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John is narrating episodes from Jesus's adult life.
Insuper et cœlum compleret quanta docebat [690]------------
laetitia, aetherei quanto gens incola regni
acciperet plausu, siquis mortalibus oris
inventor scelerum, atque pii contemptor et aequi
iustitiam colere inciperet, rectumque tueri.
Sicut ovem incautus pastor qui è millibus unam [695]
amisit, serae oblitam decedere nocti
cum gregibus, ubi per rupes perque aspera tristis
quaesivit dumeta, diu loca cuncta volutis
convisens oculis; demum si forte reposta
pascentem valle invenit, subitô arripit illam, [700]
sublatamque humero stabulis laetissimus infert:
intranti dulces occurrunt oscula nati
praeripere, et reducem plausu domus excipit omnis.
Idcirco neque colloquiis muliebribus heros
abstinuit: nuperque legens Samaritidos orae [705]
rura sub antiquis Sicharaeae mœnibus urbis,
viderat ad fontem venientem ut forte puellam,
imploravit aquam supplex, putealiaque hausit
munera, qui pelago, qui fluminibusque sonoris
imperat, et vastum largis rigat imbribus orbem; [710]
cuius ad imperium populis sitientibus olim
delicuit rupes, atque undis plurima fluxit.
Secreti nos interea mirarier omnes:
ipse sed admonitam, atquo ultro commissa fatentem
in lucem è tenebris, altaque è nocte vocabat. [715]
Saepe illi pueros, aevo et florente puellas,
flore comam pressos, et molli fronde revinctos,
summisere piae, metuunt dum cuncta, parentes;
quò teneris animis pulchrae virtutis amorem
insereret, stimulisque rudes impleret honestis. [720]
Impubem turbam affatus placido ore monebat,
lustrabatque manu, ne carmina dira nocerent,
neve ulla infernis premeret vis edita ab oris.
He also taught us how heaven is filled with [690]------------
joy, how the angels of that ethereal realm
feel true bliss every time someone down here
turns away from their crimes, and piously
lives a life of righteousness and straight dealing.
As when a careless shepherd with a thousand sheep [695]
loses one that forgot its way in the dark
and, anxious, searches for it among the rocks
and undergrowth for a long time, sweeping
his eyes; and if, perhaps, he finds the sheep
grazing in a valley, he seizes it and [700]
carries it on his shoulder to the fold, full
of joy, met at the entrance with sweet kisses
from his children and the applause of his home.
So it was the hero did not shun women’s
conversation. Recently in Samaria [705]
as he passed the ancient walls of Sychar
he saw a young woman beside a well
and asked her for some water, and gladly drank—
he who commands the sea and sounding rivers!
Who waters the vast earth with heavy rains! [710]
And satisfied his people’s thirst by order
an abundant stream from the living rock!
Secretly we all marvelled at this, but
he urged her to leave sin of her own free will
calling her from deep darkness into the light. [715]
Often boys and girls in the flower of their youth—
carrying actual flowers, hair tied with blooms,
would be brought by their pious and fearful parents,
for him to fill their minds the power of love
and instruct their hearts with honest teaching. [720]
He calmly talked to this young crowd, and also
blessed them with his hand, so that no evil spell,
no force from hell’s shores could ever do them harm.
Three things are being illustrated here. First, the parable of the lost sheep:
Then all the tax collectors and the sinners drew near to Him to hear Him. And the Pharisees and scribes complained, saying, “This Man receives sinners and eats with them.” So He spoke this parable to them, saying:Vida reproduces all these details, adding a couple more: having the sheep run off at night, expanding the flock from hundreds to thousands. Never knowingly under-exaggerated, our Vida. The segue from this to Jesus’s encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well implies, rather, that ‘woman’ as a group is one of the lost sheep after whom Jesus searches, which may have been what Vida thought but which is pretty startling in its sexism. Here, his treatment of the Gospel material goes the other way, condensing a pretty lengthy account in John:
“What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he loses one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness, and go after the one which is lost until he finds it? And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbours, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost!’ I say to you that likewise there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine just persons who need no repentance. [Luke 15:1-7]
So He came to a city of Samaria which is called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. Now Jacob’s well was there. Jesus therefore, being wearied from His journey, sat thus by the well. It was about the sixth hour.Vida boils this down to a few lines, de-emphasising the Samaritan woman herself and instead indulging in a rhetorical flourish of performative astonishment that God Himself needs to ask a woman for a cup of water when he commands all the water in the universe. It seems to me this touch is overplayed, actually, and one reason why it might be is because this whole lengthy episode is a little problematic. Theologians have long recognised that it apes, formally, a series of OT betrothal scenes in which a man and a woman meet by a well and then go on to marry; and that the point of the episode is, precisely, to thwart our narrative expectations, replacing romance and sex with piety.
