Scripture is alive. God breathed into it truths so great that physical life is not long enough to extract the wisdom it contains. Thankfully, some men have been gifted by God to help us. They both expose great truth and bring depth to known truth.
I’ve started reading Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places
Dr. Peterson juxtaposes two very famous stories that are seldom told together from chapters three and four. Chapter three tells the story of Jesus and Nicodemus while chapter four focuses on Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. Peterson draws something I’d never noticed out of these two familiar stories. That’s not accurate, it’s not the stories themselves that he draws freshness out of, but their placement. While he offers nothing new to me in exposition, he compares them and reveals that there is intention in their placement.
Jesus shows us in two separate encounters that the Gospel is not given based on gender, location, religion, education, standing, theology, boldness, identity, or concern for reputation. Instead, the Gospel is available to everyone. John clearly reveals this in the placement of these two stories.
In the first story, the Gospel is given to a man in a large city. Nicodemus was brought up understanding who the Messiah was and became a professional theologian. He was a respected man in his community and part of the most orthodox of Pharisaic sects. He approaches Christ with questions and is named prominently in the text. He does this under cover of darkness, we logically assume, because his reputation was at stake.
In the second story, the Gospel is given to a woman on the outskirts of a small city. She had a distorted understanding of who the Messiah is and she is a layperson. She was either an abused or disreputable woman and she was a heretic. Jesus first approached her and she is never named. In this story, it is Christ who puts his own reputation at risk.
The Gospel is for everyone: those who pursue it and those who are pursued by it. The emphasis in both of these stories is neither Nicodemus nor the Samaritan woman. We know this because John gives us no real insight into these people except what Jesus Himself says about them. We do not know their motivations or their desires and they are not relevant to the text. These stories are about Christ and the Gospel.
This was striking to me because though the truth itself is not new - seeing it weaved in this fashion proved God was intentional even in the placement of the events.
