We usually associate the "wearin of the green" with St. Patrick's day but as we begin this new liturgical season called Ordinary Time, that is what indeed the priest will do. It's time to don the green colored vestments again until we return to the purple hues for the season of Lent, beginning this year with Ash Wednesday on February 17th. While purple symbolizes penitence during Lent during Ordinary Time, green represents life. Yet, it is not life as we know it in nature whose predominant color seems to be green (God's favorite color?) we recall our life in Jesus Christ and the formation of a Gospel centered life.
Although we call these weeks from the Baptism of the Lord until the Lent and Easter season and then afterwards until Advent in late November "Ordinary" we may question, "Has anything been "ordinary" this past year?" I suppose that depends more on whether we call the major disruption to our lives in 2020 a move away from the ordinary or at least the normal rhythm of our lives.
We can certainly say that everything from the virus to the Church restrictions to the political battles, the hurricanes in the south and wild fires in the west to the economic and educational controversies everywhere and let's not get started on the value of "lockdowns" and all the shocking violence we've seen have brutally disrupted the seemingly more predictable flow of our daily lives.
Yet, the move to the familiar "Ordinary" time in our liturgical year is more of an ordered sequence of the unfolding of the public life, teachings, works of wonder, and challenging Christian morality of the Gospel of Christ. We have come to see this babe of Bethlehem is indeed the chosen, the anointed one (Messiah) of God who dwells among us in and through his Church and that now during this ordered time of year, until Lent/Easter season, presents to us the teachings, the miracle stories, the call of the disciples and the public ministry of Jesus. It is meant to call us to a deeper discipleship that finds no place in our lives for expressions of violence and vengeance and hate speech or racism or division that seem to have such a presence at this time.
Jesus came to heal a broken and brutal world. To gather to himself the lost, the rejected, the poor, those on the fringe but to also bring right justice in a more ordered world whose center is God himself. That our lives may be more centered correctly towards higher spiritual and moral values around the person of Jesus the Christ as Good Shepherd, King, Servant of God. He was baptized in the Jordan not because of any personal sin on his part but because of ours. That we might be washed clean of the guilt of original sin and receive the hope of forgiveness and eternal life. So we learn more reflectively what it means to be a disciple of Jesus living today as we ponder all we hear Sunday after Sunday, as the center of our week, throughout the liturgical year and especially in this more ordered time which calls us to live our Christian lives in an extraordinary manner.
So as we journey through these weeks and the year ahead we need to be a light of reason and balance to those around us. Our lives lived with God at the center and according to Biblical morals creates a community guided by love. As you hear the Sunday readings, take them more seriously this year to make what may seem ordinary become a force for conversion and hope.
May 2021 be that year of hope and healing.
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