Luke 12. 32 – 40
Fr Alex
“You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”
As a parent of five young children I find words like “you must be ready” quite triggering – because they’re words I use very often, in the Vicarage. And they’re usually fraught with feelings of tension and distress!
There are variations on the theme. “Why on earth aren’t you ready to leave?” “We were supposed to be there five minutes ago.” “What do you mean you only have one shoe!?”
Perhaps not exactly the situation Our Lord envisaged when he warned his followers to be ready. But what does he mean? What does it mean to “be ready” for Jesus?
A quick Google search gives us a definition of ‘ready’: it is to be “in a suitable state for an action or situation; fully prepared.” As well as people, things can also be ‘ready’: think of ‘ready money,’ something “easily available or obtained.” And who can forget Boris Johnson’s various ‘oven-ready’ Brexit deals?
Being ready is certainly a good thing, but it takes some effort, doesn’t it. We have to plan in advance, ensure everything is where it needs to be, put contingencies in place for potential delays or disasters.
If my children aren’t ready to leave the house, it’s because they haven’t tried hard enough – or, more likely, their parents should’ve started helping them get ready a bit sooner.
At first glance, our Gospel reading suggests the same sort of thing. These servants must be dressed for action, lamps lit, waiting to open the door for their master when he returns.
But for what purpose must these servants be ready? Stunningly, Jesus turns upside-down our expectations. He says that the servants must be ready for their master to “have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them.”
Their readiness lies not in well-thought-out plans or contingencies: not really in any great effort at all. To be ready, is simply to be expectant; to wait and be open to what their master might do for them. They don’t have to plan and manage the feast; they just have to be there, and their master will come and serve them.
We hear this reading often in Advent, which is the great season of prayerful expectation: looking for Christ to be born again at Christmas, making room in our hearts for him to be born again within us; making ourselves open to all that he will do for us.
But today is also an excellent time to be reminded of these themes, as we look ahead to our celebration of the Blessed Virgin Mary on Friday. I hope you will be able to join us for our Mass in the evening.
Mary is in a sense the embodiment of Jesus’ encouragement to be ready. When the angel Gabriel came to her, she wasn’t ‘ready’ for his words in any conventional sense; it was a total surprise; she was only a young girl engaged to be married, who might become a scandalous figure if what the angel said came true. And how could anyone possibly be ‘ready’ to become the Mother of God?
But she was ‘ready’ in the Christian sense, in her simple openness to God; her pure and humble faith that God is good, and that to serve him is to receive the most wonderful blessings: to be served in return by God in Jesus, who would become her loving and obedient Son.
Mary’s path was not an easy one, as we know: as Simeon foretold, a sword of anguish would pierce Mary’s soul as she watched her Son die on the cross.
But she would experience that same stunning reversal of our human expectations, the upside-down nature of God’s action in the world. A lowly girl in the middle of nowhere, now honoured as the Queen of Heaven. Her Son, dead and buried down in the earth, now alive and exalted at God’s right hand on high, ruling over all.
Perhaps Mary wasn’t aware of all that would transpire as a result of her universe-altering “yes” to God. But because of her openness to God, her readiness for her Master, she knew the transformation that was possible.
“He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.”
This is the transformation of which she sang to her cousin Elizabeth while she still held God within her womb, with the certainty of the past-tense; a transformation that God has already brought about, through what he and she were doing together.
And this is the transformation that is possible for us, if we follow Mary’s example of openness to God.
May we be ready for God: not by any great effort of our own, not by meticulous preparation and careful planning – God often chuckles at our plans.
But rather through our prayerful expectation of God’s goodness; by being awake, joyful, open to him, and ready for all that he will do for us and with us. It might be in an unexpected way and at an unexpected hour; but God desires to be present and active in our lives. How will we be ready for him? Amen.