Jan 27 Tue
What is the “Ordinary Time” of the Liturgy?
With Christmas behind us and as we now proceed through “Ordinary Time,” we have the opportunity to contemplate the full, extraordinary mystery of God’s descent into human life and our ascent into the divine. One of the clearest depictions of this divine condescension is found in the nighttime conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus.
Nicodemus comes to Jesus in the dark of night. Jesus tells him that he must be “born anew” if he wishes to enter into the kingdom of God. To which Nicodemus asks how it is a man can be born again, “Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus explains: “No one has ascended into heaven but he who descended from heaven, the Son of man.” And that this ascent is imaged in the death on the Cross.
In this brief exchange, Baptism and the Cross are juxtaposed. They illustrate both the ascent into Heaven and the taking on of eternal life. The ascending and descending language that Jesus uses here has two bookends: birth and death on the Cross. In these few lines, the full mystery of our own life in Christ is revealed, since our life in Christ is a mirror of the life of Christ.
That the ascending and descending of Christ is the ladder by which we can become “other christs.”
Jesus Christ’s is his Incarnation, the top rung of the ladder. His life and ministry are the middle rung, and his death and resurrection are the bottom rung. The three-runged ladder can be paired with the classic Byzantine cross, which itself has three bars: one for Jesus’s feet, another for his hands, and the third bearing the inscription “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.”
The ladder of ascent into Heaven is the Cross that we are each called to take up. If the ladder’s bottom step – the lowest bar of the Cross – is his death and resurrection, it’s the first step on our path of ascension into Heaven.
This “death and resurrection” is Baptism and the new birth about which Jesus sought to instruct Nicodemus that night. Thus, St. Paul can say, “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death?”
Having been reborn into Christ, we now must take on the “mind of Christ,” the middle step. By the sacrament of Confirmation, “the Spirit of truth comes,” and He guides us “into all the truth.” By it we live a life of evangelization, doing apostolate, and being witnesses.
The topmost crosspiece in the ascent is the Word’s becoming flesh, and our participation in the body and blood of Christ, our reception and adoration of the Eucharist. Here we are joined to the Head: because it was God’s will “to recapitulate (to put together) all things in Christ.”
Through the sacraments, His life becomes the very principle of ours. The Christian life is not a formula but a participation in a life: the Life of Jesus Christ. And only through that participation can we, as “other christs,” bear witness to the Truth.
With excerpts from Dominic V. Cassella