Eschatological Fatigue

Proper 14                                                                                          8 August 2010

Luke 12:32-48

Ages ago I had a tape of an address to clergy in one of the dioceses in Texas.  I listened to it many times but now it seems to have disappeared.  But I remember that the topic of the address was the Gospel for today.  The priest who gave the talk more or less answered Peter’s question:  Master, is this saying of yours meant for us or for everyone?  I think if we look closely, we can see that there is a message both for clergy and for laypeople. 

Jesus compares his followers to the servants of a large landowner.  Our translation calls them slaves; the older translations called them servants.  There were lots of different kinds of slaves in those days—the vast majority of people were quite poor and many had sold themselves into slavery just to live; others had been captured in war and then sold.  The economy of Rome ran on slave labor.  The assumption Jesus makes in his parables is that the servants of the lord of the manor have nothing that they can properly call their own.  Everything they use for clothing, food, and shelter, belongs to their master.  The other assumption is that slaves are almost always on duty.  In the first part of our lesson, the master is about to return from his wedding.  Jesus imagines the household servants waiting up all night if they had to, in order to welcome their master and his bride home. Jesus says that his followers are also supposed to be like those servants in this regard: they are looking for his return and are prepared for him.  They are awake and alert, because they know who they are and who they belong to. 

In the second illustration, the master’s return is also expected, but it looks as if he is going to be gone for a longer time.  Here there are servants who are in charge of other servants—rather like one of those grand Victorian country homes with multiple servants and staff.  In charge of it all, was the head butler and under him the head of the kitchen and the head housekeeper.  All the rest of the servants took orders from them—the master of the household hardly had to take thought for anything.  So it is in Jesus’ story.  But the master had been gone a long time.  So long, in fact, that the head servants began to think of the place as their own.  Their authority had begun to be exercised for themselves and not for their master.  They took advantage of their position—beating the underlings, getting drunk, lording it over the rest of the help. 

At the end of the passage Jesus says, “So then, you see, once you know what the master wants, you are obliged to carry on with it, no matter how long he is gone.  If not, there will be a reckoning to be made once the master returns.”  Now when Jesus first told these stories, he was probably not thinking of his own return, as we might suppose.  At least that is what the best NT scholarship holds.  He was thinking of God’s return to Zion—what every righteous Jew of his day was looking for.  God was coming back to his people.  He had gone away at the time of the exile—because of Israel’s idolatry and sin—and, although the temple had been rebuilt, and the people studied the Bible at Synagogue, there was something still missing: the triumphant return of God to his people in a way that all would recognize.  This was the coming of the Kingdom which Jesus said was happening in his own life and ministry.

But as he preached and taught, he found people who were tired of waiting.  The master was a long time coming.  They had become accustomed to his absence.  So some had gone to sleep and others had taken over the leadership for themselves—just as the stories showed.  Many people were not awake, not able to listen to what Jesus was saying, not ready to heed his word, not ready to accept him and welcome him as their Lord and Master.  They had forgotten what their true Master was like and did not recognize him.

We are in a similar situation ourselves.  And this was the point of that priest I mentioned earlier.  Jesus, we believe, fulfilled the promises of the Kingdom—in his death and resurrection and the coming of the Spirit, the old prophecies had come true.  God had returned to his people and the Kingdom came to be present in the world.  But there is more yet to happen.  Sometimes it doesn’t look as if the Kingdom has come.  Sometimes it looks as if Jesus really has gone far away and is a long time coming back.  And sometimes those who call themselves by his name have fallen asleep and are tired of looking for him—in fact, some no longer even expect him.  They do not look for his presence among them now nor do they hope for his return.  They have accommodated themselves to the way things are done in this world and try to get along as best they can.  Some of the leaders of his people have taken on the characteristics of the unfaithful administrator of Jesus’ story and have started to lord it over the rest of the help—or if they cannot get away with that, at least have performed their duties for themselves and not for their master.  According to the priest who gave that clergy address, many of us suffer from what he called eschatological fatigue. 

I like that word: eschatological.  It is such a wonderful theological word, filled with meaning, and not difficult to understand.  In Greek, the word for “the end” is eschaton.  So anything having to do with the end is eschatological.  Eschatological fatigue is the disease of being tired of waiting for the end, that is, for God to make good on his promises.  We feel as if we have been doing our job, but nothing has happened.  We have tried to be good Christians, yet nothing has worked out right for us.  This is an affliction many clergy experience.  It isn’t the case that we don’t know what our Lord wants.  He wants us to love God with all our heart and our neighbors as ourselves.  He wants us to be filled with love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, mercy, compassion, forgiveness, and self-control.  He wants us to work and pray and give for the spreading of the Kingdom.  He wants us to be awake and alive to the reality of the presence of God with us.  He wants us to be filled with the Spirit. 

And yet, that doesn’t seem to count for much in our world. “Where’s is the money?” it wants to know; “How big an operation are you running?”  Our world doesn’t really care if people are spiritually alive and alert, awake to the realities of God and his purposes.  Modern technological and consumerist societies don’t really see much use in people being spiritually awake.  They buy more stuff and are more easily manipulated if they are asleep.  Religion has also been tamed and made a popular pastime, reinforcing the consumerist tendencies of our culture and ministering to our desires to have nice experiences.  It is so much easier to be lulled to sleep by those who offer a little religious entertainment than it is to wake up and look for the master to return, to seek first the Kingdom, so that we can work with him in the little details of our lives, which will never matter much to most people—except for those closest to us. 

So how are we supposed to do this?  How can we wake up and keep awake—not in the sense of being anxious and fearful, but in the sense of being alert and alive to the nature of the spiritual realities in which we are immersed?  Actually, you are doing the most important thing right now: you are here at Mass, the worship of the Church, in which the great mysteries of life and death, sin and redemption, grace and judgement, are rehearsed and made present.  We are renewing our identity here as the people God has called to witness to his plans and purposes in this world.  We are renewing our baptismal identity as God’s own children.  We come together in order to get a fresh hold on the profound and tran-scendental mysteries by which we truly live. 

But of course someone can come to Mass mostly asleep and never get it.  So a lot depends on what you do the rest of the week—whether you are praying and reading Scripture and working at the development of Christian character.  When you do these things, you come to Mass prepared to grasp hold of unseen realities and mystical truths and go out into the world ready to stay awake one more week, maybe even encouraging some friends and neighbors to wake up. 

I know it has been a long time—and the master still has not returned.  Some of the information he gave us through his apostles in the beginning seems hard to deal with under conditions that are so changed in 2000 years.  Keeping to the master’s work requires a lot of creative imagination.  And it requires that we all stay at the job together—especially when the situation is difficult.  But others have had hard times, too—and they did not fail.  Nor need we.  “All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them. They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of the land that they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; indeed, he has prepared a city for them.”