Ordinary time. After the forty days of Lent and the fifty days of Easter we return to Ordinary Time. It is not ordinary in the sense of plain or humdrum. Ordinary in Church means “counted” time. (Our English term “ordinal numbers” has the same root.) In ordinary time we pick one book of the Bible and read it chapter by chapter. For the next several weeks the gospel will be taken from St. Matthew, beginning with the Sermon on the Mount. In that Sermon Jesus says, “I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.” The initial promise of God to make a people “peculiarly his own” is fulfilled in Jesus where all people of every nation are members of the people of God.
JUNE122019
By Church Staff