Thursday in the Twenty-First Week of Ordinary Time

The Feast of St. Monica

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.”

Throughout his Gospel, St. Matthew records very many instances of the Lord Jesus teaching about the coming judgment at the end of the world.  Doing so enabled Matthew to console the persecuted Jewish Christians for whom he was writing.  In Matthew’s Gospel more than the others, we see the wicked, often thinly disguised Pharisees, scribes, and the leadership in Jerusalem — their persecutors — being punished severely while the faithful are rewarded.  The Gospel reading for today is taken from the twenty-fourth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel.  Chapters twenty-four and twenty-five contain the last public addresses of the Lord before his Passion begins and so they constitute a farewell speech.  He does not address large crowds again.  His last words to the crowds are about the second coming, and the next time large crowds see him will be at his second coming.

The reading is cut out from the middle of the Lord’s words on his coming again for judgment, and the context is his reason for people to live in  expectation of it.  In the Greek text, this reading is connected to those words with oun, which means “therefore”.  The Greek verb here is gregoreíte, which does not mean “stay awake” but “be on the alert”, or, “keep watch”.  The difference is significant.  A person can be awake but unaware.  Jesus is telling people to stay on their toes, to keep alert, “for you do not know on which day your Lord will come.”  We might ask why it is necessary for us to keep alert, since the Lord will certainly come again whether we are paying attention or not.  Foreseeing this question, Jesus speaks in a parable: “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.”  We can understand this in two ways.  First, that Jesus is the thief who comes while everyone is asleep, sure of their safety.  But complacency is not real safety and if the thief comes and is able to break in, the sleepers will lose everything.  They could protect themselves with good works, and these would act as “the master of the house” keeping watch at night.  Second, it can be understood as the devil seeking to steal away a person’s faith, since faith can also be lost through complacency.

The moral Jesus gives here, “So too, you also must be prepared, for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come”, he repeats several times in this section in the same way as he repeats “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you shall not have life in you” over and over again as recorded the sixth chapter of St. John’s Gospel.  We must live holy lives today as though our souls will be demanded of us tonight (cf. Luke 12, 20).

“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.”  The servant “put in charge of his household” — the master’s household — is the disciple of Christ who “distributes to them their food”, that is, feeds others the Gospel, “at the proper time”, doing so prudently and skillfully.  “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.”  This servant is “blessed” in the sense that he is praiseworthy and also in the spiritual sense: “Come, ye blessed of my Father, possess you the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world” (Matthew 25, 34).

“My master is long delayed.”  The wicked servant, that is, one who has no interest in the master except to supplant him, persuades himself that the master will not return.  He may even tell himself that the master does not really exist, and so he is not bound by any objective rules or laws the master had set down — and not even basic human decency — and acts according to to his lusts and propensity for extravagance and violence.  But here he acts against his own interests because he is a servant and does not know how to be a master.  The other servants quit and the house falls apart, untended.  The crops are not planted, or not planted at the right time and they fail.  The returning master finds his property in a disastrous shape and so he “will punish him severely and assign him a place with the hypocrites, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.”  The wicked servant sails aloud in the agony of his suffering, and grinds his teeth in frustration of what he could have had if he had simply done his duty, and in rabid envy at the reward of the good and faithful servants. 

The Gospels are not for the faint of heart, and particularly not these chapters of Matthew’s Gospel, but for those who have the strength of faith and the love of God, they strengthen their strength and deepen their love.

We celebrate today the Feast of St. Monica, a woman of great faith and perseverance in prayer.  We ask her intercession for us below that we might imitate her virtues and come to share her reward.