Tuesday in the Twenty-Ninth Week of Ordinary Time

Scripture Readings: Rom 5:12, 15b, 17-21;  Lk 12:35-38

In today’s Gospel, did you notice what the master does when he returns?   He girds himself and waits on his own servants. This isn’t the natural order of things where servants wait on their master.  Instead, Jesus reveals a supernatural order where our Lord waits on us!  This is amazing!  We are transformed from servants into honored guests.  

But there’s a catch.   We have to be waiting to open the door when our Lord comes.  After World War Two the playwright, Samuel Beckett, published a drama titled “Waiting for Godot.”  It’s a satire about waiting for someone who never comes.  The only prop in the play is a dead tree, a symbol that they wait in vain, because the tree of the cross is dead, we are not saved, there is no ultimate meaning to our existence, no resurrection.   

In “Waiting for Godot” the characters lose faith and become apathetic. They don’t care anymore and turn bitter, angry and hostile.  For Samuel Beckett Christianity is absurd.  It has failed.  We wait in vain.  But Jesus says, “Blessed are those servants whom the master finds vigilant on his arrival, he will gird himself, have them recline at table and wait on them.”