The Samaritans in South Africa

I found this post from Khanya poignant (links added are my own):

Yesterday was the 5th Sunday of Pascha, the Sunday of the Samaritan Woman.

It was a most appropriate occasion for teaching about the evil of xenophobia, such as we have been seeing in South Africa recently.


For the Jews, the Samaritan Woman was a foreigner, a lekwerekwere, and in the Gospel Reading (John 4:5-42) we are told that the Jews had no dealings with the Samaritans. The Samaritan Woman was amazed that Jesus, a Jew, would talk to her. At that time Jews from Galilee, like Jesus and his disciples, would often make a long detour via the Jordan valley when traveling to Jerusalem for festivals, to avoid having to pass through Samaria. But on this occasion Jesus took the direct route, and his encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well was a result.

In the Church, however, we are often part of the problem instead of part of the solution. Twenty years ago, when the first non-Greek priest was ordained by the Archbishop of Johannesburg and Pretoria at the Church pf Pantanassa in Melrose, Johannesburg, Greeks from other parishes came to the church to protest against the ordination of this xenos, and some of them yelled “Anaxios” (He is unworthy), and there were fisticuffs in the church, which was reported in the following week’s Sunday Times.

We’ve come a long way since then, and many people of different ethnic groups have been ordained. But the Samaritan Woman, whose name is not mentioned in St John’s Gospel, is given the name of Photini, the Enlightener. The light of Christ is to be spread to every ethnic group, and ethnic sanctuaries, like Mount Zion in Jerusalem or Mount Gerizim in Samaria are no longer important. To worship God in spirit and in truth we do not need to belong to any ethnic group.

So yesterday, at our service in the humble classroom in Mamelodi East, with crumbling concrete floor and flaking plaster on the walls, we remembered the makwerekwere like St Photina who remind us that Christ was a light to enlighten the Gentiles, the ethni, the nations, all nations.