“Look. Stay awake. You don’t know when it’s time. Like a person abroad, who left his home, who empowered his employees to do their jobs, who ordered the doorman so he’d stay awake. So stay awake! You don’t know when the master of the house returns. Evening? Midnight? Sunrise? Morning? When he suddenly arrives, don’t let him find you asleep. What I tell you, I tell everyone: Stay awake.” —Jesus,
Newbie Christians are pretty good at following these directions. “Hey, Jesus is coming back! He might come back today. At any time now. Really soon! So let’s stay on the alert. Hey, is that a sign of his return? Hey, is that an End Times thing?…”
They’re so intent on staying awake, they get a bit jumpy. Some of them can’t take it. In my experience they tend to go one of two directions: Paranoia, or despair.
Despair is far more common, so it’s the issue Jesus addresses here. Despair is the fear Jesus isn’t coming back. Ever. Or, if he does return, it won’t be with a literal return to earth, to literally reign over its people. It’ll be a “spiritual” return—by which they mean imaginary return. ’Cause to them, the return will only happen in our heads. Or hearts. Or when we go to the afterlife. But not in the real world.
Or not in their lifetime. In their minds, Jesus’s return is “in the future.” But it’s always in the future, pushed forward about 20 or 40 years. Or after they die, although they don’t think about death: It’ll happen someday, but they don’t wanna dwell on that. Feels morbid. And so Jesus’s return becomes functionally imaginary.
To them, Jesus gave this warning lest they be caught unaware. You don’t know when Jesus will return. Even if you believe all the End Times prognosticators, and their claims that this event or that personage has to appear first: You don’t know. They don’t know. I don’t know. None of us knows.
And as I remind Christians all the time: If Jesus doesn’t return for the entire planet, he can always return just for you. You don’t know the date of your own death. Few do. Tends to hit ’em when they least expect it. So stay alert for that, anyway: Be ready for Jesus to come for you, if not the world just yet.
The paranoid.
I myself fall into the camp of Christians who believe Jesus could return at any second. (Again, either for me personally, or for the world.) Any events which had to take place first, have. All Jesus has to do now, is return.
But there’s a vast difference between my optimistic hope, and the paranoid. For them, it’s not optimistic in the slightest. It’s not something they look forward to. They kinda do, or claim they do. But either they’re scared to death of the End Times disasters which signal the return—and want to stop them at all costs!—or they’re scared to death they don’t quite meet Jesus’s expectations, and might get left behind in the rapture.
Fr’instance, Pelagians believe we’re saved by being good. Not by God’s grace; they figure God hates sin so much, he’s not gonna be all that gracious. He’ll forgive us if we’re sorry, and forgive us every time we apologize. But if we have any sins on our conscience at the time of Jesus’s return, or our death, he might pull his safety net out from under us, and throw us into hell. Their greatest fear is that when Jesus returns, he’ll catch them in mid-sin, and they’ll miss the rapture.
And of course conspiracy theorists are convinced the Beast is coming, and everything’s a sign of it. Every politician (except their favorites, naturally), every celebrity with a following (especially if they aren’t Christian), every preacher they dislike: All potential Beasts. So they think they’re staying awake, as Jesus instructed, but in reality they live in fear. The fear drains away all their love, joy, peace, patience, and kindness. All they have left are good deeds, but no fruit. All they have left is dead religion. Yeah, it’s a bitter irony.
Both these views stand in contrast to Jesus’s instructions.
Watch for the Master. And nothing else.
Jesus compares his followers to a household staff—literally slaves, but under the Law, slaves were to be treated as employees, so that’s how I translated it.
Now, imagine a household where the master leaves on business, and goes abroad for an undetermined length of time. Hard to imagine in our day and age, but in Roman times no one had control of their schedules. Travel took as long as it took; business took as long as it took; the master could be gone for weeks at best, years at most. And with no postal service, the only hint you’d get of the master’s intentions, was if the master sent a messenger with a letter.
So you didn’t know how long the master would be. You just knew he’d return. Someday. Maybe today. Hopefully today, if you were fond of your boss, or if the people left in charge were abusing their authority.
Okay. What was the staff expected to do in the meanwhile? Well, they’d been given their duties, and knew them. The doorman was instructed to stay awake. And that was all: Do your job, and when the master returns, be ready to receive him.
What about looking out for signs of the master’s return? Which signs? Well, if certain Christians are to be believed, political signs. Societal signs. Economic signs. If everybody seems to be sinning way more, and way worse, than you can ever remember (allowing for the fact you had a rather comfortable, sheltered childhood, and are basing your memories of the past entirely on heavily censored television shows… oh wait, you haven’t allowed for that, have you?) it must mean the End is near. Or if everybody seems to have less freedom than they used to… or, contrariwise, if everybody seems to have more freedom than they used to…
Y’know, pretty much any event out there can be taken as a sign of the times, can’t it? Even though Jesus said a lot of those things were nothing more than labor pains.
But to the master’s household staff, what was the sign of the master’s return? The master’s actual return. The watchful doorman who could see him coming, who could announce it to the rest of the staff. It could happen any time of day, but it wasn’t foretold by signs in the sky, signs in society, or signs anywhere else. All that stuff is augury, and rubbish. God doesn’t reveal the future through augury. He reveals it through doormen. Prophets, we call them.
The fake prophets, who interpret every event as if it’s an End Times harbinger, need to be dismissed and denounced for the fear-stirring phonies they are. They produce no good fruit. They lead few to Jesus. They either lead Christians to fear, to despair, or to quit Christianity altogether because people confuse their outrageous claims with true religion. Our duty, under Christ, is to do our jobs. And the doorman’s duty is to stay awake. And that’s all.
Get rid of the fear. Get rid of the despair. Follow Jesus.