Is Ordinary Time Boring?: Second Sunday Ordinary Time, B, 2012

Click here for audio homily. Merry Sunday of the second week of Ordinary Time! Why are there so many people who come to celebrate Christmas but so few to celebrate the Sunday of the second week in Ordinary Time. Is it because the ordinary is drab, boring, and dull? Actually, we really should not call it Ordinary Time. It is really ordinal time. If you remember your math class, one, two, three, etc. are cardinal numbers; first, second, third, etc are ordinal numbers because they order things in sequence. But Ordinary time is anything but ordinary. I remember walking into the sacristy one day and asking the priest, “Are we doing anything special, today?” He responded, “We’re celebrating Mass.” If we really understand what happens at Mass we could never say Mass is boring again. In the Book of Revelation, John tells us “I, John, saw a new heaven and a new earth. The former heaven and the former earth had passed away... I also saw the holy city, a new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven.” This is what happens at Mass. The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is nothing less than Heaven come down to earth. In a few moments, I will take ordinary bread and wine, and because of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, I will say those words of consecration, “This is My Body”, “This is the chalice of My Blood,” and by the power of the Holy Spirit, the bread and wine will cease to exist and in its place will be the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ, true God and true man. There is nothing ordinary about that. So why are there so few people here? Why if we can receive the Almighty and Eternal God into our very being through Holy Communion are there not more people here today? Bl. Pope John Paul the Great lamented that “Stripped of its sacrificial meaning , [the Mass] is celebrated as if it were simply a fraternal banquet… How can we not express profound grief at all this? The Eucharist is to great a gift to tolerate ambiguity and depreciation.” Therefore, according to Bl. Pope John Paul, we must get away from the idea that Mass is a “fraternal banquet” and recover the more ancient theology that “the Mass makes present the sacrifice of the Cross; it does not add to that sacrifice nor does it multiply it.” We have forgotten the purpose of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. If we do not fulfill our purpose in life, our life is like an unsharpened pencil. It has no point. What do you do with something that has lost its purpose? You throw it away, or you put it in a drawer somewhere and bring it out once in while to look at it but it has no real impact on your life. There will not be an increase in Mass attendance or vocations to the priesthood, until priests are willing to sacrifice everything for the sake of the kingdom. As a career, the priesthood does not have much to recommend it. You can’t live where you want, or with whom you want, you can’t get married, you don’t get paid much, and people are always complaining. If, however, we could recapture the priesthood as the fight against the evil one, if we could recapture the theology of the Mass as the sacrifice of Calvary made present at the altar, if we could recapture the idea the we are all going to die and face judgment, then we could return to the Church as the vibrant force in the world. We have also forgotten the purpose of sexuality and of the complimentary nature of male and female; and we have lost the understanding of what it means to be a woman or a man. Men need a challenge, men need to conquer, men need to sacrifice themselves for a greater cause. We have, of late, denuded the Church of sacrifice, conquering evil, and the ultimate end of life. In the last forty years or so we have replaced sacrifice with a “feel good, no fault, you’re OK I’m OK” mush that does not succede in any other field of life and yet, we expect it to work in the Church. St. Paul says, (1Corinthians 9:27) “Every athlete exercises discipline in every way. They do it to win a perishable crown, but we an imperishable one. Thus, I do not run aimlessly; I do not fight as if I were shadowboxing. No, I drive my body and train it, for fear that, after having preached to others, I myself should be disqualified.” Today, we would say, “non pain, no gain.” What would happen if the military boot camp instructor went easy on the recruits before they were sent off to war? If the drill instructor said, “There is going to be a fifty-mile hike with full pack starting at 6 am, and you’re invited.” What would happen? How long would they stay alive in the field of battle? In the same vein, we are in a battle with the devil, he will use every trick in the book to get us to loose our souls. It is the job of the priest to be our boot camp instructor and prepare us for the fight with the devil. The reason why we can’t attract men to the priesthood is because those who would enter seminary, see nothing manly in it. John the Baptist calls Jesus, “the Lamb of God.” Jesus is the Lamb of God because by shedding His Blood and sacrificing His life on the Cross, He fulfilled the Passover promise to save God’s people. Jesus did not just save us from slavery but also from sin. This is what we celebrate every time we celebrate Mass. This is what the priest is called to do. The priest is called to act “in the person of Christ” and in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass make present for us that one definitive sacrifice of Christ on Calvary, a sacrifice which cannot be repeated but that at same sacrifice is made present to us at every celebration of the Mass. If we want to rise from the dead, if we want to be free from the slavery of sin, we must eat the flesh of the Lamb of God but only if we are spiritually prepared. For even the Jews were told how to prepare themselves to eat the Passover lamb. This is why before receiving Holy Communion, the priest says, “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, Happy are those called to the supper of the Lamb.”