Jesus was looking for her
A Grace Hill Library Paper
Jesus Was Looking for Her
What shocked the disciples, and where this series leaves us.
He had to go through Samaria.
That's how John kicks off the fourth chapter of his Gospel — and it's a strange thing to say, because Jesus didn't have to go anywhere near Samaria. Most Jewish travelers of his day would spend an extra day's walk just to go around the region. The hatred ran deep in both directions. Even the woman Jesus meets at the well that day says as much: "Jews do not associate with Samaritans." Jesus wasn't taking a shortcut. He had an appointment to keep.
Jesus was looking for his evangelist.
The disciples leave him resting at Jacob's well while they head into town for food. I picture them with their heads down — good Jewish boys who'd rather not be caught in this part of the map, moving fast, eyes on the ground, trying to get in, get lunch, and get out. Oblivious to the spiritual hunger surrounding them on every side.
Everyone in this story is looking in the wrong place. The woman assumes Jesus is talking about water from a bucket; he's offering her water that never runs dry. The religious question in Samaria is about which mountain is best for worship; Jesus reveals that it's not about a building, but a relationship of Spirit and Truth. The disciples come back wondering who fed Jesus lunch; Jesus is full on something they can't see.
And their biggest shock was finding him talking to her.
John uses a specific word for the disciples' reaction: thaumazō — to marvel, to be astonished, to wonder. It's the same reaction when Jesus calms the sea. It's the word used when demons flee at his command. And now it shows up again, for this: their rabbi, alone, talking to a woman. These men had no words when they saw Jesus sitting with her.
It was that scandalous. For anyone steeped in Israel's Scriptures, a man sitting at a well with a woman wasn't a small thing — it was a type-scene, and ancient readers would have heard wedding bells. Isaac found Rebekah at a well. Jacob found Rachel at a well. Moses found Zipporah at a well. Three of the most consequential marriages in Israel's history all began at the side of a well, and the pattern was unmistakable to anyone who knew the stories. If that weren't enough of a setup, John had already told us, one chapter earlier, that John the Baptist was casting Jesus as the bridegroom in search of his bride. Turn the page, and the bridegroom is sitting at a well. "Can I have a drink?" lands less like small talk and more like a proposal.
The story makes its own point clear enough: Jesus isn't there to marry her. He's there to offer her something even the best marriage never could. And in response to the disciples' thaumazō, she does something we shouldn't miss — she leaves her water jar behind and runs into town. John is winking at his readers here. She came to that well, at that hour, alone, to escape the gossip and fill a jar she'd be back to refill again tomorrow, and the day after that. But it seems she doesn't need it anymore. The living water Jesus promised is already overflowing out of her.
What happens next puts the whole scene in perspective. She walks into the very town the disciples had just left. John describes her as a witness (v.39, martyreō), a favorite word throughout the entire Johannine corpus for how the gospel is spread. As shocking as it would be for the ancient reader, it was not Nicodemus — the Jewish leader and Bible expert we met in chapter 3 — but this outcast woman of Samaria who joins with John the Baptist as one of the first witnesses to the Christ.
"Come see a man who told me everything I've ever done," she tells anyone who'll listen. "Could this be the Christ?" The disciples came back with a bag of sandwiches. She came back with an entire town of spiritually hungry people. Armed with nothing but her story and a couple of questions, the very people who once whispered about her now can't get to Jesus fast enough.
As the town starts walking toward them, Jesus turns to his disciples. "Look at the hills," he says. "They're ripe for harvest." He isn't being abstract. He's pointing at the actual hills of Samaria, at the actual people his disciples just walked past with their heads down. I think there's a smile on his face and a little bit of a chide in his voice: you were just there. You missed it. They'd spent the morning in the same town, bought their lunch from the same people, and never once looked up.
It's a perfect parable for today's church.
A Look Back
We've spent seven articles now walking through what the Bible actually says about men and women — not the handful of verses everyone quotes, but the whole arc, from page one to the early church. It's time to step back and ask what we've found, and where it leaves us.
