Immortal Longings in Sermone Humili: A Study of John 4.5–26

From those high fountains where now she drinks her fill of the waters of life the woman of Samaria may permit herself a wry smile at the curiously contorted ways in which some of her modern commentators re-tell her story. It is not that they take the incident at Jacob's well too seriously. In a way they do not take it seriously enough. Those few minutes of conversation by the well-side were for her the beginning of the new and abundant life which she now lives to all eternity — and nothing could be more serious and important than that. No, it is rather that the conversation is given the wrong sort of seriousness. It is invested with an earnest solemnity of which the event itself was entirely free. I fear she hardly recognises herself in the pasteboard caricature which is held up to our inspection by over-earnest, perhaps overlearned, exegetes.