John testified further, saying, “I saw the Spirit come down like a dove from heaven and remain upon him. I did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water told me, ‘On whomever you see the Spirit come down and remain, he is the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.’ Now I have seen and testified that he is the Son of God.” (John 1.32-34)
Ironically, the word quotidian is not an everyday word, although it means everyday. Defined as something everyday or ordinary, quotidian seems to be something a scrabble player might use, especially since it carries twenty-one points. For non-scrabble players, the word probably never crosses the screen, lost on the dictionary page, found somewhere between quote and quotient.
Yet, quotidian seems the perfect word to use on this occasion, especially since we now enter the liturgical landscape known as “ordinary time,” a term that, by its very definition, implies it holds lesser importance than the more eye-popping and jaw-dropping seasons such as Easter and Christmas, Lent and Advent. Something about the phrase wants us to believe nothing important is going to happen, much like a lazy summer day when we don’t feel like doing yard work.
Of course, we would be mistaken if we hold the belief that nothing important happens during ordinary time. The stark reality is we live most of our ordinary lives in ordinary time, escaping the everyday for a brief tour of tinsel and lights at Christmas and for a splash of color with Easter egg baskets and Easter egg hunts at Easter.
Truth be told, if anything important is going to happen in our lives–most particularly as followers of Rabbi Jesus—then it is going to happen during ordinary time, if for no other reason than it accounts for most of our lives, both in number of days and in everyday experiences. Take away ordinary time and we’re left with Christmas trees and chocolate bunnies, nice enough, but not enough to build a life on.
Some two decades ago–my, how time flies–the writer and poet Kathleen Norris sought to elevate the ordinary in her small, but significant book that she entitled “The Quotidian Mysteries: The Laundry, Liturgy, and Women’s Work.” Based on a series of lectures she had given, Norris’ book reminds us that the Divine is not found in the extraordinary so much as it is found in the ordinary.
Quoting Therese of Lisieux who said that “Christ was most abundantly present to her not ‘during my hours of prayer, but rather in the midst of my daily occupations,’” Norris tells the reader that the ordinary activities that she herself finds most compatible with contemplation are walking, baking bread, and doing laundry. Explaining why doing laundry makes the list, she says, “As for laundry, I might characterize it as approaching the moral realm; there are days when it seems a miracle to be able to make dirty things clean.”
Later in the book, she offers support from the Scriptures, finding in the ancient texts proof that God excels with the ordinary. Referring to the Hebrew prophets, she sees them “reminding us that by meeting the daily needs of the poor and vulnerable, characterized in the scriptures as the widows and orphans, we prepare the way of the Lord and make our own hearts ready for the day of salvation.” She concludes, “The rhythm of sunrise and sunset marks a passage of time that makes each day rich with the possibility of salvation.”
With those encouraging and insightful words, we must take a bow to the ordinary, finding in it the gateway to the Most High God, discovering in the humdrum dailiness of life the face of the Divine One, realizing that if we are ever to step foot inside the heavenly gates, we first must put our feet in the dirt of this earth. Rather than try to escape the ordinary, we are to embrace it because it is where we find burning bushes.
Perhaps by happenchance, perhaps not, the scripture that is selected for the start of ordinary time is taken from the early pages of John’s gospel, a section that follows John’s panoramic view of the placement of the Beloved Son, placing him at the beginning, telling us that, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (1.1).
After John’s breathless insertion of the Beloved Son onto the blank canvas of the beginnings of the world, he immediately brings everything down to earth, telling us that “the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us,” forcing us to skydive from the high heavens to the hardened earth of humankind, where we live and die, sweat and rest.
And the first person we meet in the ordinary world of our lives is none other than John the Baptist, a crusty curmudgeon with little patience for the pace of backsliding sinners. Whereas the other gospels expend print on John’s hellfire and brimstone rhetoric, the fourth evangelist prefers to present John as the one who introduces Rabbi Jesus to the world, serving here more as an emcee than a televangelist with a sharp tongue.
