Thursday in the 21st Week of Ordinary Time, August 31, 2023

Matthew 24, 42-51

Jesus said to his disciples: “Stay awake!  For you do not know on which day your Lord will come. Be sure of this: if the master of the house had known the hour of night when the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and not let his house be broken into. So too, you also must be prepared, for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come.  Who, then, is the faithful and prudent servant, whom the master has put in charge of his household to distribute to them their food at the proper time? Blessed is that servant whom his master on his arrival finds doing so. Amen, I say to you, he will put him in charge of all his property. But if that wicked servant says to himself, ‘My master is long delayed,’ and begins to beat his fellow servants, and eat and drink with drunkards, the servant’s master will come on an unexpected day and at an unknown hour and will punish him severely and assign him a place with the hypocrites, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.”

“Stay awake!  For you do not know on which day your Lord will come.”  The Lord’s teaching on the end of the world begins in St. Matthew’s Gospel at the beginning of Chapter 24.  The day before the Lord gave this teaching he had entered Jerusalem triumphantly, with the Jews thinking he was the long-awaited Messiah.  Matthew then describes him as coming out of the Temple and the Apostles marveling at its buildings and courtyards, and telling them that of these things “there shall not be left here a stone upon a stone that shall not be destroyed” (Matthew 24, 2).  The Apostles anxiously asked for the time when this would happen, and the Lord proceeded to tell them all about his return in glory to judge the living and the dead while also mentioning the destruction of Jerusalem which would come first.  We can also understand these verses as pertaining to the end of our lives on earth.

In the verses used for today’s Gospel Reading, the Lord teaches the necessity for the faithful to possess and exercise both perseverance and alertness.  He means, From now on, keep vigilant, for the judgment is coming.  That is to say, we should not start taking the second coming seriously when we are older, but every day of our lives we should be prepared for it.  We need not be obsessed with it so that we do nothing but wait, but we should be aware of our need to build up our faith and to fill up our treasure of good deeds in heaven.  “Be sure of this: if the master of the house had known the hour of night when the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and not let his house be broken into.”  The Lord emphasizes urgency with his image: if the master of the house will stay alert for the hour the thief will come, how much more should we, whose very souls are at stake, keep awake and aware.  In this way we can see temptation and sin as a distraction by our soul’s enemy so that we are not ready when the Lord comes, but performing good works as engaging in this vigilance.

“So too, you also must be prepared, for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come.”   We might think back to the first Passover, when the Jews ate a late dinner with their coats on and were ready at a moment’s notice to rise and to leave Egypt.  We, likewise, must be ready to leave the Egypt of this life for the Promised Land of heaven.

“Who, then, is the faithful and prudent servant, whom the master has put in charge of his household to distribute to them their food at the proper time?”  The master has put a servant in charge and gone away for an unknown period.  Jesus asks the question: Who is this?  It is each of us, for the Lord puts us “in charge” of helping the people around us to get to heaven, nourishing then with our words and deeds.  “Blessed is that servant whom his master on his arrival finds doing so. Amen, I say to you, he will put him in charge of all his property.”  How many actions we have performed which we would not want to be our last actions on earth!  What do we want to be doing when the Lord comes, whether at the end of our lives on earth or at the great judgment if we are alive at that time?  The servant who is doing his master’s work when he comes will be put in charge of all his property: this servant will be raised from his earthly work to a lofty place in heaven, there to intercede for the conversion of the world.

“My master is long delayed.”  We may be tempted during our lives to end our alertness, to cease our vigilance.  We grow weary and the wait seems long.  We cease to nourish with our words and good example the people whom God has given us, and this amounts to “beating” them and “drinking” with “drunkards” — those who have given in to self-indulgence to the extent that they are senseless and uninterested as to the master’s return.  “The servant’s master will come . . . and will punish him severely and assign him a place with the hypocrites.”  The master will punish that neglectful servant for not being ready himself for his return as well as for not helping the others get ready for it.  They will be punished to some degree too, for they were not helpless, bot not as severely as the one who was supposed to help them (cf. Luke 12, 47-48).  This wretched servant will be assigned a place with “the hypocrites”, the godless, the word the Lord used for the scribes and Pharisees (which may indicate that the Lord may have originally meant that the Pharisees were this servant who was supposed “to distribute to [the Jews] their food at the proper time”).  In this place there will be “wailing and grinding of teeth.”  St. Thomas Aquinas says that the wailing will be due to the exterior suffering afflicted on the damned and that the grinding of teeth will be due to interior hatred and guilt for having known the Lord’s will and rejected it.

Holy pictures and crucifixes in our homes, and medals and scapulars on our person help us to stay vigilant as well as the regular habit of prayer.  We should take advantage of whatever we can to keep our minds on heaven, and the Lord who reigns there.