Gird your loins and light your lamps
and be like servants who await their master's return from a wedding,
ready to open immediately when he comes and knocks.
If we remember that we are meant to be servants of the master things will go well even when he is visibly absent. But we all face a temptation that goes back to the serpent and the tree. It insinuates that we are meant to be are own masters. It makes us want to push back against any prospect of hierarchy and insist that we alone are sovereign over our lives. Particularly in a fallen world where we have seen so much abuse of power it is difficult for us to even imagine that there might also be a valid use. We gradually come to believe that the only basis we have to obey others is a mutual, contractual consensus. In proof of this, it probably sounds fairly sane and standard. It isn't immediately obvious to us that we are not all that different from anarchists, doing our best to enforce our own boundaries, and preserve our own power. There are actually higher principles for governance than mutual consent. Truth and goodness matter more. Even if all the world consents to evil it cannot thereby make a valid law. Even if all the world agrees to believe a lie it doesn't thereby become true. Of course men and women are in no position to be absolute enforcers of what is true and beautiful. But if we fail to remember that there is such a hierarchy we are setting ourselves up to fail. When we come to believe that there is no master who will one day return, and that we are the final authorities ruling our individual lives, we tend to slide toward selfishness. We do those things with which we can, apparently, get away unpunished, simply because we desire them. After all, we have failed to set up any absolute principle to compete with our desires. Among the things we miss without such a principle is any justifiable reason to be concerned about our neighbors beyond how they might wield their own power against us. But our fear of consequences can only go so far.
Blessed are those servants
whom the master finds vigilant on his arrival.
When we do remember that we are servants who await our masters return we live differently. We live with hope. And the consequences of this hope are a more meaningful life for us, free from the ever encroaching darkness of despair. Our hope also bears fruit for those around us as we work to make this world more truly human, treating others with dignity because we recognize that they are (or are potentially) fellow servants of our one Lord. The same principles of goodness and truth call us to love both God and neighbor, and doing either automatically reinforces the other.
Amen, I say to you, he will gird himself,
have them recline at table, and proceed to wait on them.
It is true that we don't earn anything from Jesus by our faithfulness to him. And yet he longs to give us so much, all as grace. The important thing is to remember that he is Lord, and thus understand that we have no right to demand anything from him or our fellow servants. When we understand that everything is grace we become more and more open to receive it. He can't give us what will only reinforce our own ego, since that would not be good, even for us. But he will happily give us all things (see Romans 8:32), as long as the thanksgiving overflows to God (see Second Corinthians 4:15).
Chris Tomlin - Everlasting God
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