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January 15, 2023: Ordinary Time
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I ran into a parishioner from a former Parish recently who asked me, again, “Why does the Church call it Ordinary Time? I don’t get it. What’s so ordinary about it?” I believe I’ve provided him the answer once or twice over the years, but he seems to have an issue with remembrance, or he doesn’t like the answer. Either way, he’s still a good guy. If he wasn’t, I would be commanded by Jesus to forgive him, which, of course, I would do in my heart, understanding human weakness touches all of us.
Upon leaving the Season of Christmas this past week, which proceeded from the Season of Advent and the new Church year that began in late November, we have now entered what the Church calls Ordinary Time. Ordinary Time is any time in the Church outside of the noted seasons celebrated every year in the Church’s cycle. The noted seasons outside of Ordinary Time are Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Easter. Every week outside of these four special times in the Church calendar is called Ordinary Time in the sense that our Sunday and weekday celebrations of the liturgy take place before or after these seasons are celebrated. Ordinary Time is not ordinary in the sense that we all of a sudden have a ho-hum, laissez faire, average attitude and approach to the celebration of our liturgies. The term Ordinary Time simply denotes the time outside of the special religious seasons noted above. What is not so ordinary about Ordinary Time, and what makes it not so ordinary, is the celebration of our Lord’s victorious resurrection from the dead every Sunday of the year, both Ordinary Time and the other religious seasons we celebrate. So, unless you happen to consider Jesus’ walk out of his tomb on the first Easter Sunday morning almost 2000 years ago after being dead for three days as an ordinary event, then every Sunday, Ordinary Time or otherwise, is anything but ordinary. There you have it, the expanded version and explanation of what Ordinary Time is in the Church of Jesus Christ.
I noticed what we also begin this week in the Sunday liturgy is St. Paul’s 1st Letter to the Corinthians. This epistle written in Paul’s hand begins the New Testament readings of Ordinary Time for the Cycle A year (our 2nd reading), which began at the start of the new Church year. This epistle by St. Paul to a community in crisis is a treasure for the Church. There’s a part of me that wants to say thank you to the Corinthians for being so crazy, spiteful, hateful, arrogant, and unloving toward one another almost 2000 years ago. By doing so, their ugly actions produced this incredible treatise on Christian theology and behavior. I suppose it would have been better in the eyes of God if they all just got along swimmingly, adhering to what Paul taught them. But they did not.
As the letter progresses over the next number of weeks in Ordinary Time, we’ll learn how this unordinary community of Christian believers in Corinth, baptized in the Lord Jesus and preached to personally by St. Paul, end up going back to their old ways of pagan worship and unholy behavior. Sound familiar? It should, because parts of our American culture are doing the same. If this is what “progress” looks like, such as telling boys they can be a girl, and vice versa, then I much prefer regress or the status quo before all this intentional confusion was heaped upon innocent children. If St. Paul was alive today, he would be writing a letter to Christians in America and elsewhere addressing such issues with forceful truth, causing some folks to hate him, but teaching God’s truth and God’s ways nonetheless. When the Corinthians heard this first letter to their faith community read to them, it’s an easy guess to say that most of them were taken aback by what St. Paul wrote, and how he wrote it. There are rumblings in the Church begging our Holy Father Pope Francis to write an encyclical/letter on this present-day issue of gender and the immense confusion it is causing. It is sorely needed.
What we have this week from the one affectionately known by the Church Fathers as The Apostle is a short set of three verses that begins his letter to the Christian community at Corinth. Upon hearing these verses proclaimed by each respective Lector this week, we may consider them to be, well, ordinary verses for those who see Ordinary Time as simply ordinary, which it is not. And neither are these short verses by The Apostle. What we have this Sunday is St. Paul’s greeting to the Corinthians, thus, his greeting to us in the year 2023. He first identifies his apostleship as not of his own fruition or power, but one who is called personally by Christ Jesus. In other words, Paul possesses the proper authority – the One and only authority – for what he is about to write to a community of Christians gone wild, informing his Christian brothers and sisters that he writes not his own thoughts and ideas, but those of Christ Jesus through the presence of the Holy Spirit. Thus, what he writes is expressed in the deepest form of truth; that of God.
