Jesus tells us to stay awake, because the master of the house is coming back; and by this he means that He, Jesus, is coming back. The day will come when we raise our eyes to His face and recognize Him. He loves us too much to stay away forever. When He does come, it will be too late to make preparations and clear up the mess. For better or worse, the king will be home again. It will be a moment of intense happiness for us, but also cause for a certain apprehension, because He is coming as judge. He will judge individually – that will happen when we die – but He will also pronounce judgment on the world and the human race. After the delivery of the last judgment, no one will be able to say, “Oh, but that’s not fair!”, because it will be fair. There will be no place for political argument or shifting of the blame. Isaiah describes it is our first reading today: “We were all like men unclean… We shall all withered like leaves and our sins blew us away like the wind.” Jesus’ words sounds alarming, even threatening, the threat was in the first place to the holy city and the Temple. The early Christians saw this as a sign that the last judgment was imminent.
The moral of the tale is: we are to take responsibility for planetary issues, not just small-scale personal ones. We cannot close our eyes to the state of the earth and what is happening on its surface. We are called to raise our voices and demand decency and justice, and proper stewardship of the world’s resources. St. Luke relays the same teaching of Jesus, about the master returning home from a wedding and finding his servants awake and ready to open up and receive him. The master will be so pleased, says Jesus in this version, that He will sit all His household down at table and wait upon them. That’s the good side of the last judgment; the Lord who is judge is also the Lord who loves us beyond measure. Today we can pray to this Lord of love, asking Him to help us to stay awake, to be sorry for our failing in the past, to care about things that really matters.