A Homily for the 3rd Sunday of Lent 2026
We all have been framed! No, that isn’t the start of a homily that’s gonna take a deep dive down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories. It’s simply a fact: We’ve all been framed. Framed by boundaries like heavy wood around a precious piece of art. Framed by narratives that are sometimes true and sometimes not.
Some frames hold us in place for a season and a reason. Perhaps we needed to learn, we needed to grow deeper roots, we needed to stand still long enough to undergo the work of God. But too often we’ve been framed or set-up by boundaries and narratives that have reduced us, belittled us, distorted us by whispering the same lie into our ears and the ears of our hearts: “Be anything just don’t be the person God created you to be!” And we’ve been sold the storyline that a Good life is when you can look back and see just how immaculately you stayed in your frame. But a Holy life is when you can look back and see a trail of broken frames for every time you bucked the lies and chose to become more fully who you are in God’s eyes!
Jesus says to the Woman of Samaria: “If you knew the gift of God…” Isn’t that the question God whispers into our ears and the ears of our hearts every day: “Do you know the gift of God? Do you know the gift of God you are? Are you willing to live from that gift rather than a lie? Are you willing to break the frame that constrains this piece of art, the frame of the narrative that dominates, domineers, and distorts your life?”
The Samaritan Woman had been firmly framed by shame. She can’t fetch water at the usual time when other women do. She’s been educated to believe all she has is her bucket and all she deserves is what she can fit in that bucket… so the bucket becomes the center of a never-really-satisfying, always-falling-short kind of existence. The bucket drives her life, which is a life reduced to survival, dependence on externals, and not the abundance for which she was created.
And was she perhaps complicit in holding the shame-frame in place? Sure! But when that’s all you know, and the frame keeps being tightened by the people and the culture around you, you learn to make do… you learn to convince yourself of just why you deserve shame, so you behave in ways that result in shame. And the cycle goes merrily on and on. Crushing souls under its relentless circulation.
But then there is the gaze of Christ… not so much his words in this encounter, but the way he sees her. The way he sees her nudges awake in her the frightening reality that she just might be more than the frame that constrains her. The dominating/domineering narrative that holds her bound. She too deserves to be fully alive!
When her encounter with Christ concludes, when the water of life, once reduced to a limited, external bucket is again something abundant within her… welling up from within her… welling up in an ever-lasting fashion… the bucket of “just-getting-by,” “just-making-do” is utterly abandoned as she breaks the frame of that dominant-domineering narrative and literally (or literarily) runs off the page of the story to the margins of the text, to the periphery of greatest need, and proclaims the kind of Good News only those freshly liberated from shame can proclaim. And (don’t miss this!) she proclaims that Good News of Abundant Life to the very people who shamed her… the community that framed her! She has utterly no interest in confining others to the same kind of domineering narrative frame in which she suffered.
Breaking the frame always means not just breaking my particular frame, but refusing to engage in the art of frame-making itself; the urge to frame others. There’s no point in breaking your frame if you are only intent on framing someone else! People who break the frame preach Good News to shamed and shamers alike, oppressed and oppressors alike… otherwise there really is no good reason to break the frame at all. The current state of the world would indicate we’ve still got a lot to learn from the Samaritan Woman!
And interestingly enough the Samaritan Woman is one among a number of women for whom Christ’s Gaze breaks the limiting frame. Think of Mary, the Mother of God, her “Yes” breaks the frame, it breaks open the world so God can become flesh! Think of Martha, standing before her brother’s tomb, her brother now 4-days dead, and says to Jesus: “Even now I believe!” She breaks the frame of what is possible, jars loose the life that does not know death. Or think of Mary Magdalene, standing outside the empty tomb of Christ (Funny, how we find this women occupying impossible spaces!). She hears her name, as only Jesus can speak her name, and the final, most dominant and domineering frame falls… the frame of death! She too then runs off the page of that narrative to the disciples to become the Apostle to the Apostles, the first to proclaim: Death is no more! Resurrection has come!
This Lent, Christ holds us in his gaze, whispers into our ears: “Do you know the gift of God?” How will we respond?
Chiaroscuro Spirituality 