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Ordinary Time

As you well know, every year by way of our Sunday biblical readings and calendar of festivals we go back to re-experience the career of Jesus when he actually walked among us two thousand years ago. In Advent we place ourselves back among the Old Testament prophets who so eloquently expressed their longing for a Messiah. Then, of course, we relive the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, cringe over the massacre of the Holy Innocents and are relieved when Jesus and his parents return to Nazareth from their exile in Egypt. Then suddenly we behold the adult Jesus calling his first disciples (and us along with them), preaching his Sermon on the Mount, healing the sick, meeting opposition - and by the end of Lent we are horrified to behold his death but only later to share the joy of his followers over his resurrection - an event that guarantees our own victory over death. Finally we watch him depart this earth; we see the curtain come down on that extraordinary interval between Christmas and the Ascension, between December and May, when we were able to be in some way contemporaries of Christ.

But then comes June, July, August, September . . . that period your Missalettes call Ordinary Time - ordinary because now that Christ has ascended here we are back to business as usual, the heat of summer, the shortening days of autumn, the approach of winter. The heat and chill of Ordinary Time - symbolic of the long centuries that have passed since Christ's departure, centuries of let down, war, politics, treading water, of influences powerful enough to make of Jesus little more than a fading memory. Ordinary Time - the time reflected in the headlines and reruns on TV that aren't funny anymore. And so what does the Church do throughout the Sundays from May to next Advent? She fills the Lectionary with biblical passages geared to prevent the erosion of our Christian values, to help us remain, despite the pressure of ordinary time, morally and humanely extraordinary people!

With this in mind let's just scan some of the Lectionary selections of recent weeks. Back on August 8th the readings recall Jesus saying (in effect): "Don't be afraid, little flock. Keep the lamp of your faith lit no matter how dark the times may be or how long you have to wait, for I will come again - to sit down at table with you and even wait on you - indeed even as soon as during this very Sunday's Eucharist under the guise of bread and wine." And then on August 22nd, instead of our sitting around brooding over how few of us there may be left in such difficult times, the Lectionary readings insist we think positively - about the inevitable spread of the faith from "Tarshish to the distant coastlands" - about people coming from the east and west, north and south to recline someday at table with our seeming few.

And so it goes: readings that remind us not to let ambition infect our virtue nor let the Church become a "closed shop" but a community humble enough to keep its doors open to the poor, crippled, lame and blind - a community where demographics carry no weight; readings that remind us that generosity can keep us extraordinary even in ordinary times; readings that counsel us not to be judgmental, not expel the imperfect but to mercifully go looking for that lost sheep, that lost coin (not to be taken literally of course), that prodigal son. And finally readings like those of today that would inoculate us against the greed of the times; the seductions of wealth.

In a word all these Sundays from May to December should be heard as admonitions designed to get us through the down time of history; indeed to change the tone of history by our own adherence to the biblical counsel of the Holy Spirit - so that perhaps at long last in our own times history may rise from being the same old story and Ordinary Time may become Extraordinary indeed!

-- Geoff Wood