Abstract
In her introductory chapter, Bernadeta Jojko maps out the course for the rest of her study: to use John 4:20-26 – Jesus’ exchange on the topic of worship with the Samaritan woman at the well – to understand how one can worship the Father ‘in spirit and truth.’ She argues that the focal point of this narrative is the relationship between God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, and that this should affect how we understand what the true nature of worship in spirit and truth entails. Not only does Jojko have an interest in what this means for John’s earliest audience, but she also moves toward a more contemporary application for the Church.
Jojko begins the body of her work by making observations on the text of study, John 4:20-26. In the second chapter, she engages in a brief linguistic-syntactic analysis of the text, which involves a grammatical examination of such elements of the text which are directly related to the thesis of her work. The bulk of the work, consisting of three rather large chapters, is spent in thematic studies of three central terms in the passage: ‘worship,’ ‘spirit,’ and ‘truth.’
The obvious strength of Jojko’s work is in her thorough examination of the way that the terms ‘worship,’ ‘spirit,’ and ‘truth’ are used throughout John’s gospel. The reader comes away with a comprehensive view of the theological impact of these themes, both in their dependence on OT usage and in their impact on the post-Easter Christian community. Unfortunately, her biggest strength is also her biggest weakness. She expends so much of her effort on finding thematic connections triggered by those three words throughout the gospel that she fails to prove her central thesis: that it is this passage – John 4:20-26 – which focuses on the relationships between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. She does not show how this relates directly to the text at hand, particularly in the flow of the narrative, in light of the narrative’s own internal emphases, or in the particularity of the uses of these terms in this passage. For example, why does she judge a Trinitarian focus to be more central than the text’s own focus on (a) Jesus’ role as Messiah, or (b) the inclusive nature of true worship which breaks down the walls between ethnicity, gender, and former religious practices? In order to be more convincing, she would do well to devote more of her discussion to John 4, letting the text speak for itself, rather than reading it through the lens of the word studies and thematic surveys she employs.
Nevertheless, those who are studying Jesus’ encounter with the woman at the well in John 4, or are dealing in any detail with the terms in focus for much of this book must now consult Jojko’s contribution to these areas.