A woman of Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give Me a drink.” For His disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.
Then the woman of Samaria said to Him, “How is it that You, being a Jew, ask a drink from me, a Samaritan woman?” For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.
Jesus answered and said to her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, ‘Give Me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water.”
The woman said to Him, “Sir, You have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep. Where then do You get that living water? Are You greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well, and drank from it himself, as well as his sons and his livestock?”
Jesus answered and said to her, “Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life.”
The woman said to Him, “Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw.”
Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come here.”
The woman answered and said, “I have no husband.”
Jesus said to her, “You have well said, ‘I have no husband,’ for you have had five husbands, and the one whom you now have is not your husband; in that you spoke truly.”
The woman said to Him, “Sir, I perceive that You are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, and you Jews say that in Jerusalem is the place where one ought to worship.”
Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe Me, the hour is coming when you will neither on this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews. But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father is seeking such to worship Him. God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.” The woman said to Him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When He comes, He will tell us all things.”
Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am He.”
And at this point His disciples came, and they marvelled that He talked with a woman; yet no one said, “What do You seek?” or, “Why are You talking with her?”
The woman then left her waterpot, went her way into the city, and said to the men, “Come, see a Man who told me all things that I ever did. Could this be the Christ?” Then they went out of the city and came to Him.
…
And many of the Samaritans of that city believed in Him because of the word of the woman who testified, “He told me all that I ever did.” So when the Samaritans had come to Him, they urged Him to stay with them; and He stayed there two days. And many more believed because of His own word.
Then they said to the woman, “Now we believe, not because of what you said, for we ourselves have heard Him and we know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world.” [John 4:5-42]
Readers of the story about the woman at the well have called attention to three features: first, the story seems to be modelled on a recurring Old Testament story about a meeting between a man and a woman at a well (Genesis 24; 29; Exodus 2; cf. 1 Samuel 9); second, there are a number of double entendres in the vocabulary used by Jesus and the woman; and third, there seems to be a gap in the logic and topic of conversation beginning with v. 16, where the conversation switches from water and drinking to the Messiah and Jewish religion. [Lyle Eslinger, ‘The Wooing of the Woman at the Well’, Literature and Theology 1:2 (1987), pp. 168]The double-entendres, should you be interested, are that in Jewish writing ‘drinking from a well’ is a euphemism for sex, and that ‘living water’ means both flowing water as in eg a river and sperm—you can check Eslinger for citations on those. His point is that Jesus’s ‘Go, call your husband’ only makes sense in this context:
His directive to go call her husband is the exact opposite of what the woman expected him to do. At the point where she expected to get his ‘living water’ Jesus's command comes as a rebuke to her carnal misconceptions. Had she not been making sexual advances, had Jesus not understood them, and had the reader not understood both the woman and Jesus, his command to go call her husband would make no sense here. Jesus tells her to get her husband exactly when she expected to commit adultery against the man. Surprised by Jesus's response, the woman first tries to deny that she is attached (v. 17), perhaps thinking that Jesus will go ahead once he believes she is single. The fact that she does not ask why he should suddenly change topics from ‘living water’ to her husband indicates that she is aware of the connection. Jesus, in total control of the conversation, now openly reveals his disinterest in her charms by demonstrating his supernatural knowledge of her past (v. 17). To the reader this demonstration completely destroys any misunderstanding. [Eslinger, 178-79]Vida’s approach to all this is, severely, to downplay it. Instead he makes reference to Moses striking water from the rock (Exodus 17) and hurries through to him blessing the children:
Then little children were brought to Him that He might put His hands on them and pray, but the disciples rebuked them. But Jesus said, “Let the little children come to Me, and do not forbid them; for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” And He laid His hands on them and departed from there. [Matthew 19:13-15]The painting at the head of this post is by Jean Baptiste de Champaigne, and dates from the 1660s. And here, to balance it out, is Duccio di Buoninsegna's Christ and the Samaritan Woman (1310-1311).
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