Thank you for being a free subscriber here at Sacred & Secular.
You are welcome here. Free members receive a full reflection every Sunday, while paid membership unlocks daily reflections like this one and full access to an archive of more than 300 searchable reflections.
You may also be interested in my book, Sacred & Secular: Find God in the Ordinary (USA Link), which brings together some of the most popular and thought-provoking reflections from this journey so far.
There are certain phrases in the Bible that have become so much a part of everyday Christian language that we can forget where they actually are in the Bible. “You must be born again” is one of them. So is Jesus’ promise of “living water.” Both phrases have been quoted, preached, printed on church notices and turned into theological shorthand. Yet because we usually encounter them separately, it is easy to miss something rather interesting.
They come from two conversations in consecutive chapters of John’s Gospel.
In John 3, Jesus speaks with Nicodemus. In John 4, he speaks with a Samaritan woman beside a well. I had read both stories countless times before it occurred to me to place them side by side. Once I did, the contrast was difficult to ignore.
Nicodemus is named. The woman is not. He is male, Jewish, educated and religiously respected. She is a Samaritan, female, with a complicated personal history. He comes to Jesus at night, while she meets him in the middle of the day. Nicodemus deliberately seeks Jesus out. The woman appears to be doing nothing more spiritual than collecting water.
And perhaps most interestingly, Jesus does not speak to them in the same way.
