The Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time (2026)
In her novel Mansfield Park, Jane Austen writes that “Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings.” She is highlighting the mundane, repetitive, and often trivial nature of daily life, where a person feels like they are constantly occupied with tasks that ultimately feel insignificant or lacking in a real purpose.
And, on a literary or poetic level, that makes sense. But when we look at life with the eyes of faith, we recognize that rather than being a “quick succession of busy nothings,” life is, in fact, a series of small choices that we make moment-to-moment, day-to-day, which chart the course for how we become who it is God has made us to be.
Think about the power of those small choices: Lifelong love begins with the tiniest gestures of an interested glance and the brush of a hand… little expressions of care before becomes total self-surrender to the beloved. (This is certainly how relationship stories most often unfold when I ask couples to tell me their story as part of their marriage-prep processes.) At the opposite end of the spectrum, acts of violence, betrayal, rejection, and deception, most often begin with little sparks of anger, white lies, and lustful looks.
This is why the message that Jesus offers us in this Sunday’s Gospel is so important: he is instructing his disciples to watch out for the little things—those small moments of decision—that undermine faith and our relationships with one another.
What’s at stake here is the question of wisdom. Wisdom isn’t that we comprehend God’s Word or moral teachings (that is knowledge). Rather, true wisdom is what prompts us to live what we know to be true and to choose right ways of living.
It is true wisdom that directs us in our interpretation of God’s Law;
It is true wisdom that opens for us a world we could never have imagined without it.
Look back over the course of your life… when we do, we realize that the longer we live, we can see how those little choices we make each day begin to coalesce and take shape. With those choices, we chart the path we will take. We have agency in how we live life and make our faith real in the lives we lead. And here find an important distinction: Obedient people do what they’re told; wise people choose what good they will do. And so, to say that we choose life over death or good over evil does not take into consideration the complexity of situations in which we choose. Sirach speaks of this in the First Reading as we are called to true wisdom; in the Gospel, Jesus tells us what wise living looks like. Because in the Gospel, we see that service of people is to take priority over service to the Law.
If we are truly wise, we will come to realize that what is acceptable and life-enhancing in one situation may not be appropriate for another. Life is fluid and complex and our thinking and acting must be flexible enough to adapt to that ebb and flow when needed. This is what Jesus did, and it was he teaches us to do. He didn’t abolish the Law; he brought it to fulfillment when he reinterpreted it to meet the needs of the people of his day. For the Law to be a wise law, it must be grounded in wisdom—which is living and active and adaptive—and not in some sort of inflexible set of legal mandates.
Today’s Gospel is reminding us that we have to be faithful to the values and beliefs we have inherited, but to also be willing and able to bring those into dialogue with the world as it is today. Jesus is teaching his disciples—and us—to interpret the Law in the light of experience and of what is real… not as the world was or how we wish the world could be.
When we allow for this expansive view of life and faith and what it is that God reveals to us, we begin to live as wise people who are able to make real in our lives what we know to be true.
Ultimately, this kind of true wisdom is a gift of the Spirit, and it has the power to enrich us with insight into life, so that we can live in ways that we never thought possible. We will realize where and how we fit into the vast and interrelated systems of the universe, and this opens us to the wonder of who we are and of all that God has made. As Scripture scholar Diane Bergant, CSA, writes,
“We will recognize that we all bone of the same bone and flesh of the same flesh, and we will honor and care for the common humanity that binds us to together. We will understand once and for all that the value of anything is determined by its ability to enrich life, and we will cherish every manifestation of that life. No longer will we view others as competitors but as companions on the same journey. No longer will we be tempted to hide behind the doors of our homes or our hearts lest we be called upon to engage in the unfolding of life. Instead,” she concludes, “we will stand on the threshold of a new life facing the horizon of undreamed possibilities. True wisdom, which comes through the Spirit, will open these vistas for us if we but follow the example of Jesus, our teacher.”
So maybe life really does feel like a “quick succession of busy nothings.” But the Gospel tells us otherwise. The Kingdom of God is built, not in grand heroic moments most of us will never face, but in the small decisions we make each day: how we speak to one another, how quickly we forgive, whether we tell the truth when it costs us something, whether we choose compassion over convenience. This is where wisdom becomes real. True wisdom is a gift of the Spirit, but it is also something we practice. It is formed in us through countless small, faithful choices that slowly shape our hearts and our lives. Faith, then, is not simply something we hold in our minds or profess with our lips—it is something we live.
And when we allow the Spirit to guide even our smallest choices, those “busy nothings” become holy ground, the very places where God is quietly forming us into the people we are called to be.
This is what it means to be wise: not merely to know the way of Christ, but to walk it—one small, faithful step at a time.
O God, who teach us that you abide
in hearts that are just and true,
grant that we may be so fashioned by your grace
as to become a dwelling pleasing to you.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
God, for ever and ever. Amen.
-Collect for the Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Homily prepared for Ss. Peter and Paul Church, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
