Sermon at Parish Mass, St Mary's Somers Town, Ordinary 19 2010

Wis 18:6-9

Heb 11:1-2, 8-19

Lk 12:32-48

“Jesus is coming. Look busy!” You can buy T shirts and bumper stickers with that slogan, if you want to. Hopefully they’re meant in a light-hearted way, rather than as a doctrinal statement.

Jesus teaches us to be alert and ready for what he calls “the coming of the Son of Man”. That’s not the same as being busy. If you’re too busy you can be rather inattentive, and may miss things that are important. Jesus says, be alert, be ready.

Ready for what? Is this a teaching about the end of the world and the final judgement? Certainly, a part of the teaching of Jesus and his Church is about the End, the last things when God will complete his saving work, when his judgement on all human life will be made known and the redeemed will be gathered into his Kingdom. We’ll say as much in the Creed in a few minutes.

It’s easy, though, to fall into the trap of thinking that all this talk of the End, of the coming of the Son of Man, is about something very remote from us. Something that may happen in an indefinitely postponed future, but doesn’t really have an immediate concern for us in the here and now. But to think that way is to miss completely the force of Jesus’ teaching.

Jesus is talking about something for which we need to be alert and ready now. The first clue to this is in the instruction to be “dressed for action”. What doesn’t come out very well in our translation is that this is a direct quotation from Exodus 12:11, and it’s the instruction for the Passover, and that first reading from Wisdom was a rather obscure reference to this.

The Passover, you’ll remember, was a meal to be eaten in haste, because it was that very night that the Israelites were to leave the land of Egypt. So the bread was unleavened, because it’s quicker to cook, and the dress code was: have your girdle round your waist, your sandals on your feet and a staff in your hand. The girdle round your waist was to hook up your long robes so you could actually run.

The Passover was urgent and hasty because God was coming to deliver his people right there and then, no time to waste. And Jesus is saying exactly the same thing to his audience in this passage. He is saying, here and now, God is delivering his people. Can you see what’s happening? Are you ready?

He then tells two parables to illustrate this point, and like all parables they’re stories in which strange and unexpected things happen, and our perception of the way things ought to be is challenged.

The master returns from a wedding very late, and expects to find his servants still up and waiting for him. So far that’s what we might expect, too. But then the master swaps roles with his servants, and serves them, waiting on them at table. That is not expected at all. Clearly the Kingdom that God is giving to his little flock is very different from human expectations. This Kingdom belongs to a new order in which the most important thing is service, not power. And Jesus will make exactly this point again at the last supper when he says “I am among you as one who serves”. We have to unlearn everything we know about how human society works if we are to enter the Kingdom.

Then Jesus shifts the imagery from that happy but unexpected scene to one which is quite unhappy and disturbing. Suddenly, there’s a burglar coming, but because this is a parable even the burglar behaves strangely. Instead of breaking through the door or a window or the roof – probably the weakest part of a first century Palestinian house – this burglar literally digs through the wall of the house. This is the Incredible Hulk of burglars!

This is where parables present us with a challenge, an obstacle to our understanding. Jesus tells these two stories, one which is strange but has a happy outcome, and the other which is strange but disturbing and upsetting. But both stories are about the coming of the Kingdom. Both stories are about being alert and ready, because God is rescuing his people, and doing it here and now.

In this Gospel passage we are at the scene of a break-in. God in Jesus is visiting his people, but unexpectedly, and in a way which shatters our pre-conceptions about how human society works. Just as the burglar demolishes the walls of the house, so Jesus breaks down the whole framework of how we thought we were meant to live. Masters become servants. Roles are exchanged, boundaries crossed. The Son of Man comes like a thief, like an outsider, to break down the walls which we thought we needed to keep the insiders in and the outsiders out.

We discover that our true life does not come from defining ourselves over against other people. The city “founded and built by God”, as Hebrews puts it, is very different from the city we human beings construct for ourselves if left to our own devices.

So, the story of the master who serves his servants, and the story of the burglar who comes crashing through the wall of the house, are about the same thing. They are both about leaving off the way we used to live, and beginning to live in the new and different life which Jesus reveals.

That can be a painful experience, of course, because it means letting go of what we are used to. But Jesus is not out to get us! It has pleased our Father to give us the Kingdom, and we are loved and welcomed. But the Kingdom is different from what we have known, and we need to be alert, to be ready, for how it is different.

St Peter, at the end of this passage, is starting to get it. He gets the point that the Kingdom is a new way of living. But he still wants to know who’s in charge, and specifically whether he and the other Apostles are the ones who are going to have authority. So Jesus has to repeat the lesson about service being the standard of authority in the Kingdom, and makes the point quite forcefully. Peter is beginning to be alert and ready, but not quite, at this point, alert enough.

We, too, have to be alert and ready. The Kingdom is upon us, here and now. We’re at the scene of a break-in. At this Mass, Jesus breaks in to the ordinary stuff of our daily lives, into a meal, into bread and wine. He gives us his body and blood so that we can live the life that he lives, the new life of the Kingdom.

The Eucharist is the sacrament of transformation, and the new life we receive here breaks in to the rest of our lives, too.

Bread and wine are transformed into the body and blood of Christ. A motley collection of sinners is transformed into the Church, which is the new way of being human. Fear is transformed into love, authority into service. A life of rivalry and defining ourselves over against other people is transformed into a life which we don’t need to define because it is rooted in Christ, it is his gift.

The old life boundaried by sin and death becomes the new life of Jesus the Risen One. Life without limit, the life of joy in the Kingdom. Here and now. Do not be afraid, little flock, for it has pleased your Father to give you the Kingdom.