Friday of the First Week in Ordinary Time
Todeay's Mass Readings
I find it difficult this time of year to quite transition into “Ordinary Time.” January feels like a time when the pace is stepped up – I have new obligations at work, in addition to finishing cleaning up from the holiday, paying bills, beginning to think about taxes (!) and constantly dealing with the snow, ice and cold that comes to us this time of year. Oh, and what about New Year’s Resolutions? There are even the new obligations I have placed on myself: get finances in order, lose weight, exercise more, et cetera. I guess even a week after the holidays have officially ended, I find myself still yearning for some vestige of Christmas – some hint of the joy and warmth of the season, or at least my fantasies of what the season could have been. I think of hot chocolate, fireplaces, relaxing with family and friends, while ignoring the howling cold winds outside.
Today’s readings allow me to indulge those sensations a bit, though this will likely not seem obvious to readers at first. The Letter to the Hebrews (Hebrews 4:1-5, 11) speaks of rest – surely an important reminder in the midst of January busy-ness. But the author means a particular kind of rest, and listening to this reading should cause us to wonder, “What is this rest? What does it mean to rest in God?”
It turns out that, paradoxically, God’s rest requires “striving”. It requires living a particular kind of life so that only those who believe in the Good News and who obey the Good News will enter God’s rest. This may not seem much like rest. In fact, it may seem much like one more thing to do. But in fact, the author suggests further that our rest depends on our following our ancestors in the faith – following the words and actions that they too had. Today’s psalm (78:3 and 4bc, 6c-7, 8) continues on the same theme by admonishing us not to forget the works of the Lord, what our ancestors have known before us.
How exactly is this rest? Perhaps especially in January, at this time when we are trying to live better in this New Year, the scriptures today remind us that we do not need to “remake” our entire world. In fact, we shouldn’t. What we need to do is hold fast to the words that God has been speaking for millennia to people in many times and places. We need to return to the tried-and-true things of our faith: prayer, reading scripture, behaving well toward people, admitting when we have done wrong and trying to fix those wrongs.
God remakes our world for us. God leads us. Prayer, confession and all of those things give us new opportunities to live our lives, even though they are the “old ways”. Today’s gospel (Mark 2:1-12) depicts this point in one of my favorite stories about Jesus, where he heals a paralyzed man. Note that in this story Jesus implies that the miracle is NOT that the man can walk – though that is what the crowd thinks. No, Jesus implies that the real miracle is forgiving sins. What is easier? It is a trick question - forgiving sins is infinitely the more difficult of the two because it is very much more difficult to heal what is not seen. After all, note that in our modern medicine, we have figured out all sorts of ways to give people mobility, but we still cannot heal hearts weighted down with recrimination and guilt.
God’s way leads us on. It reminds me of one of my favorite Christmas carols, “Once in Royal David’s City.” One of the lines says, “And he leads his children on / to the place where he is gone.”
- Jana Bennett