Be on watch! Be Alert!

It has become a tradition in the celebrating of ADVENT to focus on four key words that seem to sum up what we are preparing for in the birth of Jesus, the coming of God among us and as one of us.

Today our key word is HOPE and there are echoes of HOPE ringing around in the selected Scriptures we read out loud today.  Together they seem to be pointing us to something they call “The Day of the Lord,” and while some of the imagery around this great a marvellous day seem to be judgemental and fearful, implicit in the texts is the idea that we who call him Lord have cause for HOPE – even in the midst of terrible and frightening things.

Be on watch.  Be alert.  

For you do not know when the time will come.

Chapter 13 in Mark’s Gospel is called “A Little Apocalypse” because it concerns the coming of Christ on earth on judgement day, something that theologians call the parousia.  This word used by Mark, means “with essence” or “to become present or real.”  Christian tradition has also taken parousia to mean The Second Coming of Christ.

But in the original mother tongue of Jesus, Aramaic, there is no word for “return” or “to come again.”  But there is a word for “appearance”.  So the early Christians looked eagerly for the appearance of Christ in power and glory.  

They lived in this HOPE which is picked up as our ADVENT theme today.  At the beginning they expected his final appearance to come soon.  As time wore on, they decided they would have to be more patient.  And they told each other stories that would keep this HOPE alive.

THE IMPLICATIONS

In the story that Jesus alludes to, I am sure you could not help thinking of the stories we had over the past few weeks that also spoke of us not knowing when the final judgement would happen.

In this version of the story, the listeners would all have understood that each servant would have been given work to be done while the master was travelling abroad.  To watch, to be alert, meant doing the work to which they had been assigned:

·        the gardener was to garden,

·        the tutor was to teach the children,

·        the cook was to do the cooking,

·        the secretary was to answer letters for the master,

·        the accountant was to pay the bills,

·        the cleaners were to clean the house, and

·        the cook was to keep busy in the kitchen.

Be on watch.  Be alert.  

For you do not know when the time will come.

This was not a WATCH & WAIT order.  It did not mean to sit around anxiously waiting.  To be ready was to be busy serving their lord.  

So this story points to the way that Christ’s followers were to live.  They were to BE READY for the appearance of the holy Son of God whenever that might happen.

Remember the truth that flows from the story about the master of the house going abroad.  This story points the way for contemporary believers.

To be really ready we must be actively involved in our Lord’s work, work which has been clearly spelled out to us:

·        loving God as we go about loving one another.  

·        forgiving enemies,

·        praying for our persecutors,

·        giving without expected reward,

·        going the second mile,

·        storing up treasure not on earth

      but building spiritual capital in heaven

·        seeking not the praises of men,

·        healing the sick and releasing the prisoner,

·        welcoming the refugee,

·        rescuing the lost,

·        and housing the homeless.

This is what being ready for the appearance of the Lord means.  And only you can judge if you have become so involved in this work of ministry that you can say you are ready.

Be on watch.  Be alert.  

For you do not know when the time will come.

MAYBE IT IS TIME?

So, are you ready?

If you made an honest audit of your life and its priorities, would it show you as being ready for the appearance of Christ Jesus?  

“Are you ready” means today, because today is the moment of opportunity?

Remain faithful and alert, taking the opportunities as they arise, is the best kind of watching for Christ Jesus that we have.  That means being alert to those around us, be they family members who we take for granted or strangers in the supermarket

Are you ready?  Am I ready?  

The business of the master’s house is all around us.  It will be a wonderful thing to be awake and ready whenever he comes.

The Joy of the Master

Are you good at taking risks?  Some people are and others are so cautious you wonder how they even get to work every day.

The world we live in is one that is almost obsessed with risk mitigation.  Even the slightest risk – once made public is something we must avoid no matter how miniscule the risk.  And so our children aren’t allowed to play in the streets or climb trees or ride their bikes wherever they want to go.  Something might happen to them.  They might meet a stranger who will abuse them.

