The Gospel reading this week this week is from Luke 7. What does it demonstrate about Ordinary Time ?
"In Luke’s story the centurion tells Jesus it is the slave’s worthiness that should be honored by the healing. Not the centurion’s. That is the thing the centurion knows will be wrong if Jesus comes to his house to honor what the Jewish elders have liked in the centurion. The slave has no authority at all. None. Yet the healing, the centurion says, needs to be because the slave’s life has value, not because his owner’s life has value." We may say that the contemporary version of the centurion is Branch Rickey. Nancy Rockwell’s article “42” is a worthy application of this idea. Link
“Rickey is the team executive for the Brooklyn Dodgers. He is a man under authority, and he orders men around and they obey him. He is also a man who, for twenty years, has carried around inside him a memory of the intense pain that ripped apart a black man who played on an early team he coached, when a hotel where the team was staying for an away game refused him a room because of his color. Rickey got the hotel to back down, but the hurt he saw in that man stayed with him as a lasting heartache, until he finally came to see that he had not begun to address the evil from which that incident had sprung, and that he could choose to use his authority to integrate baseball.”
“Rickey had come to understand enough about racism to know that Robinson needed to be on the Dodgers because of his athleticism, not because Rickey wanted to integrate the team, and the he, Rickey, needed to stay out of the limelight and provide Robinson all the help he could, so that Robinson, No 42, could survive the hatred that would come to him. “
"Like the Centurion, Rickey came to the understanding that Robinson’s life had value. He needed a chance against the traditional segregation of thetime “when public restrooms had signs for White and Colored, when black people’s skin was considered to be contaminating, and when their abilities were considered to be inferior.”
1947 Robinson prevailed as a ball player, becoming Rookie of the Year. One of Robinson’s enduring quotes is: "A life is not important, except in the impact it has on other lives."