Christ was “flirting”: strange language at Leo XIV’s meeting on Amoris laetitia.
At the Vatican event marking 10 years of Amoris Laetitia, Sr. Helen Alford, O.P., presented a fellow Dominican’s reading of Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman: “In a somewhat provocative way, but I think it is a useful provocation, he calls the first stage ‘flirt.’”
“A conversation between a woman and a man who are both alone.”
As Jesus gradually transforms the conversation, Alford says “the ambiguity persists.” Later, after Christ confronts the woman about her five husbands and the man she is currently with, Sr. Alford says she realizes: “This man is not just flirting.”