January 24, 2012

Luke 12.35-40

"Be ready for action, with belts fastened and lamps alight. Be like men who wait for their master's return from a wedding party, ready to let him in the moment he arrives and knocks.

"Happy are those servants whom the Master finds on the alert when he comes. I tell you this: He will buckle on His belt, seat them at table, come and wait on them! Even if it is the middle of the night, or before dawn when He comes, happy if He finds them alert!

"And remember, if the householder had known what time the burglar was coming he would not have let his house be broken into. Hold yourself ready, then, because the Son of Man is coming at the time you least expect him."

1 comment:

forrest said...

I've been hanging back, here, because this is a hard one to interpret, and I didn't want to just pass it by.

"son of man" may mean all sorts of things, from "visionary figure in the Book of Daniel" to "me" to "we/us mortals."

This may well mean "what was symbolised by 'one like a son of man' in Daniel";

but the plain sense of it is "me." "This person named Jesus".

So, what kind of "return" are we talking about here? Something that was supposed to happen "soon," but only by a 1000 year timescale? Which is now about to happen because "everything else that could happen already has"?

Something that was really supposed to happen soon, but didn't?

Or something that in fact happened already, perhaps soon after his death? What, then?