We started, all the way back in the series introduction, with a phrase that continues to help me make sense of biblical story: complementarity without hierarchy. Men and women, really different, never ranked. From there we went to the actual beginning pages of Scripture and found that the "helper" God made for Adam wasn't a subordinate at all. Ezer is the same word the Bible uses, almost everywhere else, for God himself rescuing his people. Eve wasn't Adam's assistant. She was his ally, formed from his side rather than his head or his foot, because the two of them were meant to rule together, side by side, as the image of God set into the heart of his creation. Then Genesis 3 showed us the catastrophe: not a curse to imitate, but a diagnosis of what happens when image-bearers stop looking to God and start grasping for control over each other instead. That's the distinction the theologian Ray Anderson gave us back in the series introduction: Genesis 1 and 2 show us divine preference, what God actually wanted for us from the beginning; everything that follows the fall, every patriarchal arrangement included, is biblical precedent, what God works within without ever calling it the design.
From there we went looking for women in the rest of the Bible's story, and we kept finding them in exactly the places their own cultures said they shouldn't be. Rahab, a Canaanite and a prostitute by reputation, gives one of the sharpest confessions of Yahweh's lordship in the whole book of Joshua. Deborah judges Israel and leads its armies, and the text doesn't blink. Huldah is the prophet a dying kingdom turns to ignite the great revival under Josiah. Ruth, a foreigner with no covenant standing of her own, becomes the great-grandmother of King David by choosing covenant loyalty over self-preservation. And when Matthew sits down to write the opening genealogy of his Gospel, he reaches past dozens of patriarchs to name five women — Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and Mary — almost all of them outsiders, all of them carrying some kind of scandal, and every one of them essential to the story God was writing.
Then Jesus arrives, and the undercurrent becomes a river. Women fund his ministry. Mary of Bethany sits at his feet in the posture of a disciple, and when Martha tries to pull her back into a more acceptable role, Jesus defends Mary's choice. Women are the last ones at the cross and the first ones at the empty tomb — first witnesses to the resurrection, in a world where a woman's testimony wasn't even admissible in court. The church has called them, rightly, the apostles to the apostles. And the pattern doesn't stop with Jesus. Lydia hosts a church in her home. Priscilla — named ahead of her husband, three times out of four, which was not how anyone wrote in the ancient world unless they meant something by it — takes the brilliant preacher Apollos aside and corrects his theology. Phoebe carries Paul's letter to the church in Rome and very likely became its first interpreter, since someone had to explain it to the Roman believers when it arrived. Junia is named outstanding among the apostles: only centuries later would editors quietly turn her into a man named Junias because the alternative made them uncomfortable. Euodia and Syntyche lead the church at Philippi by name. In all, 30% percent of the leadership of the early church were women — in a world where the public square belonged to men. That number isn't an accident. It's a pattern that speaks to the Spirit's work from the beginning.
We then spent three long articles in the passages everyone actually argues about — 1 Corinthians 11 and 14, 1 Timothy 2, Ephesians 5, Colossians 3, 1 Peter 3 — and found, again and again, that the case for permanent hierarchy has to be built by inference, while the text itself keeps assuming mutuality. Paul expects women to pray and prophesy out loud in church in the very same letter that's been read as silencing them. The only imperative in 1 Timothy 2 is "let her learn." The only verse in the whole New Testament where Paul uses the actual Greek word for authority between a husband and wife splits it evenly between them. "Wives, submit to your husbands" borrows its verb from the verse before it, where everyone is told to submit to everyone. The "tie-breaker" that's supposed to settle every disagreement in a Christian marriage is nowhere on the page — what's on the page is two people becoming one through the same kind of self-giving love Christ showed the church, which is to say: not leadership as control, but leadership as the willingness to die first.
So here's the question that's been underneath every one of these articles, whether I said it out loud or not: will we rejoice that the gospel keeps getting carried by the very people our cultures, our churches, and sometimes our own theology told us to overlook? Or will we be like the disciples — thaumazō — shocked all over again to find Jesus speaking with a woman, sending his Spirit to her, filling her up until she can't help but run into town and bring the whole place back with her?
No Longer Male and Female
There's one more passage I want to look at closely, because I think it's the verse that ties this entire series back to where it started. Galatians 3:28: "There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no 'male and female'; you are all one in the Messiah, Jesus" (NT Wright's New Testament for Everyone).
Paul's words here would have sent shockwaves through the social and religious world of his day. The Jewish world was divided along all three of those lines; the Gentile world even more so. Free Jewish men sat at the top of the social order, and the sign of the covenant itself — circumcision — marked them out from women by definition. Paul says Christ has dissolved every one of those distinctions. Galatians as a whole is fighting for one thing: that Jew and Gentile sit at the same table of fellowship, no second tier required. Philemon does the same work for slave and free — Onesimus comes home not as property but as a brother. And 1 Corinthians 11, as we already spent a whole article showing, is where Paul works out what this means for men and women specifically: the distinction stays intact, but the partnership is equal, both praying and prophesying as the Spirit leads.
