[Pearls Ep 154: Preparing for Sunday.]
This Sunday’s Gospel reading brings us John the Baptist seeing Jesus come toward him and declaring, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.”
We are also now back into “Ordinary Time.”
In this week’s Pearls of the Interior Life, we set our sights on Sunday’s Gospel reading, as always, but we especially focus on Ordinary Time – what it means, and how to make the most of it.
It turns out that Sunday’s Gospel reading is a marvelous entre to ordinary time.
The early biblical commentators made careful note that John says Jesus takes away the SIN of the world – singular, not plural. And they are essentially unanimous (Augustine, Gregory the Great, John Chrysostom, etc) that sin is singular because John is referring to original sin. Yes, Jesus can forgive and heal our individual sins (particularly through the Sacrament of reconciliation), but the key is that He went right to the heart of the matter and healed humanities core wound – original sin.
St. John Chrysostom makes this more personal. He notes that a few verses prior in John’s Gospel it is written, “He came to what was His own, but His own people did not accept Him.” Chrysostom notes this is referring to more than just the Jews, but it is “the shame of our common nature, that the world which was made by Him, knew not its Maker.”
That is original sin in action. Because of humanity’s core wound, we don’t even recognize our Creator when He’s standing right in front of us.
Have you ever had someone not recognize you? It stings. I (Steve) recall being at our wedding reception and an elderly man came over and started having a nice chat with me. We talked for a few minutes. I didn’t know him, and eventually asked how he was connected to Karen; friend or relative? At which point his face fell, and he told me he was my Uncle George.
You see, my family had a rift a couple generations back, and one side stopped speaking to the other. Fortunately, we’ve been mending fences, but it’s been a slow process and I hadn’t seen my Uncle George in decades, to the point that I didn’t even recognize him at our wedding.
It’s infinitely more sad that humanity doesn’t recognize its own Maker. Chrysostom goes on to discuss that is part of why Christ became one of us – to become recognizable – so that we can (hopefully) freely choose to follow Him and then, as the Lamb of God, He becomes our salvation.
It’s not a stretch to say that those few passages from the opening chapter of John encapsulate the entire Gospel – the Divine becoming man, so that we could be taken up, into the divine.
But there’s so much to take in and savor in the entirety of the Gospel.
Ordinary Time is the opportunity to do just that. And that’s what we look at in this week’s video and follow-up messages – three specific ways to make the most of Ordinary Time.
Blessings on your journey with Christ –
Steve and Karen Smith
Interior Life