John 4:5-42
In this passage, Jesus famously crosses social borders in order to show himself as the Messiah to a Samaritan woman. In doing so, he moves, crossing boundaries of gender and culture. While physical migration is not visible in this passage, the realities of the importance of movement to Jesus’ life-giving mission are shown. By the end of this passage, Jesus is revealed as Messiah not to fellow Judeans but to Samaritans, across an ethnic and religious divide. He begins his revelation of his divine life to one of those whom Latina theologian Loída Martell calls “sobrajas—those whom society believes have no intrinsic value and thus can dispose of at will.” [1] For Martell, movement is life in the Spirit; as Jesus says in this passage, they will “worship the Father in spirit and truth” (4:23) across the physical and ethnocultural borders that separate Jews and Samaritans. Movement, migration, is life and connection, as Martell emphasizes.
In addition to Jesus’ border-crossing, his interaction with the Samaritan woman points to other key ideas found in the Migration With Dignity principles. He offers her living water (4:11), “a spring of water gushing up to eternal life” (4:14). This is a promise of both spiritual and material needs being met. Jesus is promising sufficiency. Of course, the promise of eternal life is a spiritual one, but the eternal life Jesus offers is also a benefit for this world. The life he promises is fullness and well-being from God. Eternal life is not a paucity of life but life that comes with healing and wholeness. The connection with MWD is that the MWD principles insist that every person has a right to healing, wholeness, and well-being: to have basic needs met; to have the right to access education and services that help bring fulfillment to human life; to have the right to maintain ethnic and cultural identity and to cultural and religious practices that bring meaning in life. For those who are migrating, the life that is available must not be only a life of fear, hiding, or grudging acceptance by new neighbors, but instead the life they are due is a life of healing and wholeness.
[1] Loída Martell, “La Nueva Encomienda: The Church’s Response to Undocumented Immigrants as Mass Incarcerated,” in Thinking Theologically About Mass Incarceration: Biblical Foundations and Justice Imperatives, ed. Antonios Kireopoulos, Mitzi J. Budde, and Matthew D. Lundberg (Paulist Press, 2017), 168.
Hannah Bowman is a member of the Episcopal Migration Caucus who lives in Los Angeles, the founder of Christians for the Abolition of Prisons, and the author of Abolition Ecclesiology: A Spatial Theology for a Church Against Prisons (forthcoming from Fortress Press in November 2026).