Next, the dialogue between Jesus and the Samaritan woman turns on a deeply contested question: where is God properly worshiped? She names the conflict: Samaritans worship on Mount Gerizim, while Jews worship in Jerusalem. In the ancient world, sacred space was tied to ethnic identity, political power, and religious legitimacy. To worship in the “right” place was to belong; to worship elsewhere was to be excluded.
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This is Part 3 of the series Justice Lessons at the Well
(Read this series from its beginning here.)
Jesus’ response unsettles that entire framework. “The hour is coming,” he says, “when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” Rather than choosing sides in a religious geography war, Jesus reframes worship altogether. Jesus’ God in this Gospel is not confined to sanctioned locations, institutions, or power centers. Worship is no longer mediated by control of space but is grounded in alignment with spirit and truth.
What lessons might we derive from this story? First, Jesus’ words echo all the way down to us today and affirm us as we challenge systems that restrict access to God based on race, gender, class, sexual orientation, and religious gatekeeping today. If what Jesus said is true about access to God, it should also lead us to challenge systems that exclude access to justice. The Samaritan woman, who was marginalized by ethnicity, gender, and social stigma, is treated as a human being with value in John’s story. Her question matters. Her voice is honored. Justice work begins the same way: by centering those most excluded and trusting their questions as genuine sources of divine revelation.
Second, “spirit and truth” resists empty religiosity that divorces worship from lived reality. Truth is not mere doctrine; in John’s Gospel truth is embodied in Jesus’ life-giving, boundary-breaking love, just as the synoptic Gospels define that lived love as concrete justice for those being harmed by Herod’s and the temple’s complicity with Roman exploitation. Our story reminds us that worship that ignores oppression, poverty, racism, or patriarchy leads to worshipers who ignore these realities in our material lives as well, and that kind of worship and actions are incomplete. “God is spirit” in this context means that God is much larger than the institutions that try to trap the Divine and control access to it. God is Spirit and that Spirit is present wherever people struggle for for their humanity, liberation, justice, and wholeness.
Finally, Jesus’ response frees justice work from sacred-secular divides. Streets, shelters, protest lines, classrooms, and kitchens all become legitimate spaces of worship when animated by Spirit and truth. The question is no longer where we worship, but how we live, whether our practices align with the liberation, justice, and love we see Jesus modeled towards others in the gospel stories.
The woman in our story this week becomes a witness, not a project. She leaves her water jar behind, and invites her community to experience what she has. In our justice work today, this story challenges us to cross boundaries, to listen first, to ask before we give, and to trust that those most marginalized are not merely recipients of justice but also its messengers. Jesus at the well shows that liberation flows first through shared humanity, and only then becomes living water for our world.
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