I will do what I like while my master is away!

Luke 12:39-48

Jesus said, “You know that if the house owner had known what night the burglar was coming, he wouldn’t have stayed out late and left the place unlocked. So don’t you be slovenly and careless. Just when you don’t expect him, the Son of Man will show up.”

Peter said, “Master, are you telling this story just for us? Or is it for everybody?”

The Master said, “Let me ask you: Who is the dependable manager, full of common sense, that the master puts in charge of his staff to feed them well and on time? He is a blessed man if when the master shows up he’s doing his job. But if he says to himself, ‘The master is certainly taking his time,’ begins maltreating the servants and maids, throws parties for his friends, and gets drunk, the master will walk in when he least expects it, give him the thrashing of his life, and put him back in the kitchen peeling potatoes.

“The servant who knows what his master wants and ignores it, or insolently does whatever he pleases, will be thoroughly thrashed. But if he does a poor job through ignorance, he’ll get off with a slap on the hand. Great gifts mean great responsibilities; greater gifts, greater responsibilities!

Food for thought!

Today's gospel reading is a continuity of yesterday's.  There are two servants, one always ready and on the job, the other not.   This one said, I will do what I like while my master is away.  Many times we are like this man. We have a habit of dividing life into compartments. There is a part in which we remember that God is present; and there is a part in which we never think of him at all. We tend to draw a line between sacred and secular.

Some of us try to confine our Christian identity to what takes place on Sundays. In order to preserve it from contamination from “the world,” we avoid as much as we can conversation beyond polite small talk between Sundays. Others of us memorize phrases from Sunday sermons and teaching and then try to insert them into pauses in the conversations or circumstances over the next six days. 

We need to tear down the fences that we have erected between language that we use on Sundays and the language we use with the people we find on the Main Street or Down Town, between Sundays. It is, after all, the same language. The same God we address in prayer on Sundays is also deeply, eternally involved in the men and women we engage in conversation with between Sundays.

God does not compartmentalize our lives into religious and secular. Why do we?  Why do we ever behave as if the Lord is away and other times as if the Lord is present? Why is there no continuity of language between the words we use on Sundays, in prayer meetings and in Bible studies and the words we use when we’re out on the Main Street?

Jesus wants us to cultivate a sense of continuity between the prayers we offer to God and the conversations we have with the people we speak to and who speak to us. He wants us to nurture an awareness of the sanctity of words, the holy gift of language, regardless of whether it is directed vertically or horizontally. Just as Jesus did.

Most of us are not preachers or teachers, or at least not designated as such. Most of the words that we speak are spoken in the quotidian contexts of eating and drinking, shopping and traveling, making what we sometimes dismiss as “small talk.” But if we really know what Christianity means we will know that there is no part of life when the master is away. We are working and living forever in the presence of God.