“The Woman at the Well, Part 1: Introduction to a Sacramental Worldview”
John 4:1-42
June 16, 2019
Faith Presbyterian Church – Morning Service
Pr. Nicoletti
We return to John’s Gospel this morning, picking up in chapter four, looking at verses one through forty-two. This is a long, but rich passage, and so as always, please do listen carefully, for this is God’s Word for us this morning.
4:1 Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John 2 (although Jesus himself did not baptize, but only his disciples), 3 he left Judea and departed again for Galilee. 4 And he had to pass through Samaria. 5 So he came to a town of Samaria called Sychar, near the field that Jacob had given to his son Joseph.6 Jacob’s well was there; so Jesus, wearied as he was from his journey, was sitting beside the well. It was about the sixth hour.
7 A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” 8 (For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.) 9 The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?” (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.) 10 Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” 11 The woman said to him, “Sir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? 12 Are you greater than our father Jacob? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock.” 13 Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14 but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” 15 The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.”
16 Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come here.” 17 The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; 18 for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband. What you have said is true.” 19 The woman said to him, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. 20 Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.” 21 Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. 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 is seeking such people 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 (he who is called Christ). When he comes, he will tell us all things.” 26 Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am he.”
27 Just then his disciples came back. They marveled that he was talking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you seek?” or, “Why are you talking with her?” 28 So the woman left her water jar and went away into town and said to the people, 29 “Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?” 30 They went out of the town and were coming to him.
31 Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, saying, “Rabbi, eat.” 32 But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” 33 So the disciples said to one another, “Has anyone brought him something to eat?”34 Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work. 35 Do you not say, ‘There are yet four months, then comes the harvest’? Look, I tell you, lift up your eyes, and see that the fields are white for harvest. 36 Already the one who reaps is receiving wages and gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together.37 For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ 38 I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.”
39 Many Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me all that I ever did.” 40 So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them, and he stayed there two days.41 And many more believed because of his word. 42 They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is indeed the Savior of the world.”
This is the word of the Lord.
“All people are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of the Lord endures forever.” [1 Peter 1:24-25]
Let’s pray …
Lord, look upon us and deliver us,
for we do not forget your word.
Be our advocate and redeem us,
and give us life according to your promise.
Great is your mercy, Lord,
and so we ask you to give us life according to your law.
Help us now to love your word,
and give us life according to your steadfast love.
The sum of your word is truth,
and every line of your word endures forever.
And so help us to attend to it now, and grow in your truth,
in Jesus’s name. Amen
[Based on Psalm 119:153-154, 156, 159-160]
Our passage this morning is long, and rich, and resists division. Which makes it kind of hard to preach from in a satisfactory way. And so, I’m going to try something I haven’t done before – we will actually spend two Lord’s Day mornings on this passage.
This week I want to focus on a pattern that we see come up in Jesus’s words and thoughts several times in this text, and then next week we will focus more directly on the dialogue between Jesus and this woman at the well.
So I’m warning you ahead of time, we’re not going to deal with most of the details of the scene here today – that will be for next week.
What I want to focus on more this morning is the pattern we see in Jesus’s words and thoughts. It’s a pattern that gives us a window into how Jesus sees the world we live in. And I want to suggest that it is a pattern that also shows us how we should view the world we live in.
The pattern we see is that Jesus keeps looking at the world and seeing metaphors of divine realities.
It happens four times in our text. First, in verses seven through fifteen. Jesus is at a well, he is thirsty for water, and then once he focuses on water he seems to jump from thinking and talking about physical water to thinking and talking about receiving salvation and the Holy Spirit, which he refers to as “living water.”
Then, in verses sixteen through twenty-six the conversation shifts to marriage. And while the connection is not made as explicitly, we should note that again, the conversation seems to quickly jump from marriage to the relationship between God and his people, two things that the Bible links together a number of times in the Scriptures.
Then, third, in verses thirty-one through thirty-four the topic of food comes up and Jesus jumps from a statement about physical food to speaking of doing God’s work by obeying his word, which he refers to as “food” the disciples do not know about.
And fourth and finally, in verse thirty-five, reflecting on the harvest and the harvest time, Jesus begins talking about fields of crops and jumps from literal fields and harvests to talking about ministry and the growth of the kingdom of God, which he also speaks of as a harvest.
In this passage you can’t seem to keep Jesus on the simple topic in front of him – he keeps jumping from the world around him to metaphors about God and God’s work.
Jesus looks at the world … and sees metaphors. He seems to see metaphors everywhere. Every object that comes up in this passage: water, marriage, food, fields – each one in the mind and mouth of Jesus quickly becomes a metaphor about God and God’s kingdom.