Some parents are so afraid of the risk their children will have an adverse reaction to a vaccination that they would prefer to expose their children to the risk of catching the diseases they could be vaccinated against.

And then on the other hand we have those people who seem to poke their tongues out at the risks they deliberately take on – such as climbing up rock faces without ropes to secure themselves against a fall; or base jumping; or ay of a whole range of extreme sports.  And what about those people who have no fear about putting up $40,000 to borrow $400,000 to buy an investment of some sort, and soon after take out another loan on the strength of what they bought before, and all the time they seem to be making one capital gain after another.

These are the issues that seem to be at stake in the parable of Jesus that Matthew tells us here right near the end of his Gospel.  It is clear from the context of the story that a key issue in it is the unexpected return of Jesus – some time, like a thief in the night.

But I think it is fair to say that most of us, when we read this story get stuck on what seems to be the unfair treatment of the man who got just 1000 silver coins.  To do this is to run the risk of missing the important thing we have to notice in the story.

There is something strange in the economy of God that many of us in the church have not understood again and again.  That is, that if you want real security you have to risk it.  Remember when Jesus said that if you want to save your life you have to be willing to lose it.  This parable is an example of this principle at work.

Now it is not talking about money.  It is talking about an attitude of mind and heart.  It is an attitude in which we understand that everything we have has been given to us and that the economy of God needs it to be working in Kingdom ways. 

The emotion that drives security is fear.  Listen to how the man with his 1000 silver coins described the Master:

‘Sir, I know you are a hard man; you reap harvests where you did not plant, and you gather crops where you did not scatter seed.  ²⁵ I was afraid, so I went off and hid your money in the ground.’

And that fear is what prevented him from doing anything in the economy of God.  He thought his primary task was to preserve the capital, as we might say today.  He thought all he had to do was protect what the Master had given him.

What he found out was that the Master really wanted him to do was use it.  Take a risk with it.  See what might happen if you dared to venture it in some risky enterprise.

I think it is very easy for us in the church to be like this.  We get caught up in the fear of losing what we have so much that we become paralysed and nothing happens.

Whereas the two who invested the money seemed to have much more freedom, and certainly joy when it came to facing up to the Master when he came back.  I find it interesting that the two faithful ones don’t get higher salaries or gold watches or plaques for their walls as some kind of reward for their faithfulness.  It seems that they get just two things:

1.     They get more responsibility.  In Jesus words “Because you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things.”  In a sense the reward for taking such risks is the encouragement – the responsibility – to take even more risks.

2.     But with the responsibility came a second reward: the joy of the Master’s presence.  The attitude of mind of the first servant towards the master would have found no joy in the master’s presence, and while his banishment is seen as a punishment, in some senses it was a natural consequence, rather than a direct action of the Master.

So, this parable clarifies for us the two alternative ways of being part of this Kingdom of Heaven. 

To the one choosing security over risk, the Lord remains a hard master, one who seems to reap where he does not sow and gather where he has not planted.  Fearfulness breeds more fear.  The prospect of joy and the freedom of response are gone.

But those who risk discover a Lord ready to share the delight of his presence and participation in his mission.  They discover the joy of an abundance mentality in which there is more than enough for everyone – and some to share beyond.  The Kingdom of Heaven knows no boundaries.  And they discover they have a link with the teller of this story, who knows all about risks and whose love is neither prudent nor calculating; indeed it is prodigal.

Be Prepared

When I was in primary school I was encouraged to join a Boy Scouts Group in my community.  I don’t think I stayed in it for a long time – then my family moved to Albany I got involved in a Boy’s Brigade which felt like the same thing only in church.

But I do remember the motto of the Boy Scouts, that Baden Powell knew was an important thing for us all to remember.  It was “BE PREPARED.”

In a sense this will be a theme that is reiterated in our services over the next seven weeks in the run up to Christmas.  Be Prepared!

