Nicole’s e-Pistle “Salvation From the Jews”

March 11, 2026

Greetings, Friends!

The Lunch Bunch has been reading a book by Amy-Jill Levine entitled The Difficult Words of Jesus: A Beginner’s Guide to His Most Perplexing Teachings. So far, we have wrestled with passages that came straight from Jesus’ mouth in the gospels, such as “sell what you own and give it to the poor,” and “Whoever comes tome and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, even life itself, cannot be my disciple.” We also tackled, “Slaves obey your earthly masters” and “Whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all.” On Monday, we discussed possible reasons why Jesus told his disciples to “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Each of these sayings is difficult to hear and even more difficult to imagine following – sell everything I have, hate all of my family, be a slave to everyone, and do not take the gospel message to anyone who is “other” from me? Did Jesus really mean all of that?

I won’t go into all the discussion we have had in our group over those sayings, though it has been extremely thought provoking and helpful to us all. However, this Sunday’s lectionary passage from the gospel of John had yet another difficult saying in it. See if you can find it…

²¹ Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. ²² You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. ²³ But the hour is coming and is now here when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. ²⁴ God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” ²⁵ The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.” ²⁶ Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”

Did you catch it hidden there in the middle? By the way, Jesus is talking to a Samaritan woman, contrary to his message in the books of Matthew and Mark about not ministering to Samaritans or Gentiles. Here, he is talking to the Samaritan woman at the well, who has just asked whether Jews are correct that God should be worshipped in Jerusalem, or whether her people are correct who worship on that mountain in Samaria. The passage above is his response, and the biggest messages to hear are that people must worship God in spirit and in truth, and that Jesus is “I AM” – the Messiah, the Christ – the long-awaited anointed one. However, tucked in between such nuggets of gold is the phrase “for salvation is from the Jews.”

If you’re like me, that phrase may trip you up… not because either of us has a problem with Jews individually or the Jewish people as a whole being God’s chosen people. However, for Christians – especially for Reformed Christians (okay, perhaps I’ll write about Reformed Theology next week) – we think of salvation coming solely from God as a gift to all people… to all nations. We may say Jews are God’s chosen people, whether we really understand what that entails or not, but does salvation really come from the Jews?

Part of me wishes that Amy-Jill, or AJ as she refers to herself, had written on this line. She is, in fact, Jewish and a New Testament scholar. She does not personally declare that Jesus is the Messiah, but she is one of the leading Biblical exegetes to have studied his words in Greek and Aramaic. She also brings a great deal of context, both in modern Judaism and in her knowledge of the 1^st century Greco-Roman and Judaic cultures. Alas, she did not write on this subject as far as I know, so you’ll have to make do with me!

First, let me provide some context, with a little help from BibleHub.com and several commentaries. During the Assyrian conquest of northern Israelites in the 8^th century BC, foreign settlers intermarried with the people who were left behind, which meant worship of YHWH (the God of Israel) was mixed with the worship of other deities. These people lived in the region of Samaria, which was the capital of the northern kingdom of Israel, between Galilee to the north and the kingdom of Judah to the south.

By the 5^th century BC, those who had been exiled had fallen into Persian hands. King Cyrus of Persia ordered that the people of Israel be allowed to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple (Ezra 1-6). The Samaritans had kept their own version of the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, called the Tanak) but had renounced all other Hebrew writings. At first, they offered to help rebuild the temple, but when Zerubbabel, Jeshua, and others refused their help, they tried to sabotage the work being done (Ezra 4:1-5). From then on, tensions continued to worsen between the Samaritans and the people of Judah. The Jews saw the Samaritans as heretics and idol worshippers, while the Samaritans argued that the mountain mentioned in Deuteronomy 27:4, written as “Ebal” in the Hebrew text, was really “Gerizim,” as changed in their own text.

Hence, the Samaritan woman pushes Jesus to tell her whether it is this mountain, which was Gerizim, was the correct place to worship. In other words, who has it right – the Jews or the Samaritans? Jesus tells her that salvation comes from the Jews and then, when she mentions a Messiah – someone that the Samaritans believed would be a single Mosaic restorer, rather than a royal-Davidic Messiah – Jesus tells her that he is the one she has been waiting for… the Jewish man-God standing in front of her. Perhaps, just as Jesus is called the Son of Man and Son of God, salvation comes to all people from the Jews, because he himself was Jewish, not Samaritan. It resets his story in the Jewish context, rather than the branch of believers who had spent the last 700 years deviating from that story.

Ultimately, though Jesus said salvation comes from the Jews, he offers his living water freely to this Samaritan woman and all who come to follow him from her village. Though he tells is disciples early in his ministry not to go to the Gentiles or Samaritans but to minister to the lost sheep of Israel, his last commandment to them before his ascension is to go and make disciples of all nations. We often do not understand God’s ways or his timing, but in the end, we may all partake of his love and compassion, drinking in the waters that quench our thirst for the nearness of him. May we, like the Samaritan woman, respond to his gift by drawing others closer to him as well.

Blessings and peace,