John 4:21

‘Jesus says to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem, will you worship the Father. You worship that which you know not, we worship that which we know, for salvation is of the Jews”.'

Jesus did not reply that both religions were as good. He acknowledged that the Jews had been the vehicle of God's revelation to man, ‘salvation is of the Jews'. But He did put both in perspective. The time had come, He said, when such matters would be unimportant. Men would in future worship God away from either centre of worship, as indeed many Jews were already doing throughout the known world. And attachment to these centres would cease to be important (this the Jews had not yet realised).

‘Woman'. As with His mother earlier(see on John 2:4), a polite word for addressing women.

‘The hour is coming.' His hour would introduce this hour, a time when worship would not be restricted to places but would be spiritual and from the heart. Then Mount Gerizim and Jerusalem would both cease to have importance. What would matter would be a heart right towards God and centred on Him.

‘You will worship the Father'. The ‘you' (plural) here referred to Samaritans as a group and made clear that He recognised that some of them would come to experience this spiritual worship.

‘You worship what you do not know.' Their means of revelation was limited to the Pentateuch. They had therefore rather a narrow view of God and were lacking the greater level of revelation through the prophets and the ‘holy writings' (Psalms etc.). And because they lacked the fuller revelation given to Israel, their knowledge of God was lacking. They did not have the full knowledge of the intimacy of God as revealed to the Jews.

‘We worship that which we know, for salvation is of the Jews'. Israel had a more complete revelation in the books of the Old Testament. And furthermore, that fuller revelation promised that salvation for the world would come through the Jews and their promised Messiah. Jesus therefore acknowledged that the Jews thus had a fuller understanding of the ways of God and a greater privilege, and were to be the channels of God's blessing to the world. As Paul summed it up ‘To them belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the Law, the worship and the promises. To them belong the patriarchs, and of their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ' (Romans 9:4). The Samaritans could parallel some of these but not all. So He did not deny that the Jews were greatly privileged.

On the other hand He did not deny that the Samaritans genuinely worshipped God. Their faith might be somewhat lacking but it was a real faith. And now that He was here it could become a transformed faith.

The statement that ‘salvation is of the Jews' is certainly one that we would expect from a Jewish prophet. But it is not one that we would expect to be inserted by an inventor, especially by a member of the early church who had suffered much at the hands of the Jews and was aware of rivalry with them. There can really be no doubt of the Jewish emphasis and the fact that this conversation took place.