March 19: Photini of Samaria
♫ Music:
Thursday, March 19
Scripture: John 4:7-19, 25-26
A woman from 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.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?” (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying 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 water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock.” Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.”
Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come here.” The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband. What you have said is true.” The woman said to him, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ). When he comes, he will tell us all things.” Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am he.”
PHOTINI OF SAMARIA
In looking at the Gospels as a whole, a pattern emerges in which Jesus often saved the most extravagant, obvious, and glorious revelation of his true nature and identity for the most intimate of settings. In this text, we again find Jesus expressing his identity powerfully in an apparently offhand encounter.
Jesus had been walking for a while and was tired, and probably really thirsty, when he sat down by the ancient well. The interaction begins harmlessly enough, but as it develops, it seems clear that Jesus has orchestrated this “chance” encounter. The disciples’ arrival, even seems conveniently delayed, so that he might more easily interact with her without the bigotry of his Jewish male cohort causing his conversation partner to become guarded. Guercino’s painting isolates the figures of the woman and Jesus, cropping them half-length to help us to focus on the intimacy of the story.
In the text and in the painting, the woman seems far more ready to observe the social divisions and hierarchies than is Jesus, as she politely reminds him that He is a Jew, and their conversation is taboo. Guercino’s painting finds her turning her body away from Jesus, almost as if she is about to leave the scene, only with her head does gesture back toward him. Of course, she doesn’t understand who is speaking to her. She doesn’t know that he knows every sordid detail of her life, and yet he has created this moment so that he might give her a gift beyond value.
This gift of revelation comes first in the form of a metaphor that is close at hand–“I am the Living Water”– this metaphor has been brewing deep within the Trinity for some time. Jesus laid the groundwork for this image of his life-giving, life-sustaining nature when he allowed Jacob to dig the well at which they were sitting, when he caused water to flow from rocks for Moses, and when he motivated David to sing beautifully of the presence of God as “water in the desert.”
So here Jesus finally is, at the well at the appointed time, bringing all of those old images to fullness, and lavishing this moment on a woman who cannot hope to deserve it. He knows she is thirsty. He knows the reasons for the multiple marriages, remarriages, and adulterous relationships. He knows that lifetime of pain, and of the unquenchable thirst that drives us all into the streets of absence.
In asking for her husband, he gives her the opportunity to confess, and she does, in part. I have often confessed only in part, denying Christ the opportunity to give me himself.
Like any great painter, Guercino paints the moment when things might go either way. Christ is gesturing to himself with his left hand, while his right hand is in the teaching gesture. Jesus’ real teaching is always himself. With Jacob’s old well in the foreground, and Jesus beyond, we are once again asked to consider if we are willing to abandon that which only satisfies temporarily, with that which satisfies for all time?
PRAYER
Jesus, You know everything about me, everything I have ever done.
Please teach me about myself.
Show me where I go for comfort, when I should come to you.
Don’t just show me the sins and vices that I run to,
Also show me the many lesser satisfactions that have interfered with my knowing you.
Forgive me for expectations for fulfillment that I have wrongly placed on others.
Only you satisfy.
Amen.
Jonathan Puls, Associate Dean of Fine Arts & Communications
Jesus and the Samaritan Woman at the Well
Guercino
1640-41
Museum Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain
Oil on canvas
About the Artist & Art
Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1591 - 1666) was best known as Guercino – Italian for “squinter”—because of his crossed eyes. He was self-taught for the first part of his life, but later joined the Bolognese school. He was a painter during the Baroque period and completed 106 large-scale altarpieces for Italian churches, as well as over one hundred other paintings. Guercino’s works are characterized by their dramatic compositions and stark lighting, much like Caravaggio’s. He frequently depicted scenes from biblical and mythological stories. Jesus and the Samaritan Woman at the Well is typical of his classical style and coloring.
About the Music (Piece 1)
Jesus Met the Woman at the Well lyrics
Jesus met the woman at the well
And He told her everything she'd ever done.
He said, "Woman, woman, where is your husband?”
"I know everything you've ever done."
She said, "Jesus, Jesus, I ain't got no husband.”
"And you don’t know everything I've ever done."
He said, "Woman, woman, you've got five husbands”
"And the one you have now, he's not your own."
She said, "This man, this man, He must be a prophet.”
"He done told me everything I've ever done."
Jesus met the woman at the well
And He told her everything she'd ever done.
About the Musicians
Based in San Francisco, California, Chanticleer is a world-renowned male classical vocal ensemble. Over the past three decades, it has developed a major reputation for interpretations of Renaissance music, but the ensemble also performs a wide repertoire of jazz, gospel, and venturesome new music. Chanticleer is widely known as an "Orchestra of Voices.” The group was named for the "clear singing rooster" in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.
http://www.chanticleer.org/
About the Music (Piece 2)
Fill My Cup Lord lyrics
Fill my cup, I lift it up, Lord
Come and quench this thirsting in my soul.
Bread from Heaven, feed me 'til I want no more
Fill my cup, fill it up and make me whole.
About the Musician & Composer
CeCe Winans (b. 1964) is one of the best-selling female gospel artists of all time. She has won ten Grammys, twenty Dove Awards, and seven Stellar Awards. She has had five Certified Gold and one Certified Platinum albums. Fill My Cup is from her 1999 album Alabaster Box.
Richard E. Blanchard Sr. (1925-2004) wrote the hymn Fill My Cup. He was a deacon, elder and pastor, in the Methodist Church. Life was never easy for Blanchard. Throughout his life he suffered from lung problems, living with only one-third lung capacity for most of his adult life. But a diminished physical well-being did not stop him. In 1953, he became the pastor of a church in Coral Gables, Florida. One day while waiting for a counseling appointment to show up, Blanchard went to a nearby Sunday school room and sat down at the piano. He later said, “When I was not in the mood to be used of God, God was in a mood to use me.” In less than thirty-minutes, as he waited, God gave him the inspiring song Fill My Cup, Lord. As Blanchard looked back over his life, he declared, “Even though God chose in his providence to impair my physical being, he has in so many other ways ‘Fill’d My Cup.’”