Worship at the well: From Dogmatics to doxology (and back again)

Trinity Journal, Spring 2002 by Vanhoozer, Kevin J

A. The Object of Worship:

"You Worship What You Do Not Know" (V. 22)

1. Local Knowledge = Partial Knowledge

Sincerity alone is an insufficient condition of right worship. Jesus says in 4:22 "You Samaritans worship what you do not know." The first Samaritans serve as prime examples of the danger of local, in the sense of partial, knowledge of God. According to 2 Kings 17, each national group the Assyrians used to colonize Samaria brought its own local deity too. 2 Kings 17:33 is especially striking: "So they feared the Lord, but also served their own gods, after the manner of the nations from among whom they had been carried away." Apparently, Samaritan religion was as promiscuous as the Samaritan woman. Might what was said of the Samaritans be addressed to us as well: "You fear the Lord, but you also worship other cultural gods-money, career, fame, celebrity, healthy, beauty, efficiency-'after the manner of the nations"'?

By the time of Jesus, however, the Samaritans had become monotheists, yet they still had only a partial knowledge of God. Their Bible consisted of the Torah, the Samaritan Pentateuch, alone. They lacked the riches of the Psalms and the prophets. The Samaritans were drawing from only certain parts of the biblical well. Because their canon went as far as the Pentateuch only, they did not know God as he revealed himself in the subsequent history of Israel. As to the Messiah, for example, the Samaritans expected a prophet-- like figure, hence the woman's comment to Jesus, but not a king.

Now you may well empathize with the Samaritans. Who can appreciate better than seminary students the incomprehensibility of God? Nevertheless, it is sobering to note that this excuse did not sit well with Jesus. "You worship what you do not know." It is hard not to hear a rebuke in this statement. The Samaritans' knowledge of God was partial, hence their worship was defective. The problem was not that the Samaritans lacked exhaustive knowledge of God (who does not?), but that they did not know enough to worship him correctly. Calvin comments: "For unless there is knowledge present, it is not God that we worship but a spectre or ghost."10 All of our pious intentions are struck by this thunderbolt, by this thought that we cannot help but worship falsely unless we are guided by God's Word.

2. The Object Of Right Worship: Who God Is And What God Has Done

Whereas the Samaritan woman appealed to "our fathers," Jesus directs her to the one Father of all. Calvin fixes on this distinction and uses it to chide Roman Catholics who attend more to human tradition (what "the fathers" say) than to Scripture (what "the Father" says). His point is well taken. If right worship depends on knowing God, as Jesus here implies, then we would do well to remember that we know God only when and where God gives himself to be known. This is why Jesus says the Jews worship what they know: historically, their faith was based on divine revelation.

Divine revelation accounts not only for the difference between Jews and Samaritans, but also for the difference between Christians and Jews. Whereas the Samaritans cut themselves off from the prophets, the Jews failed to recognize Jesus as the Son of God. Calvin says that it is those "who forsake the Word [who] fall into idolatry."11 Specifically, those who do not know the Son cannot know the Father. Yes, God is incomprehensible, yet at the same time the incomprehensible one has made himself known in Jesus Christ. Knowing Jesus Christ-the locus of God's fullest self-revelation-is thus the condition for right worship.