The master who serves

A word for the week

Picture a house at the end of an evening with its lamps still burning. Somebody inside is up, and dressed, and listening for the gate, and glad about it. That is the picture Jesus draws, and it is worth sitting with, because people usually reach for a much grimmer one: a nervous household forever glancing over its shoulder, unable to enjoy an evening for fear of being caught out. No one could keep that up for a month. It is nothing like what he says.

He says: be like servants waiting for their master to come home from a wedding feast, dressed and with their lamps lit, so that the moment he knocks they can open the door at once. That is the whole image. Not cowering. Sitting up for someone you are glad to see. Think of the difference between waiting up in fear for bad news and waiting up for someone you love who is out late. Both are awake. Only one is at peace. Jesus is describing the second.

Then he says something almost too good to believe, and it is easy to read straight past it. The master comes in, finds them up, and ties on the apron himself. He sits them down and waits on them. Read that again. The master takes the servant's place. The one they stayed up for serves them the meal. This is the God Jesus keeps showing us: the one who kneels, who washes feet, who feeds. It does not end in a reckoning. It ends at a table, with him serving.

So the question this passage puts to you is about the kind of house you keep. A lamp already lit is only a life already being lived his way on an ordinary Tuesday, with nothing that would have to be scrambled and changed if somebody knocked tonight. The ones caught out in this story are not wicked. They had simply let the house go dark, meaning to see to it later, and later is the one thing nobody is promised.

He adds the harder line, the one about the thief, to sharpen it. If the man of the house had known the night, he would have sat up. He does not get to know. You cannot post a guard for one particular night when you have no idea which night it is, so you keep the house well on all of them, as a way of living rather than a thing you switch on.

And keeping the house is not grim work. It is the lamp lit, the door easy to open, the bread where anyone could find it, the love practiced on the people you actually live with. Do that and there is nothing left to prepare. He is the one who ties on the apron. You only have to be up, and glad, and at the door.