How to weight our waiting

Luke 12.32-40

Luke 12:32-40: Jesus said to his disciples, "Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions, and give alms. Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

"Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit; be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet, so that they may open the door for him as soon as he comes and knocks. Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them. If he comes during the middle of the night, or near dawn, and finds them so, blessed are those slaves.

"But know this: if the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into. You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour."

Almost every New Testament scholar situates today’s reading in the context of a delayed parousia (Greek for “arrival” or “coming,” but used throughout the New Testament to refer to Jesus’s second coming). Many if not most in the early church, including Luke and Paul, seemed to believe that Jesus’s return to earth was imminent. Jesus’s return would fulfill the “day of LORD” mentioned by the prophet Amos and right the wrongs of the world, vindicate the righteous and defeat the wicked. Though a completely foreign concept to Amos, many Jews at the time of Jesus had come to believe in a resurrection of the body for those who died from persecutions for their faith. It seems like immortality was not fully on the table yet and heaven as detached from earth was a nascent idea at most (cf. Revelation 21 where God makes the earth “new” and declares that God dwells among mortals, an extremely different concept from Darby’s 18^th century hypothesis of a rapture and God pulling the righteous from a wicked and corrupted earth to a perfect and placating dimension. Early Christian theology emphasized God righting the wrongs done on earth on the earth and not in the sky!). Paul and Luke and the earliest believers expected this to happen within their lifetime and were facing a delayed Parousia and its challenges for faith. Is Jesus coming back at all? Have we believed the wrong thing in just one area or is the whole Christian idea off? Will bad things happen to good people forever? Is there accountability after death for the way we live life? If not, what’s the point? These questions seem very at home for us because we have moved on theologically and conceptually from Jesus’s original audience and tend to take an eternal afterlife for the “soul” for granted. But they were new questions for the time. So new that they caused more than a faith challenge or crisis. The ancestors believed that life was for the living, not indentured servitude for eternity. There was some sort of life after death in Sheol, but everyone went to the same place. Cosmic and karmic justice only entered Judaism in the later Persian period (post 4^th Century BCE) and the idea of a soul being separate from the body and eternal to boot was still problematic in both Jerusalem and Athens (Paul is ridiculed by the Athenians at the Areopagus for this idea in Acts 17).

Luke and Jesus seem to be asking people to keep the idea of the day of the LORD while holding on to the ancestral inheritance of living life. Becoming distracted by the anxieties and worries of the what, where, and when of the afterlife can result in lethargy, sleeping away life, abusing our brothers and sisters. Worse yet, having grown up in a Fundamentalist sect of Christianity that emphasized the very new and unbiblical ideas of rapture and God’s vengeance on the earth alongside maps and charts counting down the signs of the anti-Christ, being distracted by the delay of Jesus’s expected return can lead to self-aggrandizement, disdain for the life we have in favor of life we expect later, poor stewardship of the earth (the sooner we ruin this one, the sooner God will have to give us a new one!?), and both competition with and judgment against our family, natural and heavenly. Jesus chides any listener who hears to stay faithful on earth even if the heaven of their minds is slow to arrive. So many folks have been taught to take a “leap of faith,” to change from the inside out, to be properly motivated to make effectual change happen. Our Jewish brothers and sisters, however, have stressed taking a “leap of action” for millennia, changing from the outside in, being faithful in practice regardless of feeling as a means of reshaping our heart (center of will). Amidst their worries of a delayed second coming, Jesus bids his follows, now as then, to take a leap of action, to serve one another, and thereby serve God, with and without feeling and motivation.

Jesus then stretches convention to the point of hyperbole: no master prepares food for or serves slaves. When slaves are faithful in their duties, they are meeting expectations and are not rewarded for their expected service, except with more responsibilities as they have proven their faithfulness and care-fulness. A master who serves slaves for any reason would be defying the chain of being that told all people how to live into the station of their birth and acquire honor. A master who serves slaves is creating equality in the middle of service by bringing the privileges of the elite to the masses at the self-chosen expense of the elite. Be faithful to the master in heaven by serving as God does and elevating those “underneath us.”

Liturgy. The “work of the people.” Often confused with the church bulletin. Liturgy in the ancient Greek world was the construction of infrastructure—roads, bridges, etc.—to serve the public good at private expense. There were no “public works” as we now understand these vital services. There were patrons of the public who offered their private means for the public good. Maybe that is how Jesus would have us worship—for the public good at our private expense.

There are, to be sure, some sticky wickets here. The wicked slave will be cut into pieces and put with the unfaithful. The recalcitrant wicked servant will receive a severe beating. At their worst, please note that these passages do not imply an eternal hell of ironic punishment or suffering, but a spanking (temporary) or a permanent unraveling (cut into pieces). They might just as well invite us to consider that infidelity—to God and to our neighbor—comes with its own ironic rewards of missing out on the larger life God intends for us. Abusing others certainly cuts us off from them and from the better parts of our nature, threatening the connection and mutuality that are inherent in our evolution as mammals. Intentionally wounding others offers temporary reprieve due to an adrenaline and cortisol rush but ultimately wounds our capacity to enjoy ourselves and facilitate love and connection with others.

I’ve always heard the last bit as God offering to judge not only our sins, but also how well we deployed our gifts—intellectual, artistic, athletic, etc.—throughout our lifetime. Much is expected. Don’t let God down. Never waste time. Multi-task. Work for products, not for process. But if Jesus is cautioning us away from anxious living and away from a strict hierarchy and towards liturgical family, then maybe the opposite of these is the invitation of Jesus. Maybe God anticipates and hopes that we will come to enjoy our unique gifts and personalities enough to offer them to one another in service. The more we have, the more we have to manage, both within ourselves and for others.

One small caveat. Some of the hardest bits here are addressed to Peter with the possible implication that these words hold even more gravity for the disciples, for the religious professionals, for the clergy. More has been given. I have been given the chance to attend seminary, the opportunities to reflect on the teachings and practices of Jesus, to continue my education, to network with peers. I used to think that more was demanded, meaning conversions and piety and service. Maybe these are the case. But lately, and without wiping these from the board, I am thinking that because more is expected of me, I have an even greater reason to become comfortable in my own skin, to laugh deeply, to be present in my marriage and parenting, to be pious by being exactly who God made me to be, no more and no less. There are few metrics for these intentions and always the opportunity to confuse selfishness with loving the Self God has in mind for me, but I am trying to take a leap of action here. Precisely because these bits are about wholly living and holy living, they are critical for all of us. Who knows which generation will be the last? Eventually someone will be right. Why wait until then, whenever then is, when God has so much more in mind for us now?