the Pharisees had heard that Jesus made and baptized more disciples than John, |
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