Now … in some ways Jesus is not alone in this sort of a pattern of thought. Some people see metaphors in things more readily than others do. In the case of most other people, we might notice this pattern in someone and chalk it up to personality and a creative imagination, and then move on.
But to do that here would be to not take into account what John, earlier in this Gospel, has already told us Jesus is.
As Jesus looks over creation and sees one metaphor after another, John has reminded us, back in chapter one that Jesus is not just some observer of the created world … he has told us that this same Jesus is the Maker of this created world. Back in chapter one we read, concerning Jesus that “All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.”
That is important, because it means that Jesus is not just giving us his thoughts on the world, he’s not just imposing his interpretation onto the world … but he is giving us an insight into the intention of the Maker. In other words, Jesus sees the world as its author intended it to be seen. He tells us not just what the world makes him think of now, but he tells us what the world is actually supposed to communicate.
You can think of it like this – it’s one thing to stand before a piece of art at a museum with a friend and talk together about what the piece of art makes you think of, or to get together with a group at a coffee shop after watching a thoughtful movie and discuss together what you think the filmmaker was trying to communicate.
It’s another thing to sit down with the actual maker of the work – with the painter or the filmmaker – and to hear from them what the work means, what sort of symbolism is going on, what he or she intended to communicate to the audience.
Human beings have always speculated on what the world means, on how we should think about what we find in it. And that is one thing.
But when Jesus is present, we don’t just have one more voice among others. We have the Maker present. We have the artist, the author, with us. And when he tells us what something means, he’s not imposing an outside view on it, he is telling us how to see it, how to read it, as the Maker or Author of the work intended it to be seen or read. He is not putting meaning onto the world, he is rightly reading the meaning that was put into the world when it was first made. He is giving us a window into the spiritual truths that he had in mind when he made the very elements of creation that he is discussing.
Tim Keller explains it like this – he points out that the Bible repeatedly compares the relationship between God and his people to the relationship between a husband and a wife. We can tend, though, to wrongly imagine that God in heaven was inspiring the Biblical authors and as he did God said to himself “Hmm … what’s a good way for me to explain to everyone what my relationship to my people is like … well … it seems like marriage is really popular down there on earth, so maybe I’ll use that to explain it!” No – that is to see it backwards. God didn’t create marriage and then later think that it made a good metaphor for his relationship to his people – but God’s intention at the moment he created marriage was for it to point beyond itself to his relationship with his people.
And that’s not just true of marriage.
Stephen Grabill is a philosopher at Calvin College, and in a series put out with the Acton Institute, Dr. Grabill discusses this topic with a young man. And Grabill says: “We can discover what [we need to] if we ask some bizarre questions: Is the world just the world? Is the cosmos just the cosmos? Are things – anything – are they just things? Or can those things be signs in and of themselves?”
The young man gives Dr. Grabill a funny kind of look and says, “You are getting way too Zen for me right now.”
Dr. Grabill smiles and then directs the young man’s attention to a wood stove near where they are talking. And he says “Let’s go back to fire. Why do we have it? For warmth, to cook, but also, fire is used time and time again to tell us something about God. He is dangerous, he purifies, he enlightens.”
The young man nods and says: “So you mean the world gives us, like, a metaphor.”
“Yes,” Grabill replies, “except with one very important difference: God isn’t like fire. Fire is like God. There is something in fire that tells us about God. There is something [in] these trees that tell us about God. In fact, when we look at everything in the world we can not only see into it, but we can see along it.”
Grabill then goes on to quote from the Christian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who writes: “I do not know that I have ever seen anything more beautiful than the bluebell [flower] I have been looking at. I know the beauty of our Lord by it. The world then is word, expression, news of God. Therefore its end, its purpose, its purport, its meaning, is God. And its life or work to name and praise him. The world is charged with the grandeur of God. The creation does praise him, does reflect honor on him, is of service to him. The sun and the stars shining, glorify God, they stand where he placed them, they move where he bid them. The heavens declare the glory of God, the birds sing to him, the thunder speaks of his terror, the lion is like his strength, the sea is like his greatness, the honey like his sweetness, they are something like him. They make him known. They tell of him. For Christ plays in ten thousand places, lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his, to the Father, through the features of men’s faces.” [Grabill & Koons, For the Life of the World, Episode 5: “Wisdom”]
What Grabill and Hopkins describe here is a concept that comes up a number of times in the Bible.
