Catholic Commentary
True Worship in Spirit and Truth
19The woman said to him, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet.20Our fathers worshiped in this mountain, and you Jews say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.”21Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father.22You worship that which you don’t know. We worship that which we know; for salvation is from the Jews.23But the hour comes, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such to be his worshipers.24God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”
John 4:19–24 records Jesus' teaching to a Samaritan woman that true worship is not bound to a particular geographic location but rather occurs when people worship God in spirit and truth, guided by the Holy Spirit and in accordance with God's full revelation. Jesus emphasizes that his death and glorification will transcend the old territorial divides between Jewish and Samaritan worship sites, establishing a new era where God seeks worshipers who honor his actual nature rather than following incomplete or localized religious traditions.
Jesus doesn't answer where to worship—he abolishes the question itself by revealing that true worship happens in the interior alignment of the human spirit with God's Spirit, not in sacred geography.
Commentary
John 4:19 — "Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet." The woman's recognition of Jesus as a prophet is a turning point in the dialogue. Having just been told the secret history of her own life (vv. 17–18), she pivots — as people throughout John's Gospel often do — from the personal to the theological. Her evasion is also a genuine inquiry: if this man has prophetic insight, perhaps he can resolve a centuries-old religious controversy. The title "prophet" is inadequate for Jesus, but it is a threshold recognition, a stepping-stone toward the fuller confession she will make in verse 29 ("Could this be the Christ?").
John 4:20 — The mountain controversy. "This mountain" refers to Mount Gerizim, visible from the well, where the Samaritans had built their own temple (destroyed by the Hasmonean ruler John Hyrcanus in 128 BC, but still venerated as the sacred site). The dispute was not merely liturgical but identity-forming: Samaritans traced their worship to the patriarchs and to Deuteronomy's command to build an altar on Gerizim (Deut 27:4 in the Samaritan Pentateuch). For the woman, geography is theology. Jesus does not dismiss this — he engages it with full seriousness.
John 4:21 — "The hour is coming." Jesus' use of "hour" (hōra) is theologically loaded in John. It most often refers to the hour of his Passion and glorification (2:4; 7:30; 12:23; 17:1). Here the word anticipates that climactic hour when the temple veil will be torn (Matt 27:51), the body of Jesus will become the new Temple (John 2:21), and the Holy Spirit will be poured out. Jesus addresses her as "Woman" (gynai) — the same address he uses to his mother at Cana (2:4) and from the Cross (19:26), suggesting a solemn, even eschatological register. The coming hour will make both Gerizim and Jerusalem obsolete as exclusive sacred sites, because God's presence will no longer be localized.
John 4:22 — "Salvation is from the Jews." This verse is often skipped over, but it is essential. Jesus does not practice a false ecumenism that treats all religious traditions as equally valid. He explicitly corrects Samaritan worship: "You worship what you do not know." The Samaritans had accepted only the Pentateuch and had rejected the prophets, losing the fuller revelation of Israel's covenant history. "Salvation is from the Jews" (hē sōtēria ek tōn Ioudaiōn estin) is a categorical affirmation of salvation history: the Incarnation, the Messiah, the fulfillment of all promises — these emerge from within Israel's covenant. This verse guards against any reading that collapses the specificity of the Gospel into vague spiritual universalism.
John 4:23 — "The hour comes, and now is." The double temporal structure — "comes" (future) and "now is" (present) — is characteristic of John's realized eschatology. The new era is both arriving and already inaugurated in the very person of Jesus standing at the well. The phrase "true worshipers" (alēthinoi proskunētai) echoes the Johannine theme of what is "true" or "real" (alēthinos) — the true light (1:9), the true bread (6:32), the true vine (15:1). True worship is worship that corresponds to reality — to what God actually is. Crucially, it is the Father who seeks such worshipers. The initiative belongs to God; authentic worship is always a response to divine pursuit.
John 4:24 — "God is spirit." This is one of the most philosophically dense statements in all of Scripture. "God is spirit" (Pneuma ho Theos) does not mean God is impersonal, immaterial, or disembodied in a Greek philosophical sense. In Hebrew thought, "spirit" (ruach/pneuma) connotes vitality, power, and freedom — the animating breath of creation (Gen 1:2). To worship "in spirit and truth" therefore means: (1) in spirit — by the power and movement of the Holy Spirit, in the transformed interior life of the believer; and (2) in truth — in conformity with the full revelation of God, which is Jesus Christ himself, who is "the Way, the Truth, and the Life" (14:6). The two terms are not two separate requirements but a single, unified description of worship oriented toward the Trinitarian God revealed in Christ.
Catholic Commentary
Catholic tradition has mined this passage with extraordinary richness across three domains: liturgy, Trinitarian theology, and the spiritual life.
On the nature of the Liturgy: The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§2765–2766) and Sacrosanctum Concilium (§10) both affirm that Christian worship is not the substitution of inward sentiment for outward form, but the transformation of outward form by inward reality. The Church has always resisted reading "spirit and truth" as an argument against ritual, sacrament, or sacred place. Augustine, in his Tractates on John (Tract. 15), insists: "God is spirit, and wills to be worshiped by spirits... Worship in spirit and truth means that the heart must be present wherever the body is present." The Mass, far from being abolished by verse 24, is the supreme act of worship "in spirit and truth" because it is the sacrifice of Christ himself, who is Truth incarnate, offered through the Holy Spirit (cf. CCC §1069–1070).
On Trinitarian worship: The passage quietly discloses the Trinitarian structure of Christian worship: the Father seeks worshipers; the Son is the Truth in whom they worship; the Spirit is the medium and power of that worship. This anticipates the Missio Dei as understood by the Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople. Gregory of Nyssa saw this verse as evidence that the Spirit is not a creature but the divine milieu of all authentic prayer.
On the universal call to holiness: Pope St. John Paul II, in Novo Millennio Ineunte (§32–34), cites the Samaritan woman's encounter as a paradigm of the Church's mission: the Father is seeking worshipers, and the Church's evangelization is a participation in that seeking. Every baptized person, not only priests or religious, is called to offer worship "in spirit and truth" as their primary Christian vocation — the teaching at the heart of Lumen Gentium's universal call to holiness (§11).
For Today
The Samaritan woman's question is strikingly modern: does it matter where or how you worship, so long as you're sincere? Jesus' answer refuses both rigid externalism and vague spiritualism. For Catholics today, this passage challenges two common temptations. The first is a merely habitual, performative participation in the Mass — present in body, absent in spirit — which Jesus implicitly indicts when he says the Father seeks worshipers who worship in spirit. The second temptation is the opposite: the privatization of faith into personal feeling that dismisses the Church's liturgical life as unnecessary scaffolding. Jesus' insistence that "salvation is from the Jews" — that God works through a specific history, people, and form — pushes back decisively against this. Practically, Catholics can use this passage as an examination of conscience before Mass: Am I bringing my spirit — my attention, desire, contrition, and love — to this act of worship? Am I encountering Christ, who is the Truth, or merely going through motions? Worship "in spirit and truth" is not an achievement but a daily conversion.
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