Friday of the Thirty-second Week in Ordinary Time

Today's Mass Readings

When I was about twelve years old, I remember that my sister and I really, really wanted a Nintendo set, the large console type that hooked up to the tv. It was the newest, coolest thing going at the time. So we worked hard to earn money to buy the Nintendo set, and when we bought it, we were quite pleased with ourselves. Of course, a year later when the new newest thing, the Nintendo Gameboy emerged on the scene, people saw it as even more awesome than the Nintendo set. The Nintendo set that my sister and I had worked so hard to earn was now “uncool” and a thing of the past – in only a year! It was the first of many times that I have been confronted with the fact that “progress”, especially in technology, has an expensive dark side. In today’s first reading, John writes a letter that makes clear that progress has a dark side for our spiritual well-being as well. He writes, “Many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh… Anyone who is so ‘progressive’as not to remain in the teaching of the Christ does not have God.”

John is writing about a supposedly progressive group of people in his day known as Docetists. They saw that the old view, that Jesus had come in the flesh and been born of the Virgin Mary, was uncool. The old view conjured up visions of the all-powerful, all-knowing God being born in the ordinary way, with groans , sweat and blood, and crying helplessly, as infants do, in an ordinary way. How could God, the most good, beautiful thing in the universe, deal in blood, sweat, and helplessness? The Docetists’ solution was to see that God only appeared to take on flesh. It also meant that humans should try as much as possible to escape their fleshiness to get closer to godliness.

John points out that the great saving grace for Christians is exactly that God should deign to take on our flesh, and all of the fleshly problems that we encounter in our ordinary lives. The extraordinary God becomes very ordinary (with a twist, of course – he is sinless). Loving each other, which is John’s exhortation in this passage, is something we do in the course of our ordinary activities, and is the TRUE way we become more like God.

How often do we want to escape the ordinariness of our days – the daily merry go round of waking, eating, dropping off kids at day care, going to work, coming home again, making dinner, paying bills, dropping off to sleep, only to start the whole process all over? Sometimes we want something cooler than that and maybe we hope God will step in and change that.

Yet, it is precisely in the ordinary that God meets us and makes our ordinary lives extraordinary. Today’s gospel reading suggests that when Jesus comes again, it will not be in the midst of extraordinary activities, but in the midst of daily “eating, drinking, buying,selling, planting, building.” God is not promising that he will encounter us only if we do extraordinary things, or only if we try to escape like the Docetists tried to do. God meets us where we are, in just our ordinary days. And that is good news, indeed, for then we know that God is always with us.

Let us take time today to reflect on how God is with us, in even the small and insignificant details of life. And let us take the time to offer thanksgiving for God’s presence in our lives.

Jana M. Bennett