We can imagine that being ready for Christ means staring anxiously towards the sky. Our Lord gives us a much less dramatic picture.
A servant doing his job.
“Blessed is that servant whom his master will find so doing when he comes.”
Christian watchfulness is not excitement about the end of the world.
It is fidelity in the middle of an ordinary Thursday.
Saint Paul tells the Corinthians that they have received everything necessary:
“You are not lacking in any gift.”
God has called them. God has enriched them.
And, Saint Paul says, God “will sustain you to the end.”
That is Catholic hope.
Not confidence in ourselves. Confidence in grace.
God gives what He commands, but He does not remove our freedom to refuse it.
That is why the Gospel contains both promise and warning.
The faithful servant is found feeding the household.
The wicked servant says: “My master is delayed.”
That sentence contains the beginning of nearly every spiritual collapse.
There is time. Confession can wait. Prayer can wait. Conversion can wait.
I shall deal with that sin later.
But Our Lord warns us that the danger is not merely dying suddenly.
The deeper danger is becoming the sort of person who no longer cares whether the Master comes.
Saint Monica gives us the opposite picture.
For years she prayed for Augustine.
And for years, outwardly, very little seemed to happen.
He wandered intellectually. He lived far from the faith.
He followed errors which must have broken his mother’s heart.
Yet Monica remained at her post.
She prayed. She wept. She hoped. She persevered.
There is something wonderfully unreasonable about Christian hope.
The world looks at a sinner and says: finished.
Grace says: not yet.
The world sees wasted years.
God sees a soul still being pursued.
Monica did not convert Augustine by clever argument or maternal pressure.
She entrusted him to God and remained faithful. And God was faithful.
The restless young man became Saint Augustine.
My brothers and sisters, Christ may come for us in glory or simply at the end of our earthly life.
Either way, the question is the same:
What will He find us doing?
Not what did we intend to do. Not what did we once promise.
What are we doing now?
The saints teach us that holiness is often wonderfully ordinary:
say the prayer, do the duty, receive the Sacraments, keep the faith,
pray for the sinner, and do not give up.
Saint Monica waited many years.
She discovered that God had not been late. He was at work all along.
St. Mary's, St. John Bosco and St. Edward's 