XXVI. SYCHAR, OF SAMARIA

John 4:5.—“Then cometh he to a city of Samaria, which is called Sychar.”

Here Jesus converses with the woman at the well. She perceives that he is a prophet. She suspects that he may be the Christ. She spreads her report of him through the city. The inhabitants are awakened to a lively interest about him. Jesus is induced to tarry there two days; and it was probably the favourable disposition towards him which he found to prevail there that drew from him at that very time the observation to his disciples, “Say not ye, There are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest. And he that reapeth receiveth wages, and gathereth fruit unto life eternal: that both he that soweth and he that reapeth may rejoice together. And herein is that saying true, One soweth and another reapeth. I sent you to reap that whereon ye bestowed no labour: other men laboured, and ye are entered into their labours.” It is the favourable state of Samaria for the reception of the Gospel that suggests these reflections to Jesus; he, no doubt, perceiving that God had much “people in that city.”

Such is the picture of the religious state of Sychar presented in the narrative of St. John.

Now the author of the Acts of the Apostles confirms the truth of this statement in a remarkable but most unintentional manner. From him we learn that, at a period a few years later than this, and after the death of Jesus, Philip, one of the deacons, “went down to the city of Samaria” (the emphatic expression marks it to have been Sychar, the capital), “and preached Christ unto them.” (Acts 8:5.) His success was just what might have been expected from the account we have read in St. John of the previous state of public opinion at Sychar. “The people with one accord gave heed unto those things which Philip spake” (ver. 6); and “when they believed Philip preaching the things concerning the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized, both men and women” (ver. 12). It is evident that these histories are not got up to corroborate one another. It is not at all an obvious thought, or one likely to present itself to an impostor, that it might be prudent to fix upon Sychar as the imaginary scene of Philip’s successful labours, seeing that Jesus had been well received there some years before; at least in such a case some allusion or reference would have been made to this disposition previously evinced; it would not have been left to the reader to discover it or not, as it might happen, where the chance was so great that it would be overlooked. Moreover, his recollection of the passage in St. John would probably have been studiously arrested by the use of the same word “Sychar,” rather than “the city of Samaria,” as designating the field of Philip’s labours.