Week 32 Tuesday

Readings: Titus 2.1-8,11-14; Psalm 37; Luke 17:7-10

It is complicated. Not that little parable in itself, but the fact that just a few weeks ago we heard another parable about a master and a slave that seemed to say the exact opposite. That first parable is found in Luke 12 and tells about a master who returns to find his servant awake - doing what he should be doing, in other words, watching for his master's return. There the master has the servant sit at table and, switching roles, serves him. Here in Luke 17 it is not like that. A servant is not to expect anything more from his master than to be treated as a servant should be treated: serve the master, and then sit and eat yourself. 'We are useless servants, we have only done what we were asked to do.'

How do we put them together? Because the life of faith and prayer, the life of friendship and love, is a life it needs attention day after day. It is not something established forever, once and for all. Our appreciation of these gifts - of faith and prayer, of friendship and love - has a history. There is a dynamism, a journey, a development, as these realities continue from day to day and as they face the changing demands and challenges of each day. Sometimes our need to maintain a clear sense of what we have received will be threatened from one direction, sometimes from another. These varied parables are ways of keeping us on the right path, ways of ensuring we stay steady in our reception of these gifts and in our living of them.

There can be a subtle change in statements like 'he is my Lord', 'she is my friend', 'He is our God'. If we emphasise the noun then it seems fine: Lord, friend, God. These are realities to be celebrated and honoured and for which we give thanks every day. But if we begin to emphasise the possessive pronoun - my Lord, my friend, our God - then a not so subtle shift takes place and we have turned the gift into something it is not.

Always we need strong and clear reminders of the graciousness of the gift, that it is totally free, undeserved, way beyond anything we could have imagined. 'Love bade me welcome', George Herbert says, insisting that I sit at her table, and 'so I sat and ate'. Always we need strong and clear reminders also that to turn this gift into some kind of possession, some kind of currency between God and myself, or between my friend and myself, will mean losing the very thing which makes it so wonderful: its gratuitousness, its undeservedness, its freedom.

As always when faced with perplexity in interpreting the gospels it helps to apply this parable to the Servant of servants, to put it in a Christological key. How would it read if the servant/slave in question here is thought of as Jesus? Then (putting the two parables together) we can imagine the Father welcoming the Son to the eternal banquet and saying to Him, 'come, sit and eat, and I will serve you'. And we can imagine the Son, coming into the presence of the Father, saying 'I am a useless servant, I have only done what I was asked to do'.

That 'uselessness' is the point of faith and prayer, of love and friendship. It is what gives them their wonderful character. To commercialise these things or to use them in some other utilitarian way is to destroy them. So we live between the need to be assured that we are totally and gratuitously loved, and the need to be assured that the One who loves us remains completely free in doing so. For otherwise how could it be the gift that we need? And for this divine gift we thank God profoundly each day.