Be sure of this:
if the master of the house had known the hour
when the thief was coming,
he would not have let his house be broken into.
The coming of the Son of Man is always a surprise for powers who are hostile to him. The strong man, the Devil, fully armed, guarded his possessions, that is, the souls of women and men, until one stronger than he, that is, the Son of Man, appeared and overcame him (see Luke 11:21). To the powers of darkness especially the Son of Man appeared as a thief, taking from them the dominance over humankind that they have previously enjoyed.
You also must be prepared,
for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come.
We too must be prepared, not so much out of fear that he is coming to rob us, but more as though he were coming on a rescue mission in order to set us free. We have already been given great freedom in our baptism by the gift of the Holy Spirit, delivered from the kingdom of darkness unto the Kingdom of light. But there are still strongholds in each of our lives where this freedom is yet imperfect. In these areas Jesus wants to teach us who live by the Spirit to also stand by his power and to walk in time with his guidance. But it seems as though his deliverance still works better if he catches the earthly and selfish parts of us by surprise in order to better bypass the defenses we have built to keep control of our lives by keeping him from interfering at too deep a level.
so that the manifold wisdom of God
might now be made known through the Church
to the principalities and authorities in the heavens.
We are not meant to wait in total ignorance for the coming of Jesus. We are meant to be able to be able to understand his plans on a spiritual level by listening to the revelation given to the Church in Scripture and Tradition. This vision revealed by faith does not satisfy our ego much as we wait, and we must therefore persist in a posture of readiness. We must resist the temptations of the ego to forget that we are waiting and for whom. We resist well when we remain rooted in the revelation of the master's plan. When we forget that plan our resistance to temptation tends to evaporate.
But if that servant says to himself,
‘My master is delayed in coming,’
and begins to beat the menservants and the maidservants,
to eat and drink and get drunk,
then that servant’s master will come
on an unexpected day and at an unknown hour
and will punish the servant severely
and assign him a place with the unfaithful.
For our part we cannot use the excuse that we did not know the master's will and hope thereby to get off with only a light beating, and neither should be content with such excuses. We who know the master's will can be faithful and prudent stewards of the gifts that the master himself has entrusted to each one of us. We can recognize and remember the genuine goodness of the rescue mission for which we still wait, the complete freedom for which we still hope. And for that reason we will not hesitate to share it with others. For it is a much better thing to understand and to be a willing participant in this plan, beginning even here and now to enjoy the freedom that Jesus will bring definitively on the last day.
Shout with exultation, O city of Zion,
for great in your midst
is the Holy One of Israel!
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