Friday of the Twenty-fourth week in Ordinary Time

There is a quiet line in Paul that could easily slip past us: "If we have only hoped in Christ in this life, we are of all men most pitiable." He is not offering comfort here so much as staking everything on a single point. Without the resurrection, he says, the whole enterprise collapses — the preaching, the faith, even the memory of those we love who have died. It is a startling admission from a man usually so sure of himself. He is telling us that Christianity is not a beautiful philosophy for living well. It is a wager on whether the dead rise. And if they do, then everything changes, including the shape of an ordinary Friday.

Look at who is walking with Jesus in the Gospel. Not only the twelve, but women — Mary of Magdala, from whom seven demons had gone out; Joanna, whose husband worked in Herod's own household; Susanna; and many others. These are people who had been unmade and remade. Something had died in them and something had risen. And now they are simply there, on the road, "serving them from their possessions." The resurrection Paul argues for so fiercely is already quietly at work in these healed lives, long before Easter. It looks less like triumph and more like faithful, unglamorous accompaniment — women who had been given their lives back and chose to spend them following.

The Psalm holds both realities together with tender confidence: "Keep me as the apple of your eye. Hide me under the shadow of your wings." This is the posture of someone who has been rescued and knows it — someone who can wait, even through the dark, because "I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with seeing your form." Our hope is not confined to this life. But it begins here, in the small daily choice to walk with him.