Psalm 19 says: “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge.” [Psalm 19:1-2] David there tells us that the creation is pouring out information about God, because God has made the world in such a way that every aspect of it speaks of him – it tells us who he is and what he is like. And though the creation has been marred by sin and brokenness since the rebellion of Adam and Eve, even that is not enough to silence the speech of creation as every element still testifies in some way to God.
Paul gets at the same idea in Romans 1 – he writes of those who did not have the Scriptures, and he is essentially addressing the question of how they can still be responsible for rejecting God. His answer is that they do know who God is – he writes that far from being ignorant of the truth they have “suppress[ed] the truth” because “what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For,” Paul goes on, “his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.” [Romans 1:18b-20]
Paul is telling us that God’s actual nature is revealed in creation – so much so that everyone can see it to some degree, and no one is wholly ignorant of it.
Similarly, Isaiah records the song of the seraphim in which they declare “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!” [Isaiah 6:3]
And for much of its history the Church has recognized this. The concept is very present in the early Church, and also in the Reformed tradition. The American Puritan Jonathan Edwards put it very well, in a quote I love from his short work titled “Types.” Jonathan Edwards, talking about these kinds of metaphors and types writes this – he says: “I expect by very ridicule and contempt to be called a man of a very fruitful brain and copious fancy, but they are welcome to it. I am not ashamed to own that I believe that the whole universe, heaven and earth, air and seas, and the divine constitution and history of the holy Scriptures, be full of images of divine things, as full as a language is of words; and that the multitude of those things that I have mentioned [so far in this work] are but a very small part of what is really intended to be signified and typified by these things; but that there is room for persons to be learning more and more of this language and seeing more of that which is declared in it to the end of the world without discovering all.” [Edwards, “Types”, 152]
All of this – what we see in Psalm 19 and Romans 1 and Isaiah 6, all of this that Tim Keller and Stephen Grabill and Jonathan Edwards are addressing, all of this gets at the view of the world that underlies Jesus’s words here in John chapter four.
Jesus looks at the world and he sees both the thing there, the thing itself, and he also sees the thing signified by it – the divine reality that the thing was meant to point to and communicate. He reads the world like a book, and he sees clearly the authorial intent behind every object.
And as he does that, we should note that it does not lead him to disparage the objects themselves. We need to be very clear about that. Jesus was still thirsty and still needed a drink of water! Jesus may not have taken the food the disciples offered him in this chapter – but he would later. In fact, we need to remember that Jesus was known to enjoy food and drink enough that his enemies could accuse him of being a glutton and a drunk [Matthew 11:19] – that insult was slander, to be sure, but we should also note that it would not have gained any traction unless Jesus was known to enjoy literal food and drink.
Jesus embraced the physical world, and the fact that every object in the world meant something about God did not diminish the physical world’s value in his eyes – it enriched the physical world’s value.
The physical world is good and to be used and enjoyed and delighted in. Recognizing that in addition to being a good gift in itself, it is also a language of metaphors that speaks about God – that truth should lead us to rejoice in the physical world even more, not less.
And so, Jesus, looking at the physical world around him saw a rich world of good gifts, each of which was not only a blessing in itself, but each of which also pointed to something of even greater value beyond itself – each of which pointed to some transcendent reality about God and his kingdom and his work.
But we … do not tend to see the world that way … do we? We don’t look at the world around us and see it the way Jesus does. Why is that?
It’s an interesting question. It’s a complex question. It’s a question about how we view the world not just upon reflection, but even more importantly it’s a question about what our “default setting” is when we view the world – it’s about how we see the world before we’ve even thought about it.
More recently scholars like Charles Taylor, James K. A. Smith, Hans Boresma, and many others have begun to address that question of how we view the world and why. They tie it in to the philosophies and worldviews that shape our culture at our time and place in history, and so shape our minds and our perceptions of the world without our even realizing it.
All of those studies into culture and worldview and the human mind are fascinating to me – it’s an area of thought I hope I can dive further into for years to come.
But I’m not going to talk much about any of that this morning. Because as I thought about it more this week, I began to appreciate that as important as those studies are – and they are very important – they are not the root issue for us in this area – for you and for me. They are not the root reason – the reason at a gut or heart level – for why we don’t view the world the way that Jesus views it.
The root problem is not really that we have a flat materialistic view of the world, and that the Bible calls us to have a more complex spiritual view of the world. That is part of the problem, but not the whole thing. If that were the whole problem, then the solution would be to take the way we already view the world and just add an extra layer on top – add a spiritual level where one was missing.
The root problem though, is that whether we think about it or not, we already have a second layer of meaning we place on top of all of creation when we view it. But rather than it being the meaning intended by the world’s Creator, we see a meaning imposed on the world by us. And rather than being a meaning that points us to the Creator, it is a meaning that is rooted in our idolatries.
