Service for its own sake can be a delight. Doing something for others who benefit from the service we provide can be the foundation of a truly meaningful life. When Jesus speaks to a crowd about service in this Sunday’s Gospel, delight and meaning may not come to their minds. It is not for lack of knowledge. A good number of Jesus’ listeners are probably servants. It’s quite possible they experience their lives less with delight and more with drudgery; less with meaning and more with meaninglessness.
These negative feelings are likely the experience of average workers across history and of our own time. Those who work at herding, farming, fishing, trade work, construction work, merchant jobs, and the like do hard work and may find it tedious. It is also possible these laborers find their work gratifying for its own sake. They are helping to feed people, house them, and secure the goods they need and they can feel delight and meaning in doing so. In Jesus’ time some workers were bound slaves. They were directly dependent upon the approval of a person of higher status who had bound them to a position of lower status. they were being directly controlled, if not owned, by someone else who could easily rob them of an experience of their work as gratifying for its own sake and diminished its delight and meaning. Added to this hardship was a theology of atonement that justified the slave state. A state of poverty, extreme in the case of a slave, was believed the result of disfavor before God. God’s punitive hand, like that of a master, was a justified slap across the whole of their lives. One should be dully penitent if not ashamed of one’s state. Equating God with a slave master of slaves is an accurate description of atonement theology. When Jesus uses the master slave relationship as an analogy with his listeners in the Gospel, he is mimicking atonement theology. He says to them, “be like servants who await their master’s return from a wedding.” Jesus then, as usual, upends atonement theology by stating: “Blessed are those servants whom the master finds diligent upon his arrival. Amen, I say to you, the master will put on the servant’s garment, have the servants recline at table, and proceed to wait on them.” The relationship between divinity and humanity has been upended by Jesus. It can no longer be justified to claim master status by divine right. The master in the parable relinquishes the role. So too must the masters in society. Mutual service is affirmed.
God is transformed from a master to slaves into a servant who loves and takes delight in each person. Our loving and delightful nature can have the same transforming effect on work in this culture and on our particular work places. This can be a starting point as we work to replace capitalism’s master slave financial system.
Prayer: Spirit of Delight, we live in union with workers.
Question: How do I show delight for those with whom I work?
August 7, 2016 Gospel Luke 12:32-48 Nineteenth Sunday In Ordinary Time