The first thing John the Baptist wants to make abundantly clear is that he himself is not the long expected one, instead telling his listeners, “The one who is coming after me ranks ahead of me because he existed before me.” When questioned by the Pharisees as to his identity, John forthrightly answers, “I am not the Messiah.”
In a clever way of turning the page, moving the attention from John to Jesus, the writer of the fourth gospel says, “The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him.” While it is easy to think little to nothing of the phrase “the next day,” we would miss the greater point that is being made here by the writer: not only is the page being turned, but a new day has come. Or as John says, “I must decrease so that he might increase.”
The specific role that the fourth evangelist gives John the Baptist is that of a witness, telling us that “John testified further, saying, ‘I saw the Spirit come down like a dove from heaven and remain upon him.’” If we did not catch it the first time, the evangelist has John repeat it a second time, making it perfectly clear in what capacity he serves, saying “I have seen and testified that he is the Son of God.”
Interestingly, the Greek word that is used here for witness is martus, easy to remember because we get our word “martyr” from the same word, a martyr, in essence, being a person who is a witness for someone or something. So, the early Christian martyrs were witnessing by their lives and with their deaths to the words and deeds of Rabbi Jesus.
That this particular scripture is provided for our consideration as we begin ordinary time might suggest that witnessing is how we are to spend our time in these ordinary days that pass until we arrive at the seasons of Lent and Easter weeks down the road. Like John, our role is specific, spelled out for us clearly at the start of ordinary time, anything but mundane or quotidian, so long as we take seriously our role as witnesses.
Assuming our seriousness of purpose, how then do we witness to the one whom John called “the Lamb of God,” an allusion to the sheep sacrificed on the altars of the Temple and to the yearling lamb slaughtered for the annual passover meal? The answer seems apparent–we imitate his ways and his words, meaning we sacrifice ourselves to better the lives of others and to better the shape of this world.
Understood in this way, it is not a leap to say that we are to become martyrs, combining the root meaning of the word as one who witnesses with the lived experience of those early men and women who sacrificed their lives as witnesses to the Galilean Teacher, sacrificing our selfishness, self-interest, and self-importance, decreasing, as John the Baptist said, so that Jesus might increase.
Continuing that long tradition of people who chose to walk the way of Rabbi Jesus, we spend our days, ordinary and humdrum as they may appear, in service to others because it is the way Rabbi Jesus lived his life day in and day out, feeding the hungry, healing the sick, and welcoming the outcast. Seen in this way, doing other people’s laundry may bring us as close to Rabbi Jesus as anything else we do.
The suggestion seems to be that our witnessing to the ways of Rabbi Jesus will be found in doing the unexceptional and unglamorous things that need to be done–mopping the floor, folding the clothes, and cooking a meal. Discipleship, as Rabbi Jesus’ life showed by his day’s work, is not found in things that steal the show or make a show of ourselves.
Quite the opposite. Discipleship is doing the little things in a way that demonstrates our love for others and our lack of selfishness. Or as Kathleen Norris said, “What we think we are only “getting through” has the power to change us, just as we have the power to transform what seems meaningless–the endless repetitions of a litany or the motions of vacuuming a floor.”
In fact, there is something profoundly beautiful and astutely honest in seeing these repetitive deeds of our daily lives as a litany that we pray, not with our lips, but with our hands, such as wiping the runny nose of a child, driving our children to school, or volunteering for meals-on-wheels. In the process, we bring holiness into the humdrum, and we change the world by changing a diaper.
As John the Baptist reminds us, then, our purpose is found in our witness to the life of Rabbi Jesus. However, we undervalue the importance of any given moment and any given day if we believe we can only fulfill our purpose in extraordinary ways or in exceptional times. Here at the start of ordinary time, we are challenged to find an opportunity to infuse each day with blessing and bounty, enfleshing again the word of God, introducing Rabbi Jesus into the quotidian as John did.
The writer William Least Heat Moon, in his book, “Blue Highways,” made the observation that “City people don’t think anything important happens in a place like Dime Box. And usually it doesn’t unless you call conflict important. Or love or babies or dying.” There might be something to be said for that observation, especially if we’re inclined to believe nothing important can happen in ordinary time.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 