One of the greatest blessings of my life was the opportunity to spend a semester studying in Israel, the Holy Land.That land has been call the ‘fifth gospel’ and an ‘eighth sacrament’ because it reveals so much of who Jesus is and what he is about and to experience it is to somehow be touched by the very plan of God for his people.
I remember standing on the shores of the Sea of Galilee for the first time.I recall too my first encounter with the Jordon River.To be honest, what struck me on those first encounters was how utterly unimpressive this particular lake and that specific river are.Coming from Minnesota, the land of lakes and rivers, all I could say to the Lord was, “But Father, we have much more impressive lakes and rivers at home.Why would you choose this spot to reveal yourself?Of all the possibilities, why here?”
Obviously, I was not the first to feel this way.Naaman the leper in today’ first reading (2 Kings 5:1-15) is told by the prophet Elisha to plunge seven times in the Jordonto obtain his healing.Naaman is agast! “I thought that he would surely come out and stand there to invoke the Lord his God, and would move his hand over the spot, and thus cure the leprosy.Are not the rivers of Damascus, the Abana and the Pharpar, better than all the waters of Israel?Could I not wash in them and be cleansed?”Naaman, before rethinking things, then turns in anger to return home.
The spring I was in Israel, I spent a week after Easter on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.While there I was contemplating that same question, “Why here?”Sometime in that week I had an insight.Why here, indeed!The very ordinariness of it speaks most loudly of all.If God could accomplish his plan here, and this is the insight I had, certainly he can accomplish it anywhere.There can be no place, no person, too ordinary, too obscure, too small or too insignificant.God accomplished his greatest work on a stretch of land 150 miles north and south, 50 miles east and west.Certainly he can accomplish his plan in Minnesota, in South Dakota, in Alaska.Clearly he can do so in me.Small, insignificant, without anything to particularly attract anyone to me—nonetheless, God can do his work in and through me!That was the insight.
It is the insight to be obtained from the sacraments as well.In a pinch, a single drop of dirty water will serve to baptize a person, giving them a share in the very divine life of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.Bread, that hardly looks like bread, and wine, no more then ordinary table wine, will serve to become the very offering of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, body, blood, soul and divinity.And the point of the sacraments?Well if God can work in those things—a drop of water, ordinary bread and wine—,and as we know he most certainly does, then he can work through any event, person, place that my daily life brings me to encounter.When I know, through faith, the encounter with the living God in the Sacraments, I gradually grow in the insight of faith that God is working out his plan of salvation for me in each person, event, and place of my life.
The ordinary contains the extraordinary and the extraordinary transforms all that is ordinary.