Interestingly, the act of ‘giving’ life-giving water (or life itself), a divine activity by a sovereign creator who had the authority to dispense life[1] (cf. Isa. 44:3a), is attributed to Jesus (‘I [will] give him’, Jn 4:13-14; cf. 4:10).[2] Both creation and salvation accounts in Judaism unambiguously describe God as the sole, authoritative giver of both creative and new creative life (Gen. 1:11-12, 20-31; 2:7; Job 33:4; Isa. 42:5; Ezek. 36:26; Jdt. 16:13-14; Wis. 15:11; 2 Macc. 7:22-23; Jub. 12:4; 26:23; 4 Ezra 3:5; 6:47-48; 2 Bar. 23:5; Jos. Asen. 8:9; 12:1; 20:7).[3] These Jewish texts focus on who God is, and they characterize the ‘unique identity of the one God and thus distinguishing the one God absolutely from all other reality’.[4] The divine activity of granting life is a description of God’s own identity which distinguishes his uniqueness from all other reality. He is the creator of life and the sovereign ruler, and John’s Christology was understood and developed within this Jewish theological context. How do we know that John intended to include Jesus in the unique divine identity of God? First, John and the rest of the NT writers developed a New Testament Christology within the theological framework of Jewish monotheism.[5] Second, we see that the so-called divine functions which Jesus exercises, like ‘giving’ life-giving water, are intrinsic to who God is. In other words, Jesus was participating in God’s unique activity of creation and the new creation.[6] Jesus answered the woman by saying that ‘whoever drinks the water I [will] give him will never thirst’ (4:14a), and ‘the water I [will] give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life’ (4:14b). The following chiastic structure[7] further highlights Jesus as being ‘intrinsic to the unique and eternal identity of God’.[8]

 

Table 3: Chiastic Structure of John 4:10

 

    [A]         If you knew the gift of God

    [B]                  and who it is who says to you

    [C]                           ‘Give me a drink’

    [B´]                  you would have asked him

    [A´]         and he would have given you living water

           

            John in his gospel includes Jesus in the unique divine identity of God’s creation and sovereign power in new creational redemption. Bauckham states that ‘Jesus is seen as the one who exercises God’s eschatological sovereignty over all things,[9] with a view to the coming of God’s kingdom and the universal acknowledgement of God’s unique deity. Jesus is included, we might say, in the eschatological identity of God’.[10] The chiasm shows that the divine gift[11] is symbolized by ‘living water’,[12] and it also discloses Jesus’ self identification (A´)[13] [‘he would have given’) in the unique divine identity of God (A). The statement, ‘he would have given you living water’, shows the participation of Christ in the eschatological identity of God in offering the woman everlasting, new creational life. These statements of Jesus are rich with irony in that the woman (in v. 12) presents a challenge to Jesus by questioning him about the source of the living water. She asks, ‘Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well...?’ To her understanding, Jacob, who is greater than Jesus, was able to sufficiently provide from the well and thereby satisfy her immediate thirst for water.[14] She challenged both his ability and authority, confronting him with this disputative question because she could not accept the stranger’s claim to preeminence.[15] Consequentially, the superiority of Jesus, characterized by the divine activity of granting life, and not merely by the quenching of one’s physical thirst, is established by the evangelist for the readers’ proper understanding.[16]

            The giving of life was a sovereign act reserved exclusively to the unique identity of God, and John, in developing his Christology, includes Jesus as the one who administers God’s sovereignty over the eschatological salvation event. In relating his Christology to Jewish monotheism, John situated his theological understanding within the context of Second Temple Judaism’s understanding of God’s unique identity. He develops his Christology of divine identity[17] elsewhere in the gospel where Jesus exercises sovereign power to grant life (cf. John 1:12, ‘yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God’; 5:21, ‘for just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son gives life to whom he is pleased to give it’).

Next in this series...Part 2: Developing the Theme of Monolatry (worship): How does ‘God is Spirit’ relate to ‘To Worship in Spirit and Truth’?

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