Last time, we asked the question: Are we ready for Jesus to come back?
Jesus himself clearly taught that the day will come when he returns to this earth. He won’t come back as a baby, he’ll be a grown man. He won’t come back in obscurity, in one Middle-Eastern village; he’ll come back in a way that nobody will miss. He won’t come back in weakness; he’ll come back in splendid power and glory, as king of the world and judge of every human being.
The question is: Are we ready to meet our maker, our king and our judge? When our life is weighed in the balances, will we be found to be one of God’s friends? Will Jesus greet us as a friend, or will he say that we never knew him? Will that day be the beginning of heaven, or the beginning of hell?
When we looked at this last time, we saw that Jesus puts his finger on one detail that makes it extremely hard to be ready for that day. Nobody knows when it will happen. It’s not a deadline that we can steadily get ourselves ready for, building up for the great day on the horizon. We need to be ready every day, because Jesus could come any day.
But there’s another difficulty with being ready for Jesus to return, and this is what he goes on to discuss in the verses we’re looking at today. That is the problem of delay. There will be a considerable delay before Jesus returns.
The Delay
Let’s start by looking at how this delay works, and then look at how the delay could fool us into not being ready.
Jesus tells a story in which the head of a household goes away on a journey and leaves one servant in charge of his affairs while he is away. He appoints a head butler, a household manager, someone who can look after his family, who can make sure there’s food on the table, and who will do so with the other servants.
Jesus plays the story through twice for us. The first time around, the master comes home and that servant is busy doing what he was left to do. The master is delighted, and puts the servant permanently in charge of everything. Well done, good and faithful servant.
But in the rerun the story runs differently. Verse 48: That wicked servant says to himself, ‘My master is delayed.’ And so he begins to beat and mistreat the other servants, and to spend time in the gutter with the drunks outside. In this version of the story, the master still comes back, but the servant is literally dissected, and is thrown out permanently.
And which version of the story you get all depends on how the servant handles the fact that the master is delayed. He’s been held up. It’s taking a long time. What to do? Give up waiting and live as though he’s never coming back? Or just keep doing what he was left to do – only for a little bit longer?
The master is delayed.
And Jesus is warning us that one of the biggest reasons why people will not be ready for him when he comes back is that there will be a considerable delay before he returns.
Sometimes you hear people describe the New Testament’s teaching on the return of Jesus like this: Jesus expected his return to be soon after he returned to heaven. Jesus’ first followers, including the apostles, thought he would come back during their lifetime. This didn’t happen, and as the early Christians began to die out, the whole question of Jesus’ return needed a rethink. This is why the later writings of the New Testament introduce the idea that Jesus may not come back for some time.
There are two big problems with that. Nowhere does Jesus say that he will come back very soon. It’s true that verse 34 of this chapter says that this generation will not pass away until all these things take place, but he’s talking there about the fall of the city of Jerusalem, and that happened within 40 years. It’s also true that Jesus has just told us to be ready all the time because we don’t know when he will return, but that’s not the same thing as telling us that he will return really soon. We just don’t know when he’s coming, but he never said it was around the corner.
The other problem with that way of summarising the New Testament’s teaching is the reading we’re looking at this morning. There, Jesus said exactly that there would be a long delay before he came back. That the delay would be so long that people would think he wasn’t coming.
So Jesus clearly teaches us here that there will be a considerable delay before he comes back.
The Pitfalls
And it is this delay that is the undoing of the lead character in the story.
Where does he go wrong? He moves from observing that the master is delayed in coming back, to living as though he was never coming back.
We’re not very good at waiting for things today, and so often when we have to wait we give up waiting. It’s quicker to walk than to wait for the bus. I’ve been left on hold for 10 minutes now, so I’ll hang up and dial again. I want that new toy, but I don’t want to wait until Christmas, so I’ll go out and buy it anyway.
Jesus said he was coming back, but he’s taken 2000 years about it, so I don’t think it’s going to happen. Or I’ll keep telling myself that he’s coming, but I’ll live as though he wasn’t, which is the way most of us do it.
This is nothing new. Turn over to 2 Peter chapter 3. Half way through verse 3: Scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, following their own sinful desires. They will say, “Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation.”
Is that not what so many people say today? Is this not what many of us think? Life just goes on. It’s been 2000 years since Jesus lived on the earth. All this talk of a second coming is beginning to sound a little bit like make-believe. Perhaps it’s just picture language for something. He’s not really coming back is he? It’s the stuff of fairy-tales.
