Mtr Mary Trainor

Dear friend,

“Reverse order” doesn’t happen often, which makes it all the more special when it does. As a person whose last name starts with “T” I can attest to how tiresome it is to live in a world driven by alphabetical order.

In school it didn’t take long to realize what this meant. I would always be near the end of whatever was handed out or going on.

We get used to the artificial ways we humans have of putting our world in order. It doesn’t make it right, it just becomes familiar.

Or at least it did to me until I encountered my fourth-grade teacher, Mr. Satterfield. He upended our little elementary school world by one day saying: “This time we’re going in REVERSE alphabetical order.”

This new method put me quite near the top, given that there was almost never a Z name or an X name. It was a refreshing change, and an eye-opener, though It would be decades before I connected this to the Kingdom of God.

Who matters to God continues to surprise us. The Great Reversal. The upside down kingdom. The least is the greatest. No matter how many clever ways we devise to describe how God measures worth, we will probably continue to miss the fullness of its meaning.

In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus is approached by protégés of John the Baptist, sent by John to ask if Jesus is the One, the Messiah. The answer? Go tell John what you see: the deaf hear, the lame walk, the blind see, lepers are cleansed, the dead are raised, the poor receive good news.

This leads into today’s Office Gospel (Matthew 11:7-15). John’s disciples have departed, and Jesus now speaks to the crowds.

So who was John to you? What drove you to the wilderness to see and hear him? A need to witness some idle noise-maker? Someone dressed up in fancy clothes? Or did you go because you needed the words of a Prophet? Because that’s who John is. The Elijah of this time.

And now for the kicker: Jesus said John is the greatest man living “born of a woman.” And yet, the least significant person we can think of is still greater than he.

Reverse. Alphabetical. Order.

Based on what Jesus offers, I do not believe that the point is merely to put someone else at the end of a line. Could it be instead to show that what is important, valuable, cherished, and loved by God is not always obvious to us? That the Kingdom is not to be measured by clock or calendar. It cannot be fairly represented by alphabetical or numerical order. With Jesus, time conflates. Past, present, future are swirling around altogether. Elijah and John the Baptist are contemporaries. 

The Kingdom is always bigger, broader, deeper than anything we can imagine. It was. It is. It will be.

And its admission standards are open. Come one. Come all. A to Z. Z to A. Or in no particular order at all.

Mtr. Mary