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Saint Photina (or Photini, it comes to us both ways) is someone you almost certainly know, but whose name you probably didn’t. She’s the Samaritan woman Jesus meets at Jacob’s Well. In the Christian East she has a storied legacy and is called “Equal to the Apostles.” But for the most part here in the Christian West, she is reduced to her gender, her outsider status, and her supposed sin.
March is International Women’s Month, so this is a good moment for us to revisit St. Photina. Her proper name means “The Illumined One.” If that sounds familiar, it's because it’s so closely related to our word for a particle of light, “photon.”
It should not surprise us then that St. Photina shines light on the ways women deserve better.
Women in the ancient world were rarely, if ever, treated as equal to men. Women were regularly denied legal, social, and educational standing. If we are honest, we recognize that the modern world's improvement is incremental. It’s a sad situation, and it’s one that Jesus refused. If we say we follow him, we must do the same.
St. Photina, being a double outsider – a Samaritan and a woman – also shines light on how ready many of us are to dismiss “those people.” Jesus was a Galilean, which, according to Judeans, was not exactly a distinguished pedigree (John 1:46). Galileans might have been cousins Jerusalem tolerated. But Samaritans? Absolutely not.
Jesus teaches us clearly that we are not to judge (Matt 7:1) unless we’re prepared to be judged by the same measure. So when we hear his words, “You have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband,” any judgment we feel says more about us than her.
In antiquity, a woman who was not identified by her relation to a man needed enough wealth or status to protect herself. Anyone else, like St. Photina, was at the mercy of her circumstance.
As Christians, we pray that we’re outgrowing the impulse to shame women. Especially divorced women, and especially women who must make difficult decisions when the world is happy to abandon the vulnerable. But there’s still work to be done. We’re also still working on seeing our “enemies” as members of a family relationship in need of healing, much like the difficulty between the Samaritans and the Judeans.
St. Photina experienced immediate transformation when Jesus offered her living water. Yet in the Christian West, her memory is still in need of “redemption.” Like Mary Magdalene, with whom she shares a long history of misunderstanding, she was not “a woman with a past.” She was an evangelist, bringing any who would listen to meet Jesus.
Blessed Photina, pray for us.
Wishing you peace,
Gregory Peebles, Director of Ministry
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