“Ordinary” is not a very exciting word. It evokes the routine, the uncreative, the typical, or even the bland and boring. So when the liturgical cycle of the Church deposits us once again in “Ordinary Time,” our interest is hardly piqued. Yet a closer look at these terms put in tandem invites a reevaluation, a reconsideration which intersects illuminatively with the Gospel passage which propels us into this apparently uninteresting season. 

Though the “ordinary” may not be what many of us would ordinarily find attractive or highly desirable, its root word possesses a more potent draw – ordo, which refers to an ordered arrangement, as on the row of threads in a loom.  And this weaving of things harmoniously and creatively together is a critical human focus, whether it be on a small or large scale; while the avoidance of the opposite, chaos and disorder, is a perpetual concern.  

Yet the ordered arrangements we participate in, strive to produce, and try to preserve are constantly imperiled, beset by forces both internal and external that destabilize and disintegrate. Time often seems the most looming of these foes of order, personified terrifyingly in the myths of the Ancient Greek world as Chronos, a father-god figure who devours his own children. Thus the processes upon which we ourselves depend unfold in time, but they also unravel with time; and even our most sophisticated efforts at measuring and maximizing temporal movement cannot completely overcome decay and the attendant threat of annihilation. 

In the discouraging shadow thrown by this chronic time, the Greeks of antiquity retained another sense of time, signified by the term kairos – which is used with considerably greater frequency by the New Testament authors. There it denotes the moment for God’s action, a deep readiness often hidden to human eyes yet yearned for by those eager for salvation, who listen and look for its arrival, carrying an abiding “when?” within their hearts.     

John the Baptist was engaging with this question when Jesus rather suddenly showed up in front of him. Thus the Gospel for the initial Sunday of Ordinary Time describes a man struck with awe and excitement, for whom time has become suffused with sacred, salvific significance. The meaningless and the mundane have been dramatically displaced; for the Christos, the anointed one who culminates and carries out the Divine plan, is now present in person: “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world. He is the one of whom I said, ‘a man is coming after me who ranks before me because he existed before me.’ ” These words of amazement give expression to the envelopment in the Trinity which enfolds us through the Incarnation: now we begin to see that what is behind and in front of us is not the purposeless unfolding of an impersonal process, but the embrace of the infinitely personal love of the Father, Son, and Spirit.

Hence the graces of the Paschal Mystery are in no way less available during the duration of the liturgical year the Church designates as “ordinary.” Jesus does not make himself scarce or step away, and his desire to share life with us never dims: he is the form of the faithfulness of God, and his promise to “be with you always, until the end of the age” carries greater certainty than the rising and setting of the sun or the motions of the most sensitive atomic clock. In the Christos, chronos serves kairos, whatever the season or the scene, as all-time is now irreversibly ordered around the regenerating purposes of Perfect Love.  

–Reflection by Brother Andrew