20 October 2020
Tuesday of the Twenty-ninth Week in Ordinary Time
We belong to God; we were made for Him. The things of the earth were not made for Him but for us, to aid us in coming to know, love, and desire Him. Thus we must strive to live with a certain level of detachment from the things of this world, attaching our hearts rather to God and the things of Heaven. This includes not merely what we have, but also being mindful of who we serve.
Jesus speaks today of the necessity of living with girt loins and lit lamps; in other words, as servants at work and ready, day and night, for whenever their traveling master might return. He says such servants are blessed “…whom the master finds vigilant on his arrival.” Why? Their vigilance speaks to the master of two things: first, that there was nothing more important to his servants than doing his will and, second, they were more desirous of his return than they were desirous of anything else. Even when he was away he was first in their hearts and minds; even when he was not there they were going about his will rather than their own. In other words, their master need not have been present for him to have mastery over them: the hearts and minds of his servants were totally his.
Thus, in kind, the master has his servants sit at table and waits on them, which strikes us as strange. Imagine you worked at a bank, or a restaurant, and as a reward for your good service your boss simply did for you one day what you do for him. Yet Jesus is teaching us about Heaven and about His Second Coming: in other words, our first and only encounter with the fullness of God, at a moment we can never know or anticipate. If we live in readiness, with God and His will first and foremost in our hearts, what is our reward? Our master will give us Himself. Look at the behavior of the servants again: doing their master’s will even when he was not present, awaiting his return constantly, even in the night with lamps alight: their master is all they wanted! When we live in faithful service to God, seeking always to do His will, striving for holiness, making confession a regular habit so we may live in a state of grace as much as possible, we are saying to God and to the world that He is our priority and our chief desire. How would God reward us if not to give us what we desire most: Himself? Consider the rebellious servant, who insists on being their own master, doing their own will, living as though they will never die, striving after the treasures and pleasures of this world as though Heaven was a guarantee, or did not exist at all: what is their reward?
God will give them exactly what they want most: their own selves, period, forever. And such souls discover quickly that the dreadful solitude of Hell, where they come into full possession of what they believed was their greatest treasure, is the greatest poverty of all.