Dear Parishioners:
The Christmas season is now over and, surprisingly, the Lenten season is almost upon us. Easter is very early this year (April 5th) so that means Ash Wednesday (February 18th) and Lent are very early this year as well. However, for a very brief period, we enter into “ordinary” time. Visually, this can be seen by the wearing of green vestments. Green is a sign of hope.
As the Church liturgical documents tell us:
Besides the times of the year that have their own distinctive, there remains in the yearly cycle of thirty-three or thirty-four weeks in which no particular aspect of the mystery of Christ is celebrated (as is true in the Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter seasons), but, rather, the mystery of Christ itself is honored in its fullness, especially on Sundays. This period is known as Ordinary Time (Universal Norms, paragraph 43).
While we tend to focus on the “special” seasons of the Church year (Advent/Christmas, Lent and Easter), we must not overlook or minimize the importance of the Sunday celebration of the Mass throughout the year. Ordinary time is actually rather extraordinary! Why? Because every Sunday the Catholic community comes together to remind the world that Jesus was raised from the dead on the first day of the week and that God’s creation came to completion.
Sunday after Sunday, we come to Mass to be challenged by the Word of God and then nourished by the Body and Blood of Christ in Holy Communion. Just think, every Sunday (in fact, every day when we celebrate Mass) I, as the priest, ask Christ to come down from heaven and be with us in Holy Communion. That is an extraordinary event!
As you may already know, this church year, we will be reading largely from the Gospel of Luke; last year we largely read from the Gospel of Matthew. Matthew was written about 70 AD, about 10 years after the writing of the Gospel of Mark. Matthew wrote to a community in which the majority of readers were Jewish converts to Christianity.
St. Jerome said, “Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ.” Let us grow in our knowledge of Christ by growing in our knowledge of the Gospel of St. Matthew.
Remember: Together, we can do something beautiful for God.
In Christ,
Fr. Brian