Third Sunday of Lent – Sr. Magdalen Lawler, SNDdeN March 8, 2026 John 4: 5-42 And there were many other women there… Mark 15.41 This phrase from Mark’s Gospel has always struck me as being very powerful in our Notre Dame tradition. It seems not only to summarise Julie’s experience in her vision at Compiegne, where she saw us, as ‘many other women’ gathered around the Cross of Jesus, but, as we know, it refers to all the women who ‘followed him, looked after him when he was in Galilee, and came up to Jerusalem with him’. according to Mark’s narrative of the Passion. Mark, 15. 41 Among those women we know the names of some, but others are unknown to us. One of those might have been the Samaritan woman whom Jesus met at Jacob’s well, in modern day Nablus, on the West Bank of the Jordan in Palestine/Israel. Jewish, Samaritan, Christian and Muslim traditions all associate the well with the patriarch, Jacob. The Eastern churches name this woman, and celebrate her feast day. They call her Photine, ‘the enlightened one’. Her name derives from the Greek word for light and many young girls are still given her name. […]