There is an old story about Pope John XXIII, now a saint, who of course was pope for five incredibly eventful years for the church in the middle of the last century. He was asked once in an interview what he would tell all the people who worked in the Vatican if he suddenly got the news that Jesus’s second coming was at hand and he was making his triumphal return to the earth. The pope said what he would tell people was: Look busy.
And in a way that is also the message of today’s gospel. This time of waiting we are in between Christ’s resurrection and the end times is for us above all a time for work, not for passive waiting or distraction with things that don’t matter. The master has left us in charge of all his property, he has also left us everything we need to care for it, and he has told us how to go about this work and what our priorities should be. In fact we have been created for that work, it is supposed to be a source of joy for us.
But being human, we all find ways to let this good news pass right by us. There are a lot of reasons for this. I think we sometimes imagine that if God has work for us to do that it will by definition be something we will not want to do or not be able to do. I can’t tell you how many people over the years have told me that they are almost afraid to pray, because if they really heard what God desired for them, it would clearly be something that they would not be ready for or that they wouldn’t like at all. Because isn’t that what God does, dream up impossible tasks, you know, voluntary poverty and self-denia and helping people who need more help than anyone possibly can give? Isn’t that what God always asks for?
And so, we distance ourselves. We use this idea that God’s tasks are impossibly demanding to leave them for other, stronger, more faithful people to worry about. Or we imagine there will be another time in our lives when we have our act more together, and we will be more ready to devote ourselves to whatever this mysterious God wants from us. And so we become these unready servants in today’s gospel, lying low, distracted, waiting for some other time or some other person and as a result not seeing the master arriving right in front of them.
One of the messages of this gospel is that perhaps we have gotten God wrong, and that we should give God more credit than we usually do. Because this image of God who only wants heroic and impossible tasks from us is mostly wrong, and really it’s not really the image of God that we’re seeing here, is it? These servants in the gospel are asked to be ready, not super-heroic; they are asked to be available and paying attention, not superhuman. When we picture a God who wants only difficulty for us, we miss the immediacy of what is available to us for the doing. We dismiss the talent gifts that we each already have, whatever they are, the gift of listening to people, the simple acts of spending time, the straightforward but tiresome work of speaking up and being an advocate for people, or just for one person, who are victims of the injustice of this world. It’s the kind of work which sometimes seems so simply futile and yet nothing changes without it.
Our job is to know the work that comes naturally to us because it is God’s gift to us as an individual and put it to work making this world ready. It’s not superhuman work. The kingdom is built with every sort of little brick like that, gifts we’ve already been given, gifts that we don’t put away for some future date but start using now. This gospel reminds us that now is not the time to close ourselves in or to wait until later, the moment is now for us to be ready. Pope Francis used to say that there are people who through the perseverance of their love are like wells that irrigate the desert. And we live in a desert that desperately needs water.
And here’s one unforgettable image from this gospel that we can easily overlook. Sure, on the one hand this gospel tells us that we are under a certain amount of very real pressure to deliver. to live up to our promise to be a servant and to do our part, whatever it is. On the other hand, look at the kind of master we have, not a distant manager who is constantly unhappy with his work force, but a master who turns the tables on his servants and waits on them hand and foot, that’s us, when we take even one step of readiness towards working on his kingdom. Where else in the bible do you see an image of God waiting on people like a servant, simply out of gratitude that they were ready for work, ready to pay attention? That’s the kind of God you might want to be ready to work for, the kind of God who might die for you.
So whatever you have been waiting to do for God or putting off for another time, whatever you have been ignoring, whatever or whomever your heart has become hardened against, you have a master who will rejoice in whatever step you take to be ready for him. Don’t just look busy. Instead, you might find great joy if you actually got busy. You might find God willing to do almost anything for you.