Tuesday of the Twenty-ninth Week in Ordinary Time
In the text from Luke for today, we are told that blessed are those “whom the master finds vigilant on his arrival.” Heeding this beatitude, we are called to be on watch, ready, waiting for Jesus’ return. But what does that mean?
Some Christians seem to take calls like this one as inspiration to erect billboards next to interstates that pose the fear-inducing question “Are you ready?” The idea being that Christ could return at any moment. If you are “ready”—that is, on the right side of God, then all will be well. And if you are not, then they’ll be hell to pay. Literally.
Such billboards don’t tell us what it means to be “ready.” And so, we are invited to wonder about that all the while feeling a good bit of anxiety and fear. But while we don’t know what it means to be ready, we do know that a question posed like that presumes that one could answer it either way. One can be ready or not ready. Or, put another way, some folks are ready, and some folks are not. Some folks are with God, and some folks are not. And the difference between them makes all the difference now and forevermore.
There is something terribly wrong with billboards like that. They seem all about dividing people up. There are those who are on the right side of the question, and those who are on the wrong side of the question. Those on the right side are the righteous. Those on the wrong side are damned.
To be more specific about why that’s a problem, let’s turn to Ephesians. The passage in front of us today starts by reminding us that there was a time (could be a remote or a very recent time) when we were without Christ, when we were alienated, when we were strangers to the covenants of promise. In short, there was a time when we were on the wrong side of things. How did we come to be on the right side? Was it by way of our own doing? Did we will ourselves over to the right side?
The text continues. And it is clear. It was not our doing but by the blood of Christ that we became near. It was not us but Christ who reconciled us to God. It was by his death that we were made one in his body. And before that, when he was in the midst of his ministry, the text tells us, he didn’t just preach to those who were already near—that is, those who were already close to him, like his disciples. On the contrary. He also preached to those who were far off—that is, those who had a long way to go before they could claim to be near at all to him. So, it was by way of his preaching to those near and far and by way of his death on behalf of all that we who were once aliens and strangers were reconciled to God. Through him, all became strangers no more and members in the household of God. In this way, Jesus made all of us strangers, aliens, unrighteous into one—into his body, the very dwelling place for God.
To return to the question we began with: what must we be on watch for? What must we be vigilant about? I think it might be this: that we should always be on watch for efforts to construct walls between the (presumably) righteous and the (presumably) unrighteous. And we must be vigilant, whenever we do encounter such efforts, to remind ourselves and others that by Jesus’ work on the cross we are not strangers to God or to one another. We are one in the immeasurable grace of Christ. Amen.
- Sue Trollinger