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Gospel: Luke 12: 35-40
Jesus said to his disciples:
“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.
Blessed are those servants
whom the master finds vigilant on his arrival.
Amen, I say to you, he will gird himself,
have the servants recline at table, and proceed to wait on them.
And should he come in the second or third watch
and find them prepared in this way,
blessed are those servants.
Be sure of this:
if the master of the house had known the hour
when the thief was coming,
he would not have let his house be broken into.
You also must be prepared, for at an hour you do not expect,
the Son of Man will come.”
The Gospel of the Lord.
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“What time is it?”
This is a question people ask throughout the day. “Am I early?” … “Am I late?” … “Did you read my email?” … “When is dinner?” … “When will this sermon end?”
“What time is it?”
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Time is a curious thing.
In our youth, time feels like it drags on forever. For example, children not only count their birthdays, but also their half-birthdays.
“How old are you?” One might ask.
“I’m three and a half!”
Teenagers count down their time to getting their driver’s license, to their next date, to graduating from high school.
Young adults dream about their futures, plotting the time it’ll take to make their next career move. Middle-agers often reflect on time-gone-by, how life did – or didn’t – go according to plan… and what to do now.
The elderly often walk down memory lane, lauding the days of long ago, when life wasn’t moving at breakneck speed.
Time is fast and slow. It drags on, while slipping through our fingers.
We never have enough of it, yet we sleep 1/3 of it away. And none of us knows just how much time we have left.
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The Greeks had two different notions of time. There was chronos, the tick-tock type of time that we focus on throughout our day. And kairos, an appointed time, a moment of unique consequence when a person’s entire life changes.
Think of winning the lottery; a marriage proposal; a pregnancy; a health-scare; or, in the Gospels, the invitation from Jesus to, “Follow me.” When a kairos moment like this emerges, we must act.
Imagine Saint Peter standing along the Sea of Galilee, mending his fishing nets on an otherwise ordinary day. Suddenly, Jesus of Nazareth approaches him and invites Peter to become his disciple.
In terms of tick-tock time, this encounter may have taken a matter of minutes… or less.
But Peter’s “yes” forever changes the direction of his life, as well as the course of world – and salvation – history.
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In today’s Gospel, Jesus challenges the way we think of time through a parable.
“Gird your loins and light your lamps,” he says, “and be like servants who await their master’s return from a wedding, ready to open immediately when he comes and knocks.”
I’d imagine the faithful servants spent their time tending to their master’s estate, while the unfaithful servants took their time for granted, breaking into the master’s cabinets, taking what wasn’t theirs, indulging in selfish pleasures.
For each servant, the master’s return was a kairos moment, forever changing the direction of their lives.
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So, what might this mean for us?
God places a claim on our time, expecting us to use it well. As Pope John XXIII wrote in his diary as a young priest, “Everything God has given me to do, I intend to do it all.”
How do we spend our time? Do we use it in ways that glorify God? Do we take it for granted?
Is this Gospel passage a kairos moment, where the Lord is urging us to take a risk, to follow him in a new direction, a call to change our ways?
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Think of the barn builder from last week’s Gospel. He believed that he had so much wealth and time on his hands that the only thing he could imagine doing was building larger barns for himself. Once they were built, he planned to, “Rest, eat, drink, and be merry!”
But God called him a “fool,” demanding his life back that very night.
I’d imagine this man might’ve had a host of excuses while standing before the Lord about how he used his time, but the reality is that he lived his life as a practical atheist, not thinking about God or his neighbor’s wellbeing once, only himself.
If the Lord came for us tonight, would we welcome him like the joyful servants awaiting their master’s return? Or, like the barn builder, would we feel cheated, as if a “thief” had broken into our lives, taking what was not his?
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Time is a curious thing.
We often ask, “Am I early?” … “Am I late?” …
“When will this sermon end?”
Jesus encourages us to also consider how we use our time here on earth. “Is it time to double-down? Or time to change our ways?”
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Image credits: (1) BBC (2) National Institute of Standards and Technology (3) ppt Online