19 January 2025 #extraordinary

And so it begins: Ordinary Time. In the entire liturgical calendar, Ordinary Time takes up the bulk of the landscape; this year there are 34 weeks of day-to-day living with Jesus, listening in on the ordinary moments of his conversations or hearing the way he works and walks with people. Yet it’s not quite ordinary, is it? Jesus does these ordinary things, like going to a wedding celebration with his friends, and turns them into something extraordinary, like helping the bride and groom out with their we-have-no-wine catastrophe.

The curious thing here is that we know nothing about the bride and groom, only that it seems Jesus went to the wedding because his Mother Mary was there. The way that the story plays out, the bride and groom are not the center of attention, which is the exact opposite of almost every wedding I’ve ever been to. Extraordinary.

We also have this letter from Paul to the good people of Corinth. Remember that Corinth is a hotbed of do-what-pleases-you, a cosmopolitan city, wealthy and corrupt, decadent, and flagrantly immoral. The sanctuary of Aphrodite held more than a thousand courtesan slaves in order to fulfil the demands of temple prostitution. Modern-day Vegas holds nothing on ancient Corinth. Most of Paul’s letter here deals with the proper understanding of what love is, what it entails, and how to live it out. 

In our little snippet today, we get the gifts of the Holy Spirit… precisely so that we can see what it means to live our lives in the light of Love Incarnate. Extraordinary.

And Isaiah speaks tenderly to the hard-working and oppressed exiles, wooing them with whispers of the sweet and tender words of the Bridegroom: You are not desolate, you are Beautiful. You are not forsaken, you are Delightful. You are not forgotten, you are Beloved. Extraordinary.

So here we are in the second week of ordinary time, pondering some extraordinary thoughts. Isn’t that the way the Lord works though? We’re living out this ordinary grey-cloud life in mid-January… and yet there’s something extraordinary about it, yes? It’s the little things like telling a friend she’s Beautiful post-divorce or having a pint with a guy who didn’t get the promotion. It’s volunteering at the school over recess and talking to the kid on the outside looking in. It’s loving the spouse and kids even when it’s messy and hard. It’s an I’m-here-for-you-text to a new widow. Because all of those things are what love really is. It’s moving the center of attention from the ordinary-things-that-happen to the extraordinary-soul-in-front-of-you.

Jesus spent 30 years having the ordinary-time-of-his-life as a son and tradesman, living a life-well lived, using the gifts of the Holy Spirt, praying with His Father, and embracing whatever came his way. He turned an ordinary life into an extraordinary one, simply by changing the focus. You can too. 

#extraordinary