The Gospel today is about being ready to meet our God. There is praise for the servant who is ready. We cannot know the day when the time to meet our God will come so we need to be prepared.
There are three things that we can do to be ready and two things that we should avoid.
Three things we should do:
- Do our best to make sure our work is, as much as possible, completed when God finds us. We should tie up loose ends. Deal with that which is half done. Things that we should have done.
- We should hope that God finds us a peace with our fellow men and women. As one author stated, “No man should let the sun go down on his anger.”
- We should hope that God will find us at peace within ourselves
Two things we should avoid:
- Be careful of dividing life into compartments/moral integrity requires the integration of the different parts of our life and behavior. Be careful of dividing our life into a part where God is present and a part where we never think of God. We too often tend to draw a line between the sacred and the secular. We have heard the expression “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”. What happens in Church should not stay in Church. We are called to take the message of the Gospel and preach it by our words and actions to a secular world.
- Be careful of thinking, ‘I have plenty of time to put things right, get my act together, before Jesus comes’. Sir James Barrie once said that, “one of the most dangerous days in a man’s life is when he discovers the word’ tomorrow”.
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote,
“The morning drum call on my eager ear, thrills unforgotten yet, the morning dew.
Lies yet undried along my field of noon.
But now I pause at whiles in what I do
And Count the bell and trembles lest I hear, the sunset gun too soon”
The passage ends with the warning, “knowledge and privilege always bring responsibility.”