Today after Mass, we took down the Christmas decorations and banners, replacing them with Ordinary Time’s green. Ordinary Time doesn’t mean “ordinary” (bland, stagnant, boring) in the sense of the modern word; it has its roots in the word ordinal. Ordinal numbers are numbers that designate the place of a thing in a series or sequence. The church orders time to remind us that it is leading to something. We count down the time to Easter, not just Easter the season, but the Easter at the end of our own lives with its hope of resurrection.
Today’s first reading, though, reminds us that it too speaks of time between Christmas and Easter, the time we know very little about when it comes to the Scriptural record of our savior and God, Jesus Christ. “As he passed by the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting their nets into the sea.” Here we see such a mundane thing. Jesus is just walking along and sees two men working. How many times had Simon and Andrew done just that? Casting the nets, pulling them in. How many days of our own have been lost and forgotten through simple repetition. We get up. We work. We sleep. We repeat.
All too often, our lives seem dull, ordinary. Sometimes it’s like we are just living for vacation or for that singular moment when something sparks our interest or emotions. These moments are anything but ordinary, though. They are moments in which we can encounter God in this vast universe, coming to meet us right here in the mess of where and who we are. The only thing making them dull and bland is our attitude or lack of gratitude, and often our lack of perception. We get so into the grind that we fail to see Jesus just walking by, to notice God winking at us through the situations around us, calling out, “Come after me.”
Because it’s not just the weeks of our calendar that God has ordered toward the gift of eternal life on the other side of Easter, it’s the very universe itself. Every atom, every particle, every beat of our hearts are by design. He is calling out to us through the very fabric of time and space. We need to take a moment, to pause and breathe in deeply, and then drop the nets of our own baggage and complacency and follow Him.
Monday of the First Week in Ordinary Time: January 11th, 2021