Tuesday of the Twenty-ninth Week in Ordinary Time

Notice that these servants are both active and passive. They passively sit and wait. They’re not out in the streets looking for their master to come back. They sit at home and wait. But they’re also active because they are ready. They’re dressed, and their lamps are lit. That detail is important because it tells us what the spiritual life should look like. It has both an active and a passive component.

The passive component matters. It’s essential that we get that right, that we wait on the Lord and his return. There are some in our world today—and this has become particularly popular again for some reason—who try to coerce the Lord’s return. Based on their own understanding of Scripture, views we would reject in the Church, they try to bring about changes in history to make Jesus come back and bring everything to an end.

We don’t do that. Even if we had a proper understanding of what the timetable looked like, the Church would still tell us, “Don’t do that.” We are to wait on the Lord. We are not trying to hurry him up. We allow him to work at his own pace.

Nonetheless, there is an active component to the spiritual life. For these servants, it was getting dressed and lighting their lamps. For us, it looks like prayer, understanding, and works of charity. That lamp is a beautiful image because a lamp in that time is both fire and light. Light is our common metaphor for understanding and knowledge. It’s what helps us see in the dark. Fire should make us think of the Sacred Heart, the fire of charity that burns within the Lord. So that image brings together knowledge and charity.

That is how we wait on the Lord: through good works, through prayer, through learning, and through showing charity to others. That is our role in this world. We spend our time going out and serving others, learning about the Lord, and trying to grow in charity. We learn to love the world and God himself in the way that Jesus models for us. That is where our minds and hearts should be.

And it’s so easy to get distracted from that. For these servants in the parable, distraction looks like falling asleep, not getting dressed, or letting the lamp go out. For us, it looks like delaying prayer, saying to yourself, “Oh, I’m a little tired. I can get to that tomorrow. I’ll pray two rosaries tomorrow.” And before it’s over with, you owe God thirty or forty before you finally get back in the rhythm. So we can’t keep putting it off.

The same is true of learning to show charity to our neighbor. It’s so easy to fall into that trap: “I’m going to feel really good if I make this comment, and I can just go to confession later. So I’m not going to worry about it.” We keep delaying learning how to live as Christ has taught us.

That is falling asleep for us. That is failing to light the lamp. That’s failing to get dressed. And we have to avoid that. It is an easy temptation, but we must push it away, constantly working on our life of prayer, constantly growing in knowledge and charity so that we are ready.

We do not know when the Lord will return, whether at the end of history or in our own lives individually. But we know he is coming. And we want to be standing at the door in those moments, ready to answer the knock immediately and enter into that great gift of eternal life.