What's easy to miss is that when Paul gets to the third clause — "no longer male and female" — he doesn't just repeat his pattern. He shifts the grammar. "No longer Jew or Greek" and "no longer slave or free" both use a simple Greek "or" (oude). But for the third pair, Paul switches to "no longer 'male and female'" (ouk eni arsen kai thēly) — the exact wording, of the Greek translation of Genesis 1:27: "male and female he created them." That's not an accident, and most careful commentators notice it. Paul is quoting Genesis on purpose.
So what does it mean for Paul to declare that there is no longer "male and female" — language lifted straight from the moment God made us in his image? I don't think Paul is erasing maleness and femaleness as categories; 1 Corinthians 11 makes clear he isn't interested in that. I think he's saying something both larger and more specific: the equality we're looking for was never going to be generic. It's not a slogan borrowed from outside the faith and bolted onto it. It's Christ-shaped and cross-formed, and it reaches all the way back to page one to get there.
Because Genesis 1:27 was already the most radical sentence available on page one of any ancient religious text. The whole ancient Near Eastern world understood the idea of a god's "image" being placed on earth — every Mesopotamian and Egyptian palace and temple was built around it. But the image of a god, in that world, belonged to the king, and sometimes the priest. Pharaoh wasn't just Egypt's ruler; he was titled the living image of Horus, the very presence of the god embodied in a single human being, and that designation was never used of a commoner. Mesopotamian kings carried the same idea — a king's statue, his "image," would be set up in conquered territory or at the border of his domain specifically because the image carried his authority with it; to stand before the king's image was to stand before the king himself. Being the image of a god was a highly exclusive status; everyone else was a mere servant of the gods.
And then Genesis 1:26–27 takes that whole concept and universalizes it. "Let us make humankind in our image… So God created humankind in his own image; in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them." Not the king alone. Not the priestly class. Not men only, with women left out of the privilege the way they were left out of nearly everything else in the ancient world. Humankind. Male and female, together, named as God's living image on the very first page. In a world where being god's image was the mark of royal exclusivity, Genesis throws the doors open to everyone. I touched on this back in the very first installment of this series — Genesis 1 is structured like a temple, and the only image God allows in his cosmic sanctuary is us — but it bears saying even more plainly here: not "us" in the abstract. Us, male and female, equally, doing what until that moment only kings got to do.
That's the world Genesis 1:27 was written into, and it's the verse Paul is quoting when he writes "no longer male and female" in Galatians 3:28. He's not introducing a new promise in Christ. He's saying Christ has finally made good on the oldest one.
In Genesis, God was building his cosmic temple and setting humanity at its center as his image, charged with shining that image into a broken and waiting world. Not alone — together, man and woman side by side. But we became cracked mirrors. Genesis 3 names the problem: instead of reflecting God's image to the world, we warped toward each other and toward our own work, distorting the very thing we were made to display. We abdicated our rule and started worshipping the creature instead of the Creator. Paul names this exact failure in Romans: we "exchanged the glory of the immortal God for an image resembling mortal human beings or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles."1 The glory bestowed on humanity was our status as God's image. Paul says we traded being God's image into worshipping lesser images — images of birds and beasts, a small, sad downgrade from the glory we were made for.
The solution Christ brings isn't simply a reversal back to where we started. It goes further than that. Paul writes that those God foreknew, he also "predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that his Son would be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters."2
When Paul writes no longer "male and female," he isn't erasing that original picture — he's refining it. Genesis 1 says all of humanity, male and female, bears God's image, and that part is never revoked; in that sense we really are all God's children. But Paul says the goal now is something more specific: to be conformed to the image of the Son. Jesus, the truly human one, came to show the world both who God is and what it actually means to be human — male and female, the way we were always meant to be.
I think that's the deeper current running underneath Paul's words in Galatians 3:28. We were never going to partner our way back into being God's image-bearers through our own effort. We can't. From Genesis 3 onward, every generation has wanted to find its way back to peace and partnership, and every generation has discovered that the rebellion runs deeper than willpower can fix. Genesis 3:16 was never the design — but on our own, it was always going to be the destination. Christ changes the destination. He broke the curse, defeated sin and death, and opened a way for us to become God's image-bearers again — not in the broader, general sense of Genesis 1 alone, but in the image of the Son, the one true and complete image of God, the firstborn of a whole family of brothers and sisters bearing his likeness together.
