This year there are 21 Sundays after Trinity taking us up to the end of October, so covering almost half the church's year. Everything really exciting - Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost - has already happened, in the year’s first half.
So is that why the second half of the church’s year is referred to as 'Ordinary Time'? In fact not. Rather the phase ‘Ordinary Time’ comes from the way in which the Sundays are counted - with Ordinal numbers: first, second, third, etc after Trinity.
From 1980 to the year 2000, we followed a more ancient tradition of naming these Sundays after Pentecost, not Trinity, and this made a kind of sense. At Pentecost, after all the excitement of Christ's death, resurrection and ascension, the church finally comes into being, as the Holy Spirit fills the beleaguered apostles with faith, courage and a strong sense of purpose. And so it is that in these Sundays after Pentecost, and now Trinity, we start to understand what it means to be a Spirit-filled church, now expressing in our life together those big theological truths – like incarnation, salvation, resurrection – that we commemorated in the first half of the year.
The gospel readings now focus not on the big events in Jesus’s life, but rather on his teaching, healing and miracles. We will get to hear about his interaction with the political and religious establishment of his day, how he stood up for those who were abused or persecuted, how he got people to question their values and rebuild their lives, how people gradually became aware that he was someone special, someone filled with God.
So in a way these Sundays are very ordinary. We meet the Jesus of the every day, the Jesus of farmers and fisherman, who told stories of lost sheep, a man beat up by the roadside, a ponsy landowner, fishers of men, treasure buried in a field, seed sown by the wayside, or, as in today's gospel, we learn what happens when Jesus meets a tax collector, and when a woman with a severe haemorrhage touches his cloak (see picture above) – an every day world that suddenly became a canvas for the Holy Spirit. Here was God, not in far off Jerusalem, but walking every day through the fields, and along the shores, of Galilee.
