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This morning a friend sent me a text of encouragement — 2 Corinthians 4:7: “But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God, and not from us.”

As I received this text, it connected with my broader musings over the week. I had been thinking again about the fact that we remain within the season of Ordinary Time in the Church Calendar. Ordinary Time refers to those weeks after Pentecost and before Advent that fall outside the major celebrations of Christmas, Easter, Pentecost and so on.

Treasure in jars of clay.

Here, Scripture compels us again to see something extra-ordinary in the “ordinary”—this time in the human form described as jars of clay. In our modern equivalent, Paul might have used the phrase containers of Tupperware.

But we have this treasure in containers of Tupperware to show that this all-surpassing power is from God, and not from us.

However we might describe the vessel, Scripture reminds us that the exquisite treasure—

the glory of the gospel,

the light of the knowledge of God in the face of Christ, and

the power of God—

is found in the commonness of a container—the bounds of a human life.

As I read the wider context of 2 Corinthians, what struck me was that the seeming ordinariness of human existence—its limits, its inescapable shape bordered by seasons, by life and death—is the very place God has chosen to reveal himself.

Yet in this passage, Paul is quick to ground the humanness of our lives in the pattern and arc of Christ’s life. In verse 10 he says, “we always carry around in our body the death of Jesus.” Yet Paul doesn’t leave us here; he reframes our ordinary and clay-like lives through Christ’s resurrection. Jesus, the one in whom true humanity is revealed, provides a new foundation and trajectory for us—“we always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body … so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body” (2 Cor 4:10-11).

His life is revealed in our mortal existence.

As Ephraim Radner says, the “garments of skin”—that grace-imbued reality of the ordinary human life of a believer—“cannot be thrown off without also throwing off our oneness with Christ himself” (A Time to Keep, p. 40).

The arc of life—the passing from birth to grave, that world “stage” Shakespeare word-smithed as the place where “all the men and women merely players … have their exits and their entrances,” (As You Like It)—is the life we often try to outrun or redesign. Yet it is the site of divine glory because Christ has made it so.

This is why the Apostle Paul repeats his encouragement in verses 1 and 16 that we are not to “lose heart” when life shows up with all its predictable patterns. We don’t despair when the unrelenting sequence of life, which poet William B. Yeats describes as “whatever is begotten, born, and dies,” (Sailing to Byzantium), continues its course. No, we remember that the rhythms of time—the givenness of created temporality, with all its inbuilt limitations—are encompassed by a God who places his treasure in Tupperware.

For the Church, “Ordinary Time” teaches us that there is now no mere ordinary time. All time is now offered to us as the site where the life of Jesus is revealed: revealed in mortal bodies and the moments of a human life.