It’s often not something we consciously think through – it’s not in the foreground of our minds, but more at a preconscious level, more in the background of our thought – but the fact is that you and I already view the world as part of a story … just not the Biblical story. We already view the world as having meaning, just not meaning that points to God. Instead, we see it as having meaning in our attempts to fill the deepest longings of our hearts with something other than God.
Let’s take marriage and sex, for example. It’s not random that Jesus turns the conversation to that in verse sixteen – it’s actually one of the areas where we can see this most clearly.
The Bible tells us that marriage, and the sexual intimacy and enjoyment that belongs within marriage, is all a picture of the commitment, the loyalty, the fidelity, the closeness, and the joy that God has towards his people and that God’s people are to have towards God. That connection gives us both an ethic of how we should relate to marriage and sexuality in our lives, and it also gives us an understanding of what marriages and sexuality are meant to point us to.
But of course, that’s not how people in our culture view marriage and sexuality, and even for Christians it is usually not the default, automatic way that we view it either – even if we agree that it should be.
How do we view it then?
Well, our tendency is to view it not as something that points us to God, but as a means to try to fill the deepest desires of our heart. And then we place it in a narrative towards that end.
So, for some, sex, romance, or marriage are about a deep heart longing for approval. You feel that if you can just have that sexual experience, if you can just have that person fall in love with you, if you can just get married, if the spouse you’re married to now would just act as they’re supposed to, then you’ll feel okay. Then, through that, you’ll receive that approval and affirmation and praise you’ve always longed for, and you’ll finally feel okay. For some, romance, sex, and marriage are primarily a means to that end.
For others, marriage and romance and sex are about security, and feeling safe or in control. Deep down you believe that if someone really loved you, if they really sexually bonded to you, then they would be yours and you would be secure. Or it may be that if you could assure yourself that you have the ability to seduce whomever you want, then you will feel in control enough of your life and your future. Or more often for Christian singles, you believe if you could get married then you would feel safe and secure against the uncertainties of life. Though the life lived by these different variations may look very different, the heart-level pattern underneath it can be the same – marriage, romance, sex are each treated as a means to the end of security or control.
And still for others, sex is about comfort and release. It is a medication for the sadness or despair or hopelessness that you feel. And you pursue it in the hopes that if you just get this experience or that experience then maybe you will find peace and comfort. At least for a little while.
Now – marriage, romance, and sex can rightfully fulfill some of these roles in life, in a limited way. The joy of loving and desiring someone and being loved and desired in return – that sort of approval and affirmation – is a joy God wrote into marriage and sex. Marriage does create more security against life’s storms. And marriage and physical marital union can rightly be a comfort to a married couple in difficult times. Marriage and sex were meant to be temporal gifts to meet some of these temporal needs. But that’s not what I’m talking about in the examples I mentioned a few minutes earlier. I’m talking about the pattern of turning to sex or marriage to try to fill the deepest longings of our hearts – longings for approval, peace, and security at the level of our soul. I’m talking about the pattern that the Bible identifies as idolatry.
Idolatry holds out many promises. But those who pursue it at any length know that it does not deliver on them. We pursue them in the hopes of finding peace and satisfaction and security, and if we receive anything like that at all, it is always fleeting. It is gone in a moment. Then it leaves us feeling more empty than before, with a bitter taste in our mouths.
And the reason for that bitter disappointment is because neither sex nor marriage, nor any other created thing was made to fill the deepest longings of our hearts. Those deep longings of our souls – longings for loving approval, for peace and comfort, for security and safety – those can only be met by God himself.
The deep longing for approval, to have another tell you that despite your failures, despite your blemishes, you are loved and desired – that longing is only ultimately fulfilled in hearing your Maker say to you “You are my beloved, with you I am well pleased.” [Mark 1:11] – the words that God says to all who trust in his Son – to all who are cleansed in Christ. In Christ, God looks upon you in love, and delight, and joy. And when you really believe that, you no longer look to marriage or sex or any other created thing to meet that deep craving of your soul.
In a similar way, the longing for peace and comfort in the depths of your soul, and in the midst of trials, is only really met by knowing that whatever trials or pain you face in this life, you have peace with God, you can have joy in his gospel, and you can have hope that whatever may come in this life, you will dwell with God in joy forever in the next life.