Where Do We Go From Here
I found out years ago that we can get all of this theology exactly right and still get it wrong in practice. I've served on staff at churches that were, on paper, fully egalitarian — and the actual experience of the women on those teams was awful. They had no real voice in the room. They were talked over, second-guessed, and quietly pushed to the margins in a dozen small ways nobody would have called "hierarchy" out loud. The turnover rate among female staff, in particular, was brutal. Getting our doctrine right is necessary. It is nowhere near sufficient.
So a few things, practically, as this series comes to a close:
Find ways to actually learn from women who've been called by God and filled by his Spirit — not as a box to check, but because you'll be a worse pastor, a worse leader, a worse Christian without their voice in the room. Pursue real, mutual leadership on your teams and in your churches, not the appearance of it. And keep an eye on the gap between your theology and your culture — because that gap is exactly where the women on your team will actually live.
I've been incredibly blessed in my role as Lead Pastor of Grace Hill Church. Our Session of Elders is made up of men and women faithfully holding the spiritual authority and direction of our church. I've noticed time and time again that the conversations we have feel different with everyone in the room. Many times our female elders will ask a question, or offer an idea that leaves me thinking, wow, I would never have thought of that. It's for those sorts of moments that I believe God said, "It is not good that man is alone."
One of my good friends and partners in this work, Rob Dixon, has spent years writing about the practical side of egalitarian ministry — not just the exegesis, but what it actually looks like during a Wednesday staff meeting, or a Friday outreach. Here he is, in his own words:
"When I've had the chance to express my convictions about women and men sharing leadership in writing, I've opted to focus on the practicality of it all. In my book Together in Ministry, I worked to break down healthy mixed-gender ministry partnerships into 10 distinct and tangible attributes. And in my latest book, Allies in Ministry, I articulated a 7-step pathway that the Church can use to proactively develop more men into more effective allies to women in ministry."
I'd recommend both books without hesitation. You can also find his monthly writing on Substack at substack.com/@rdixondis — worth following if you want the practical side of this conversation alongside the theological one.
Two more voices, both women, both worth your time:
Carmen Joy Imes (substack.com/@carmenjoyimes) — her book Bearing God's Name: Why Sinai Still Matters changed how I read the third commandment entirely. If "taking the Lord's name in vain" has ever sounded like a rule about cursing to you, her book will completely rework that, and it sits right alongside everything we've covered here about what it means to carry God's name and image into the world.
Haley Goranson Jacobs — her book Conformed to the Image of His Son is one of the best treatments I've read on glory and what it means to be an image-bearer, and it will change the way you read Romans 8. Her work is the backbone of what I wrote above about bearing the image of the Son.
And one more recommendation that isn't a book. Brenda Salter McNeil is one of my favorite preachers. Some of her sermons I heard 20 years ago, still stick with me today. She spends a lot of time in John 4, and her words are always in my head when I open that chapter. Here is her John 4 sermon at a national InterVarsity mission conference back in 2006 that is still completely worth your time: listen to the sermon.
Ripe for Harvest, Still
I keep coming back to that scene at the well. The disciples went into Samaria with their heads down, bought their lunch, and walked right past a town that was about to come running to Jesus because of one woman's testimony. They weren't bad men. They weren't trying to miss it. They'd just been trained their whole lives not to expect anything there.
That's still the temptation in front of every one of us. Not malice — just trained inattention. Heads down, errand done, out the door, oblivious to the hills around us, ripe and ready, simply because we were never taught to look up.
Revelation 5 gives us the end of this whole story: a kingdom and a priesthood, ransomed by the blood of the Lamb, ruling on the renewed earth. Men and women, together, exactly the way Genesis 1 pictured it on page one. That's where this has been heading the entire time — not since this series started seven articles ago, but since the sixth day of creation. The only question left is the one Jesus put to his disciples that day at the well, and it's the one I want to leave you with as this series closes: the harvest is standing right in front of us. Will we look up in time to see it?
Notes
1 Biblical Studies Press, The NET Bible First Edition (Biblical Studies Press, 2005), Romans 1:23.
2 Biblical Studies Press, The NET Bible First Edition (Biblical Studies Press, 2005), Romans 8:29.
A Grace Hill Library Paper
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Grace Hill Edition 2026 · May be freely shared with attribution.
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