But then you start to live as though he’s never coming back, which is fine … until he comes back. Because he will. Jesus taught that there would be a delay first, so up to this point everything is exactly on track.
The fact that this servant never thought his master was going to come back came out in his behaviour in two ways.
First, he began to beat his fellow-servants. The way he related to other members of the master’s household changed. I imagine the staff of a large house can be a fairly intense place to be, and probably the servants had niggled each other for many years. But you keep it bottled up if you know that the master and his family could walk in on your squabbles at any point.
But once the master is away, and you believe he’ll never return to fire you, there’s nothing stopping you taking out all those niggles on the other servants. And so punch-ups become the order of the day, and people end up black and blue.
If you’ve ever read the chilling novel, The Lord of the Flies, you’ll know it’s about a group of children who are stranded on an island. To start with, they organise themselves in a fairly civilised way, and keep a fire burning so that any passing ship will find them. It’s as they give up hope that they’ll ever be rescued that things start to fall apart. And the way that comes out is as they take all their niggles out on one another. Black and blue is the least of their problems.
You can tell a church or a group of Christians who have given up on Jesus coming back. One of the tell-tale signs will be infighting and bickering. Recover the clear conviction that he’s not cancelled his return, but it’s just delayed, and we focus on serving Christ together, not on the things we find difficult with each other.
The second way this servant’s behaviour changed was that he ate and drank with the drunkards. Not only did he change the way he related to the other members of the household; he changed the way he related to those outside as well. In short, he joined them. He started to live their way. His lifestyle became indistinguishable from theirs.
After all, if the master was never going to return, he’s got nothing to gain by keeping the household running. Why not just abandon ship, and enjoy himself as best he can, each day at a time?
Here’s the other way you can tell a church or a group of Christians who have given up on Jesus coming back. The other tell-tale sign will be immoral living. Lifestyles in the church that are indistinguishable from those of the world at large. Recover the clear conviction that one day Jesus will return, and we return to living the way that he wants us to. We know that what he thinks matters far more than being in with the fun-loving crowd.
Jesus is coming back. There’s just a delay, just as he said. But the servant in the story confused the delay for a cancellation of his master’s return, and the consequences were disastrous.
Staying Ready
So we want to be ready for Jesus to come back, and we don’t want the delay to be the cause of our undoing.
So what does it look like to be ready?
The first thing is making sure we are ready in the first place. Jesus is the master of the house, and when he returns it is to welcome his household to a renewed world where suffering and pain have no place. So if we’re not in the household, we’re not ready. Each of us needs to turn to Jesus as our Lord and Master, ask him to take control of our lives, and look to his death and resurrection for the forgiveness we need when we fail. If that’s something you’ve never done, then you’re not yet ready to meet him. Today would be a good day to put that right.
But having done that, we need to take on board what Jesus says here: He’s not coming back straight away. When the servant in the story stayed ready, in the first run through the saga, his readiness was nothing remarkable. He simply carried on doing what the master had left him to do.
For us that translates as us carrying on living for Jesus, putting his priorities first and serving other people in life. We simply keep living for him.
Imagine the school class who are left by their teacher with some worksheets to complete while she goes to the staffroom to do some photocopying, and possibly to have a cup of coffee (or maybe even two). When the teacher comes back, she wants to find them at their worksheets. The class don’t know how long she’ll be, so the wise pupils will simply crack on, and keep going.
Invariably there’ll be a few who sit by the window and keep watch, so that everyone knows when the teacher is coming back. But that’s no use whatsoever. They might know in advance when the teacher will return, but it won’t help them. The teacher did not ask them to keep guard, to try and calculate the exact time when she would return. She asked them to do their worksheets. For that, they did not need to know when the teacher would come back; they simply needed to get on with the work they had been left so that whenever she returned the class was ready.
We do not need to know when Jesus will return. We just need to get on with the business of living for him. It may be that he returns today. It may be that he does not return for many centuries yet. That is not our business. Our business is to make sure that we, personally, are ready when he does.
Conclusion
Let’s come back to the question we’ve been considering as we’ve looked at Matthew chapter 24.
Are you ready for the day when Jesus will return?
Please be absolutely clear: Jesus clearly taught that one day he would come back as judge of all.
The trouble is: nobody knows the day or the time when this will happen, so we have to be ready all the time.
The other difficulty is: there will be a considerable delay between when he lived on the earth the first time and when he comes back.
So don’t give up waiting for him. Get to know him, live for him, and keep doing that day in and day out. And then, by his grace, you are ready to meet him.