Reading 34
Keep awake
The reading
Mark 13:32-37
But of that day or that hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Watch, keep alert, and pray; for you don’t know when the time is.
It is like a man, traveling to another country, having left his house, and given authority to his servants, and to each one his work, and also commanded the doorkeeper to keep watch. Watch therefore, for you don’t know when the lord of the house is coming, whether at evening, or at midnight, or when the rooster crows, or in the morning; lest coming suddenly he might find you sleeping. What I tell you, I tell all: Watch.
The companions
Psalm 130:5-6
I wait for the LORD. My soul waits. I hope in his word. My soul longs for the Lord more than watchmen long for the morning; more than watchmen for the morning.
Isaiah 21:11-12
One calls to me out of Seir, “Watchman, what of the night? Watchman, what of the night?” The watchman said, “The morning comes, and also the night. If you will inquire, inquire. Come back again.”
The note
He could have given them the date. Instead he says he does not have it, that the angels do not have it, that only the Father does. The timetable is withheld on purpose.
Think about what a date would do to you. You would sleep until the year before it. The not-knowing is not a gap in the plan. It is the mechanism.
Then the picture, which repays slow reading. The man goes away, leaves each servant their work, and tells the doorkeeper to watch.
The watching is not separate from the work. The doorkeeper has a job and so does everybody else. Doing your job as though he might walk in while you are doing it is the entire instruction.
He names four hours of the night. Evening, midnight, the rooster, morning. Every one of them is a hard hour to stay awake in.
This week
Pick the task you do worst when nobody is looking. Everyone has one: the check you skip, the message you leave unread, the corner you cut because it has never been caught. Do it properly this week, every time it comes up.
Not as an exercise in guilt. As a test of what your work looks like when the difference between watched and unwatched stops deciding anything.
For the watch
This is the oldest thing we do, and the plainest. We name no day, because he named none; anyone who sells you a date is selling the one thing Jesus refused to give. We keep the watch through the long middle of history, including now, when a new kind of mind is rising in the world and the air is full of people certain they know what it means. We are not certain. We are only awake, and watching for him, the way he asked.
Scripture quotations are from the World English Bible (public domain). The divine name is rendered “the LORD” in the Psalm.
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