And the longing for security in a constantly shifting and insecure world is only met, at its deepest level, in the knowledge that while so much can be lost in this life, nothing can separate you from the love of Christ, and nothing can snatch you from his hand [John 10:28], so long as you cling to him in faith. That as the Apostle Paul puts it: “neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” [Romans 8:38-39]
And it is only when you find the deepest longings of your heart met in Christ that you can really stop reading the world wrongly and begin to read it rightly. It’s only then that you can begin to truly see – not just intellectually, but with your gut – how the creation points to the true source of your soul’s deepest needs. And when you are seeking your soul’s satisfaction in God, then you can enjoy the created world as it was meant to be enjoyed, because you’re no longer asking it to do more than God made it to do. You can enjoy it and rejoice in the divine reality it points you to.
Marriage and sex may be an obvious example for this, but the same holds for all of creation.
Jesus speaks of water pointing to the life-giving power of the gospel and the Holy Spirit. We don’t often think of it that way, because we again treat even water as a means to an end – and not just a means to a physical end, but ultimately a means to a soul-level end. And so, in our fear of death and anxiety to control our destiny many in our culture fixate on the purity and the quantity of the water they drink, desperate not just to be healthy but to grasp at a sense of control in an unpredictable world. Or, standing under the flow of water in the shower we treat it primarily as a tool that will clean and beautify our bodies so that we can win people over and increase our power, or so that we can gain the approval from others we desire, or so that we can feel secure in our ability to control others’ perceptions of us, and so on.
It is again only when we find those deeper needs met in Christ that we can experience the cleansing, beautifying, and life-giving work of water and recognize how God made it as a picture that points us to the cleansing, beautifying, and life-giving power of the gospel and the Holy Spirit.
And the same holds for so much else of creation.
We can begin to see the world as we are meant to when we stop seeing the world as a means to try to fill the deepest longings of our soul. And we can stop seeing it as a means to grasp at the deepest longings of our soul only when we find our heart’s true satisfaction in God’s love for us in Christ.
That is the heart of the issue. It is what we need to address first. And then as we address that, we can also begin to train our minds and cultivate the habit of a Biblical worldview.
We can then immerse ourselves in the Scriptures, trying to see both how it holds out Christ as the one who fulfills our deepest needs, and also how to teaches us to see the details of the world God has made in a way that point to him.
We can approach the world reminding ourselves both that God alone meets the needs of our hearts, and also that all he has made reflects something of him.
We can sit back and meditate and exercise a sanctified imagination both of the words of approval and the joy we will receive when we enter God’s presence one day, and we can look over the world God has made and let our imagination ask questions of why God has made one thing or another the way he has, and speculate on what he might be trying to communicate about himself in how he has made the things he has made.
We can do those things. But none of that will get us very far unless we are first rejecting our false and idolatrous views of the world God has made and come to Christ to have our deepest needs met by him.
God has made an incredible world. It is beautiful, it is useful, and in countless ways it reveals him, his character, and his work.
We so often treat the world like a greedy investor at an art auction. We are so focused on how we can make a profit, how we can use each work as a means to grasp at something else, that we fail to actually see the artwork in front of us. We see only a dollar amount or the social approval or prestige that a piece of art can get us, rather than actually seeing the exquisite work of art that is before us and that is meant to say something to us. In our anxiety and lust for social or financial gain, we miss the masterpiece before us and the message it aims to communicate.
In the gospel Christ tells us that in him we have all the riches and all the social standing we will ever need – he has filled our bank account beyond our wildest imaginations; he has given us access to the most prestigious social circle there is. He has given us more than our own scheming ever could acquire. And if we hear him, and if we really believe him, then the dollar numbers and the social currency we were projecting onto each work of art before us should fall like scales from our eyes. And our eyes will open to truly see the artwork before us. And what we see then before us is a portrait of the very one who has poured out his riches upon us and met all our needs.
The whole world before us is such a piece of art – a masterpiece that points to the one who made you and who in Christ will meet all of your needs.
Lift your eyes up to Christ and see what you have in him.
And then look back down at the world he has made for you and rejoice in the ways it points to him and his glory.
Amen.
—
This sermon draws on material from:
Brown, Raymond E. The Gospel According to John. vol.1. Anchor. New York, NY: Doubleday, 1966.
Calvin, John. Commentary on the Gospel According to John. Vol. 1. Translated by William Pringle. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1847 (2005 Reprint).
Carson, D.A. The Gospel According to John. PNTC. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991.
Edwards, Jonathan. “Types” in Typological Writings. Edited by Wallace E. Anderson. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993.
Grabill, Stephen & Evan Koons, in For the Life of the World: Letters to the Exiles, 2015, Episode 5: “Wisdom”.
Morris, Leon. The Gospel According to John. NICNT. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1971.