Lamps lit, ready for the door

A word for the week

What does it actually mean to be ready? When people hear that they should be ready for the Lord, they often picture a kind of dread: a person forever glancing over their shoulder, unable to enjoy anything for fear of being caught out. If that were what Jesus meant, readiness would be a misery, and no one could keep it up for long. But look at the picture he actually draws, because it is nothing like dread.

He says: be like servants waiting for their master to come home from a wedding feast, dressed and with their lamps lit, so that the moment he knocks they can open the door at once. That is the whole image. Not cowering. Waiting up for someone you are glad to see. Think of the difference between sitting up in fear for bad news and sitting up for someone you love who is coming home late. Both are awake. Only one is at peace. Jesus is describing the second.

Then he says something almost too good to believe, and it is easy to read past it. When the master comes and finds them awake, he will dress himself to serve, sit them down, and wait on them. Read that again. The master takes the servant's place. The one they stayed up for ties on the apron and serves them the meal. This is the God Jesus keeps showing us: the one who kneels, who washes feet, who feeds. Being ready does not end in a reckoning. It ends in being served by the one you were waiting for. That is what is on the other side of the door.

So readiness is not fear. Then what is it? It is being the kind of person, on an ordinary Tuesday, that you would not have to become in a hurry if he knocked tonight. It is having your lamp already lit, which is to say, already living the way, so that his arrival would not require a scramble to change, only a glad walk to the door. The unready in this story are not wicked. They are just not dressed for it. They meant to get ready later.

He adds the harder line, the one about the thief, to sharpen it. If the man of the house had known when the thief was coming, he would have watched. But you do not get to know. The hour is one you do not expect, on purpose. So the only way to be ready for an hour you cannot predict is to be ready in general, all the time, as a way of living rather than a thing you switch on. You cannot post a guard for one particular night when you have no idea which night it is. You can only keep the house as though any night might be the one.

Which turns the whole thing around. Readiness is not a state of nerves you have to sustain. It is a life you settle into. It is the lamp kept lit, the waist kept dressed, the daily watch kept, not so that you can pass an inspection, but so that when the one you love finally knocks, you are already up, already glad, already at the door.