“Blessed are those servants whom the master finds awake when he comes…”

The Future Shapes the Present

What we believe about the future shapes how we live in the present. We spoke last week about how God can set us free from slavery to the God of Mammon, from anxious toil and restlessness. Today we hear from Christ something about how we to think about what is to come.

Before we look more closely at these words, it’s worth noting that, when it comes to the future, we live in a world which is profoundly lacking in hope. On an individual level, the average modern secularist thinks little about his own mortality or about what is to come on the other side of death. As a society, we tell ourselves stories about the imminent end of the world and, due to this profoundly negative narrative of eschatological despair, we struggle to see the continuance of our own species as a positive thing.

It's so important, therefore, that we attend to a specifically Christian eschatology. That is, a Christian vision of the last things and the end: the end of our lives and of the end of this world.

In our passage today, Christ speaks of what doctrinally is called his Second Coming. He came for the first time in the Incarnation. He lived, died, rose, and ascended into Heaven. He will come again. This will be the second time. This will be the Second Coming.

We live in the middle of those two times. And we therefore wait for him to come again. We wait for the close of history which will be brought about not through any means of man or through the explosion of the Sun, but through the return of Jesus.

This is what the story Christ tells us is about.

The Night of this Life

“Stay dressed for action and keep your lamps burning,” Christ tells us, “and be like men who are waiting for their master to come home from the wedding feast, so that they may open the door to him at once when he comes and knocks.”

What an evocative image to which we can all relate. It is nighttime in the house of the master. Who knows how long the servants have been waiting for his return? And yet he still has not come. They know he will come but they do not know when. They are tired. They are longing for their beds. Their eyes are drooping. They are, perhaps, wondering if he will indeed return at all that night or if he has found somewhere else to stay. Their only option is to stay awake and alert, even in the midst of all of these questions and doubts. Because the only thing they know is that he is coming at some point. But they do not know when.

We’ve all been there of course, diligently trying to stay awake because we are waiting for something late at night with eager anticipation. I remember as a young child desperately trying to stay up to watch Match of the Day on a Saturday evening and somehow finding myself awake the following morning in my bed having missed the programme entirely and been put there by my mother.

Christ is telling us, then, that the world and the time we live in is a little bit like that. It is the night before the coming of God. And the night is soporific. It calls to us to lie down, to sleep and to enter a world of dreams, a world in which there is, in fact, no master, a world in which the master will never return and in which therefore we have no need to stay awake at all.

Our dreams are various – of the ultimate reality of the material world, of comfort, of wealth, of distraction, of entertainment, of sexual self-expression, of power, success, prestige, aesthetic pleasure. There are endless dreams. And yet the dreams don’t call us to wake up to the great reality that we will face at some point.

Being Ready

How, therefore, are we to resist the siren call of sleep? Christ gives us a picture of spiritual alertness. He speaks of being dressed and ready for action – or, more literally, of having one’s loins girded. This phrase refers to the gathering up of a long, flowing garment and the tucking of it into one’s belt. In the contemporary world, we might speak of pulling our socks up or rolling up our sleeves. He speaks also of having our lamps burning.

Many historic commentators have seen in these two images a calling to both the active and contemplative life. The active and contemplative life are the two sides of the life of the Christian reality. In the contemplative life, we keep burning the lamps of our minds as we meditate upon the word of God, as we speak to him in prayer, and as we fill our minds with edifying and spiritually uplifting thoughts. Cyril of Alexandria tells us that the burning lamp represents ‘the wakefulness of the mind and intellectual cheerfulness’.

In opposition to this, Christ says, keep your lamps burning. Fill your mind with the truth and shun thoughts of sin and wickedness the instant they occur to you. In this way, you will stay intellectually and mentally awake.

What about this image of girded loins? This speaks of our readiness to respond to the calling of God with acts of service and love. In the same way that we must train our minds for godliness, so must we train our bodies.

The overall picture is of a physically and intellectually alert servant, fully aware of what he must do when his master returns and capable of carrying it out. How does this speak to you? Are your loins girded? Is your lamp lit? What steps do you need to take to wake up?

The Marriage Feast

Let us consider one further feature of this story which is that the master is away at a marriage feast and will return from thence. When we think of the Second Coming our minds might be filled with the fear of judgment and with fiery wrath visited upon the earth. And, yet, Christ gives us here quite a different picture. When we return from a wedding feast that involved a beautiful reception and a mutual sharing in the joy of the bride and groom, with food and drinking, singing and dancing, surely we are in a fantastic mood, glowing with the overflowing happiness of the newly united couple. Will not the master in the story be of a similar disposition when he returns?

Again, Cyril of Alexandria has great insight here: ‘…Christ will return as from a feast. This plainly shows that God always dwells in festivals that are fitting for him. In heaven above, there is no sadness whatsoever since nothing can occasion grief.’

This is the joy that the master brings with him back from the wedding feast: the very joy of heaven itself, the Kingdom of God come to earth.

The servants are willing to stay up, happy to do so, because they are anticipating the joy of their master when they open the door to his expectant knock.

And, then, the most amazing thing of all: “Blessed are those servants whom the master finds awake when he comes. Truly, I say to you, he will dress himself for service and have them recline at table, and he will come and serve them.”

In other words, the master is so happy, so overflowing with joy from his beautiful evening that he doesn’t want it to end: “Let’s not go to bed yet,” he says, “But let’s have another drink and some more food. Come, you are tired, you are weary from waiting up for me. Sit down and I will prepare to continue the feast I have been enjoying, now with you, my friends.”

We can paint in our minds a very austere vision of God – of an angry father, of a displeased judge, of an unmerciful slavedriver. And, yet, are these visions true to the vision that Christ consistently offers us? This is a vision of grace and joy. The sleeping servants do not enjoy this happy scene because they’ve gone to bed. That was their decision. But, for those who stayed awake, great joy remains.

Wait for the Lord

And yet waiting and hoping can sometimes take its toll. It is not easy to continue always with the spiritual life. Discipline, faith, effort, resilience – all of these things are needed, sometimes more than others…especially when we are tired and weary of the fight.

This is why Christ tells us this story: to encourage us to continue. I was reading this week a passage on the spiritual labours of St Anthony of Alexandria, one of the pioneering fathers of Christian monasticism. When he withdrew from the world to engage in a life of prayer and devotion, he was beset on all sides by intense and diabolical demonic attacks. He was psychologically tormented and tempted in every way, and yet he persisted through all trials and his name resounds throughout the history of the Christian Church.

The great spiritual writer, Thomas Keating says this of his life:

Thomas Keating, Invitation to Love: The Way of Christian Contemplation

Friends, go and do likewise in your own lives. Never stop waiting for God. Never stop trusting in God. Never stop praying to God.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.