If a person writes or speaks to us some advice on some issue, we may consider it, then accept it wholly or partially, or reject it altogether. We may consider the expertise of the one offering advice, where their heart happens to be in the matter, and are they offering some words for our eventual good, or do they simply enjoy telling us what to do. Such people do exist. What we have in St. Paul’s 1st Letter to the Corinthians is not his personal advice on matters of Christian belief, living, and behavior. The same holds true for each of his 13 epistles. What we have rather is Divine Revelation in and through the heart and mind of God’s chosen Apostle, St. Paul. Thus, his authority and what he writes is not of his own opinion, but is born of the mind of God through words meant to affect the Corinthians and how they live the Christian faith they have been baptized into. In other words, what we now know in 2023 as the New Testament is not advice offered by a few writers back then, hoping to lead us in the ways of God. What St. Paul writes goes far beyond human advice for Christian living, offering us the option to reject it. We can certainly do so, but at the peril of rejecting the teachings of God given through God’s authority granted to Paul and the other Apostles. What Paul writes is God’s truth, and God’s truth is unchangeable. God’s truth does not change from one culture or generation to another. It holds true forever.
Paul establishes his apostleship in Christ Jesus by the will of God in his first words in 1st Corinthians because he knows his subjects well, knowing that they are a hard bunch. They are worse than the Simpsons. Lawrence Welk they are not. Dirty Harry with loaded guns would better define the Corinthians. Yet, Paul loves this community he founded in the name of Christ Jesus. He spent much time with them, teaching and preaching to them the holy ways of life grounded in the Lord Jesus. He will not give up on them as they twist and turn what he preached into Swiss cheese or a tossed salad, mixing in the worst of their former pagan ways with the holiness and sanity of now being Christian. These two ways cannot justifiably mix at any time. We can either choose the ways of Christ, or reject the ways of Christ, but mixing together knowing Christ and not knowing Christ is a way of living that says the Sacrament of Reconciliation is necessary. This sort of mixing is better known as lukewarm faith. To mix together holiness and what is unholy, which is a prominent, present lifestyle for far too many Catholics, is to misrepresent Christ Jesus by miles. Not only have I heard such foolishness on TV and radio, but this way of “being Christian” is lived openly through other denominations who profess to be Christian, watering down the words of St. Paul and other New Testament writers in attempting to justify cultural lifestyles that, in truth, are abhorrent to the living God. This is what Paul faces and addresses in his first letter to the rebellious, wayward Corinthians. Holiness is floundering in their community, and their former pagan ways have returned. As they say prior to a hungry lion and a hungry bear confronting each other over the same source of food before them, “This is gonna get ugly.” Yes, in this epistle, St. Paul writes the ugly truth, something human beings still have a hard time accepting to this day.
Yet, before the Apostle writes words that will sting his brothers and sisters in Christ, doing so for pastoral reasons, calling them back to holiness, he finishes these apparent ordinary three verses with holy words of intercession in the most uplifting way; “Grace to you and peace from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” This does not sound like an Apostle without hope and good will. Just the opposite. He desires God’s grace and peace to be theirs, a sign of his love for the Corinthians. Even as they go south in their faith, Paul has nothing but love and concern in his heart for them. This is precisely why he will be so truthful and honest with them as the epistle moves on, because they deserve to hear God’s truth, the commands of the Lord Jesus, and not affirm what they’ve created in their personal lifestyles of unholiness and profanation.
It takes the greatest spiritual maturity for any individual or group of dissenters to return to what God has taught us through those He called to the highest positions of authority, such as that of St. Paul. But Paul comes from a position of love and truth, and a mindset of the Divine. May we remember this as we hear proclaimed in the upcoming Sundays of Ordinary Time some not-so-ordinary hard words from a loving Apostle to a group of believers, a group of brothers and sisters, whom he calls back to holiness and Christian love as one people in the Lord Jesus Christ.