Joshua, that great successor to Moses, just before his death, reminds the people of the wonderful ways in which God had shown his utter faithfulness to them since they left Egypt and had come to this wonderful “Promised Land” and that all God asks of them in response to his faithfulness is a commitment to similar faithfulness – and the kind of faithfulness he is talking of is the faithfulness in relationship that should exist between a man and woman who are married.

That is why the idea of foreign gods is so abhorrent.  They are like a partner in marriage committing adultery – and indeed this term “adulterer” was frequently applied to the people of Israel by the prophets because they had fallen away from their One and True God – The Lord, who rescued them from the Pharaoh.

The covenant Joshua drew up to remind them of all this was really a kind of BE PREPARED Manifesto – be prepared to do all these things to show that you intend always to be faithful to God.

There are echoes of PE PREPARED in the Psalm as well.  The Psalmist reminds the people that they took on an obligation to teach these things to their next generation so that they, too, would know and understand how important their faithfulness to God was.

The letter of Paul is also full of the BE PREPARED manifesto, as he encourages the people in Thessalonika to remember that those who die in Christ enter into a life in Christ and with God that cannot be taken away from them.

So let’s now have a little look at the Gospel in a way that we have not for a few weeks now.  Here in this story of the ten bridesmaids we have a description of something of what the Kingdom of Heaven is like – “At that time the Kingdom of Heaven will be like this: …”

There are two important elements to the parable.  Firstly there is that idea of BE PREPARED.  We have the wonderful image if the bridesmaids awaiting but they had had to wait so long that the expected amount of oil necessary for their lamps had been exhausted in the waiting, and only five had thought ahead of this possibility and made sure they had some extra supplies – but not enough to share.  There is nothing more to say here than make sure you are ready.  You know the Bridegroom is coming – even if you can’t be sure when.

This provides a nice Segway into the other key theme in this story.  I don’t know about you but this story goes rather against our cultural norms for weddings – it is usually the bride that keeps the guests waiting at a wedding.  In fact my wife was physically constrained by her brother – he was driving one of the bridal cars – to make sure she was late, even though she wanted to be there on time.

But getting to the point it is obvious that this is a story connected with the Christian notion of Christ’s coming again on some great and wonderful day in the future.  Other texts in the Gospels point to it.  Various texts in the Epistles point to it, and the great thinkers of the church have pondered on this idea at great length down through the millennia.  And so we have many ideas all blended together into what we make of this idea of The Second Coming.

When considering this story some might want to pick up on the sense of the unexpectedness of the moment when it happens – “You do not know the day or the hour.”

I want to offer a nuance on that idea.  I wonder if the important idea for the readers here is that the bridegroom’s coming has been delayed – and that in the delay there is a sense of grace.

We know there are texts of Jesus giving the very clear impression that his “second coming” would happen in the lifetime of that generation.  We know that Paul wrote at times warning of the imminent return of the Lord.  Yet as time passed it seems that people had to gradually reorient their expectations in this matter.

Remembering that Matthew was writing his Gospel at least 40 years after Jesus’ at a time when average life expectancy might have been 45 or 50 (so he must have been a venerable old man) in this parable near the end of his story he is giving us a hint that there might be a delay in the Bridegroom coming.

And of course we are reading this story 2000 year on, so we know there has been a delay.  While this delay has led some to consider that we have gotten this idea of a Second Coming wrong and even tried to construct different ideas of what the second coming might mean and that do not involve an event of signs and wonders accompanying the end of all time.

I want to offer the suggestion that in this delay we should see signs of God’s grace – for once the END has come upon us none else can enter into the joy of relationship with God into eternity.

This gift of time means that many more will have the time and opportunity to enter into this covenant of faithfulness with God by which they will be prepared for that final day.  Some people, it seems to me, seem impatient for this Second Coming because they see in it the moment when God’s judgement and condemnation is brought down on those who are not ready.  I am of the view that it is God’s will that none should be lost – and by his grace in this delay those who might otherwise be lost have been given more time to recognise their need to BE PREPARED.