Considering the devastating aftermath of the COVID virus on the world’s economy; staggering damage being done by fires and floods raging across large swaths of eastern and southern Asia, Russia, northern Africa, Europe, western and southern United States, Canada, Australia, India, Bangladesh, Mexico, and Brazil; and concerns about increased terrorism across Africa, southeast Asia, and the Middle east; today’s Gospel (Matthew 24:42-51) could lead us to obsess about the apocalypse. You “must be prepared, for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come.” If you are not prepared, you will be punished severely in “a place with the hypocrites, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.”
Rather than being frightened about the end times–which Matthew clearly considered imminent–I believe it is more important to consider the corresponding focus of this passage: how do we best live our daily lives as Christians? How do we treat the people around us? How can we be “faithful and prudent servants” even when “the master” is not home? How do we live authentic Christian lives, even when no one is watching?
The Gospel begins to answer these questions by suggesting we need to pay attention both to what we do and to what we do not do. We need to steward well that which has been placed in our care. We need to distribute “food at the proper time.” Whether someone with power is watching us or not, we need to be conscientious people who care for one another and for the “household” that binds us. At the same time, we need to avoid certain behaviors such as hurting one another (“to beat his fellow servants”) or neglecting our responsibility to be prudent stewards by “eating and drinking with drunkards.”
I do not envision God as the Great Scorekeeper in the Sky, watching our every move, waiting for us to mess up in order to punish us. Our God is with us always, offering us love and forgiveness in our joy and pain, in our celebration and grief, in our triumph and in our sin.
Still, it seems to me that “how we live our lives when no one is watching” can be helpful principle for us, as Christians, to consider. A recent news story considered “ethics in the marketplace” by interviewing people at a supermarket about seemingly insignificant actions such as “tasting” (stealing) grapes before paying for the weighed bunch or knowingly keeping extra change that we might receive at check out. The people they interviewed believed such tiny infractions were no big deal. A philosophy professor and self-described “public ethicist” disagreed. He (and I believe Aristotle and Aquinas would agree) suggested that the small, simple, everyday decisions in our lives are how we form good or bad habits that form our enduring characters for virtue or for vice. We are more likely to make ethical big decisions if we are in the habit of making lots of ethical small decisions. If we rationalize why the seemingly small infractions are acceptable, we are more likely to rationalize the big sins. Did the CEOs of Enron and WorldCom set out intentionally to steal billions of dollars and decimate thousands of people’s retirement funds? Or did smaller sins that were considered “no big deal” form their characters in such a way that one thing led to another, and to another, and it all got out of hand?
In his Confessions, St. Augustine (whose feast day we celebrate tomorrow) is haunted by the childhood memory of stealing pears from a neighbor’s tree simply because he wanted to steal. Whether it is grapes in the grocery store, pears of a neighbor’s tree, or billions of other peoples’ money, we need to live our lives as “faithful and prudent servants” whether anyone is watching us or not. Jesus asks us to always be prepared, to always care for one another. Forming good habits now, through our everyday decisions, can only help us when larger decisions come our way.
May God Bless You and Grant You His Peace!