Week 32 Tuesday (Year 1)

Readings: Wisdom 2:23-3:9; Psalm 33(34); Luke 17:7-10

It's complicated. Not because of that little parable itself, but because just a few weeks ago we heard another parable about a master and a slave that seemed to say the exact opposite. The first parable is found in Luke 12 and tells of a master who returns and finds his servant awake, doing what he should be doing, which is watching for the master's return. The master seats the servant at the table and, reversing roles, serves him. Here, in Luke 17, this is not the case. The servant should expect nothing more from his master than to be treated as a servant should be treated: to serve the master and then sit down to eat. “We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.”

How do we put these together? Because the life of faith and prayer, the life of friendship and love, is a life that needs attention day after day. It is not something that is established once and for all, forever. 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 day by day and 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 different parables are a way of keeping us on the right track, of ensuring that we remain steadfast in receiving these gifts and living them out.

There can be a subtle shift in statements such as “he is my Lord”, “she is my friend”, “he is our God”. If we emphasise the noun, then everything 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 change occurs, and we have transformed the gift into something it is not.

We always need to remember loud and clear the grace of the gift, which is totally free, undeserved, beyond our imagination. ‘Love welcomed me,’ says George Herbert, insisting that I sit at his table, and ‘so I sat and ate.’ We always need to remember strongly and clearly that transforming this gift into a kind of possession, into a kind of currency of exchange between me and God, or between me and my friend, will mean losing precisely what makes it so wonderful: its gratuitousness, its undeservedness, its freedom.

As always, when faced with perplexities in interpreting the Gospels, it is useful 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 were 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 down and eat, and I will serve you.’ And we can imagine the Son, arriving in the presence of the Father, saying: ‘I am a useless servant, I have only done what I was asked to do.’

This ‘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 use them in some other utilitarian way is to destroy them. We therefore live between the need to be certain that we are loved totally and freely and the need to be certain that the One who loves us remains completely free in doing so. For otherwise, how could it be the gift we need? And for this divine gift, we thank God deeply every day.