Title: If Jesus Knocked Right Now
Intro: The Day of the Lord is as close as your next breath.
Scripture: Matthew 24:37-44
Reflection
My dear friends, have you ever had someone knock on your door when you were not expecting visitors? Perhaps you were still in your nightclothes, or the house was a mess, or you had nothing prepared to offer them. That moment of panic, that rush to make yourself and your home presentable, that feeling stays with us, doesn’t it?
Now imagine if the person at your door was someone you deeply loved, someone whose opinion mattered more than anyone else’s in the world. The anxiety would be even greater, wouldn’t it?
This is the image Jesus gives us in today’s Gospel from Matthew 24:37-44. He tells us about people eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, completely absorbed in their daily routines until the flood came and swept them all away. He speaks of two men in the field and two women grinding meal, one taken, one left. He warns us to stay awake because we do not know on what day our Lord will come. And then he gives us that striking image: if the owner of the house had known at what time of night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and not let his house be broken into.
But here is what moves me deeply about this passage, my brothers and sisters. Jesus is not trying to frighten us into good behaviour. He is not standing over us with a stick, threatening punishment. No, he is doing something far more tender. He is reminding us that he wants to find us living well when he comes. He wants to find us being ourselves at our best, not scrambling to hide who we really are.
I think of my own mother. When I was young, she would sometimes tell me she might visit my room at night to check on me. Did I clean my room only on the nights I thought she might come? No. I learnt to keep it clean always, not because I feared her anger, but because I loved her and wanted her to be proud of me. I wanted her to find me being the son she had raised me to be.
This is the heart of today’s message. We are called to readiness, yes, but readiness born of love, not terror.
Living in India, we understand well the rhythm of unexpected visitors. We keep our homes ready not because we know exactly when someone will arrive, but because hospitality is woven into the fabric of who we are. We keep the kettle ready for chai. We keep something to offer. We keep our hearts open. This is not anxiety; this is love expressed through preparedness.
Yet I wonder, my friends, if we have lost something of this spirit in our spiritual lives. We have become so caught up in trying to decode prophecies and calculate dates. I have seen people obsessing over signs and wonders, watching the news with notebooks, trying to map current events onto ancient visions. Meanwhile, their relationships crumble. Their compassion dries up. Their daily duties go neglected. They are so busy watching the sky that they forget to watch over their own hearts.
Saint Paul writes in First Thessalonians 5:6-8, “So then let us not fall asleep as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober; for those who sleep sleep at night, and those who are drunk get drunk at night. But since we belong to the day, let us be sober and put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet, the hope of salvation.”
To belong to the day. What a beautiful phrase. It means we do not live in the shadows of fear or the fog of indifference. We live in the clarity of purpose, the brightness of love, and the light of faith.
But what does this look like in our actual, messy, complicated lives? Let me tell you about Stella, a woman in my parish. She works as a nurse in a government hospital. The conditions are difficult. The pay is modest. She has two teenagers at home and an ageing mother-in-law who needs constant care. Every day is a battle against exhaustion. Yet whenever I visit her home, I find her attentive to her mother-in-law’s needs, patient with her children’s struggles, and somehow still finding energy to volunteer in our parish’s outreach programme. She once told me, “Father, if Jesus came today, I want him to find me loving the people he put in front of me.”
That is it. That is the whole message of today’s Gospel in one sentence.
You see, my dear friends, we make this too complicated. We think being ready for the Lord’s coming means having perfect theology or achieving some mystical state of constant prayer. But Jesus keeps it simple. In the parable that follows today’s Gospel reading, he speaks of the faithful servant who was simply doing what his master had asked him to do. That is all. No heroics. No spectacular visions. Just faithfulness in the ordinary.
The truth that should shake us awake is this: the Day of the Lord is not just some distant event marked on God’s calendar. The Day of the Lord is as close as your next breath. Today could be the day you stand before your Maker. I do not say this to frighten you, I say it to wake you up to the preciousness of now, this moment, this opportunity to love, to serve, to be faithful.
I think of how we often treat Advent, this season we have just begun. We light candles and sing hymns about waiting and watching. But are we really? Or are we just going through motions, checking boxes, while our hearts remain fast asleep?
True watchfulness means living with our eyes open to the needs around us. It means staying sober when the world around us is drunk on materialism, hatred, and fear. It means choosing faith when cynicism seems wiser. It means loving when love looks foolish.
Remember what Jesus said in today’s Gospel: two will be in the field, one taken and one left; two women grinding meal, one taken and one left. The difference between them is not their occupation or their circumstances, it is their readiness. And readiness is not about being in the right place at the right time. It is about being the right person all the time.
My brothers and sisters, I want to ask you something personal. If Jesus came to your door right now, if he walked into your living room, your office, or your kitchen, what would he find? Would he find you living according to the values you profess? Would he find you treating your spouse with tenderness? Your children with patience? Your colleagues with honesty? Your servants with dignity? Would he find you using your resources generously? Your time wisely? Your influence justly?
Or would he find us like those people in Noah’s time, so absorbed in eating and drinking and the endless rounds of acquisition and entertainment that we have forgotten why we are here at all?
As we begin this new Church year, the invitation is clear and urgent. Not too paranoid. Not to complacency. But to love. To faithful, daily, unglamorous, beautiful love.
Keep your lamp burning not because you fear the darkness, but because you have become a child of light. Do your duty not because someone’s watching, but because it is who you have chosen to be. Love the people God has placed in your life not because you expect reward, but because love is its own reward.
And when that doorbell rings, when the Lord comes either at the end of your life or the end of time, may he find you already dressed in love, already serving, already awake, already home. Not scrambling to become someone you are not, but peacefully being who you always were meant to be: his beloved child, faithful to the end.
The Day of the Lord is coming. But today is also the Day of the Lord. This moment. This choice. This act of love.
Stay awake, my friends. Stay awake.
May the heart of Jesus live in the hearts of all. Amen...
