Jesus is speaking with a Samaritan woman at a well — a crossing of multiple social boundaries: a Jewish man, a Samaritan woman, a public conversation, a theological discussion. She has shifted the conversation to the ancient argument between Samaritans and Jews about the correct place to worship (Gerizim vs. Jerusalem). Jesus dissolves the argument by making it obsolete. The question of location is being replaced by a question of condition: not where but how. The “hour coming and now here” is the inaugurated eschatology of the Gospel: the new age is breaking in while the old structures still stand.

From the writers we read together

John Polkinghorne

physicist and Anglican priest, author of Belief in God in an Age of Science

Polkinghorne spent his career at the intersection of scientific inquiry and theological reflection, and the phrase “in spirit and truth” was, for him, a description of the intellectual posture both disciplines require: a willingness to be corrected by what is actually there. Bad science produces results shaped by what the scientist wants to find rather than what the data reveals. Bad worship produces a God shaped by what the worshiper wants rather than what the Father actually is. Both failures are failures of alētheia.

Polkinghorne's reading of “God is spirit” was not that God is non-physical and therefore inaccessible, but that God is not located at a particular mountain or temple — that the Father can be worshiped in a molecular biology laboratory or a cattle shed or a Samaritan well with the same access as in a cathedral. The “hour now here” is the hour in which geography ceases to be a barrier to encounter. The condition is not your location but your orientation: spirit toward Spirit, truth toward Truth.