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Readings for Today. Listen to our other podcasts.
The beginning of Ordinary Time is a good opportunity to think about what you can do to become more open to God. What new practice might you take on? How will you maximize ways to encounter God?
When ordinary is not ordinary
Today we begin ordinary time. And I think it’s always important to remind ourselves that the name ordinary time does not mean ordinary in the sense that we use it. If something is ordinary, it’s well, it’s common, it’s not terribly special, it’s not dramatic, it’s just ordinary.
It really comes from the Latin ordo, which is really about order. It’s about numbers. You may remember when you had math, however many years ago, that there were ordinal numbers. And that’s really all the ordinary time signifies is that it is a sequence of gospels. So we have the first Sunday and the second Sunday and so forth throughout the year.
The reality is that it is anything but ordinary. If we think of the purpose of the church year, it really is to sanctify time. The purpose of the liturgy is to sanctify space. So everything is about holiness in what we do. But I think like many things, we have to be intentional about what it means as we enter a new year.
We’re going to hear gospels that undoubtedly we’ve heard many times before. But can we hear them in a new way? We’re going to have many of the same things that we’ve done in previous years, but can we see them in a new way? There are going to be instances in our life where we do the same old things, but can we find God in them?
For that really is the purpose of the Christian life, to seek God. And to recognize that God says to us, see, I am doing something new. Now something new does not always mean something that we will really love and look forward to, because maybe the something new is a challenge that we’re being asked to take on.
Maybe the something new that God wants us to do is to learn how to deal with life when it doesn’t go our way. Maybe the something new is learning how to deal with the loss of a loved one, or someone who is sick with some kind of terminal illness, maybe even us. Whatever it is, we’re called to seek God. That’s what Jesus proclaims in the gospel.
He starts off the way he’ll spend much of his time on earth teaching. He tells people about God, and there’s something quite qualitatively different about what he says and how he speaks. People notice it right away. He speaks with authority, not like the scribes, not people who are just reciting from rote what they may have learned without really allowing it to touch their hearts and to come into their hearts.
That is really what we’re called to do too. As we seek out the presence of the Lord in this new year to find those ways in which we can allow what God wants us to know and who God wants us to be to go right to the depths of our hearts so that we will recognize a teaching with authority, a new teaching, something that is amazing, the Lord Jesus himself.
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