“Watch, therefore, you do not know when the Lord of the house is coming, whether in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or in the morning. May he not come suddenly and find you sleeping.” (Mark 13.35-36)
In Mark Twain’s memoir, Life on the Mississippi, he tells of his learning to become a pilot of a steamboat when he was a young man. “I’ll learn a man the river,” his mentor Mr. Bixby, a no-nonsense and experienced pilot, liked to tell him, lessons from the river that meant the difference between life and death, between a boat staying afloat or sinking into the deep.
Early on, he learned that the steamboat did not stop at night, but required even greater vigilance. He writes, “The watch was ended at last, and we took supper and went to bed. At midnight the glare of a lantern shone in my eyes, and the night watchman said, ‘Come! Turn out!’ And then left. I could not understand this extraordinary procedure.”
He continues, “So I presently gave up trying to and dozed off to sleep. Pretty soon the watchman was back again, and this time he was gruff. I was annoyed. I said, ‘What do you want to come bothering around here in the middle of the night for. Now, as like as not, I’ll not get to sleep again tonight.’ The watchman said, ‘Well, if this ain’t good, I’m blest.’”
In this way, he learned there was no sleeping when there was work to be done. On another occasion, he saw it again. He writes, “That night we had the watch until twelve. Now it was an ancient river custom for the two pilots to chat a bit when the watch changed. While the relieving pilot put on his gloves and lit his cigar, his partner, the retiring pilot, would say something like this–
‘I judge the upper bar is making down a little at Hale’s Point. . . ‘Yes, I thought it was making down a little, last trip. Meet any boats?’ ‘Met one abreast the head of 21, but she was away over hugging the bar, and I couldn’t make her out entirely’. . . And so on. And as the relieving pilot took the wheel his partner would mention that we were in such-and-such a bend, and say we were abreast of such-and-such a man’s woodyard or plantation. This was a courtesy; I supposed it was necessity.”
Twain writes, “But Mr. W came on watch full twelve minutes late on this particular night–a tremendous breach of etiquette. In fact, it is the unpardonable sin among pilots. So Mr Bixby gave him no greeting whatever, but simply surrendered the wheel and marched out of the pilot house without a word.”
Soon enough. It became very clear to Twain that the cardinal rule for becoming a riverboat pilot was to be watchful. When it was his time behind the wheel, his eyes could never leave the river, not for a moment, because the river was always changing, never the same two days in a row. If a riverboat pilot overslept or dozed off, catastrophe was right around the curve, not only for the crew, but for the passengers.
As we see, that same vigilance is required of the followers of the Galilean Rabbi, who makes the same point in the story he tells of servants who are left in charge of their master’s goods while he goes away. Not knowing exactly when the master will return, the servants must not become lazy or lackadaisical. The story ends with this warning, “May he not come suddenly and find you sleeping!”
Purposely, we hear this story as we begin the season of Advent, a time of preparation for the entrance of the God-Man into human history, born in a barn for animals in the rural village of Bethlehem, as far away from pomp and ceremony as possible, no one watchful but shepherds on a nearby hillside. Like those shepherds in the night, we also are to stay alert, wanting to be ready for the day and the hour of his entrance, even if it is in the dark of night, while the rest of the world sleeps.
Of course, we would be shortsighted if we believed our watch ends with Christmas, for that is but the celebration of a past event, important though it was. There is a future event that we also anticipate, and that is the welcoming of the same Lord when our lives are done and we, servants of his, stand before him, as he asks of us to give an accounting of our days while he was away. Hence, the story that the Rabbi of Galilee tells his disciples.
Understood in this way, all of life is an Advent season, a watch, a waiting, an awareness that our days move inexorably towards that moment of encounter, when we show ourselves to be either wide awake or goof-offs, servants doing their work or servants idling away the time. In that moment, as we stand before the Master, it will become clear to him and to us how we have spent our time.
Not surprisingly, as the story makes clear, “the unpardonable sin,” to use Twain’s words, is to be found sleeping, when we should have been awake. As we heard, the Galilean Teacher uses the word “watch” four times in this brief narrative, juxtaposing it with sleeping, drawing a sharp contrast between the two, the one who stays awake honoring the master, while the one who falls asleep dishonoring the master.
Later, in the same gospel, we will find the Galilean’s first disciples failing the same test, succumbing to sleep when he had asked them to stay awake. That event, familiar to all of us, occurs in the Garden of Gethsemani when the Rabbi asked his disciples to stay awake with him while he agonized over his upcoming death. Stepping away for a bit to pray, he returns to find them fast asleep, asking them the question that haunts all subsequent followers, even to this day and time, “Could you not stay awake for one hour?”
Stay awake. Here, we find the same word that he used in this story about not sleeping that he told his disciples, using the word “watch,” a word that literally means “I am awake in the night,” the story referencing the four night watches of Roman soldiers when they must be awake, “in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or in the morning,” these watches so paramount for the soldier on duty that any failure to stay awake would result in his being put to death in the morning.
Interestingly, those same watches of the night were carried down through history. In 1505, when a German locksmith named Peter Henlein invented the world’s first portable pocket-sized clock, it acquired the name watch from sailors who used it to replace the hourglasses that they had used to time the four-hour shifts of duty, or watches, that they had on the ship. And, as we know, the name has stuck ever since.
And although none of us associates the watch on our wrist with the night watches of soldiers or sailors, this story that the Galilean Teacher tells us about being watchful urges us to reclaim the association, so that each time we look at our watches we are reminded that, as the hours pass on that time piece, our watch during this advent season of life continues, moving steadily towards the morning of the master’s return.
Coming to learn that same lesson, one writer shared this thought with his readers, “Perhaps it is because of my advanced age (I’ve clearly got more yesterdays on my account than tomorrows), but I find that I wake up each morning surprised, grateful even, just to be waking up in the morning.”
He continues, “I find myself saying to myself, ‘So, you have one more day. What a surprise. What a gift. So, what will I do with today?’ The time before me is a gift and an assignment, grace, and judgment. What will we do,” he asks, “what will God have us do with the time?”
His question is a question we all should ask ourselves, “What will we do with the the time,” asking ourselves surely during these days of Advent that move us towards Christmas, but asking ourselves also each day that moves us closer to our long-awaited encounter with the Master of the house, the one for whom we work, the one to whom we will have to explain how we spent our time.
A number of years ago, a writer shared an event in his life that opened his eyes to that same need to be watchful. He told of a phone call he received one November morning, telling him that a friend of his had died at home of a heart attack, no apparent health problems and no family medical history to explain the suddenness of his death. As he said, “There was absolutely no reason to suspect he might die.”
Then he writes, “What struck me immediately after I finished that phone call . . . was that Scott and I would never speak again. And that I’d squandered my final opportunities to be with my friend in the preceding few–the last few–months of his life.” His words reveal a mind full of regrets, someone coming to see too late that he had not spent his watch as well as he could have.
He continues, “Unless a person is old or acknowledged to be terminally ill, we never imagine that whatever we have to say to him or her had better be spoken now, because this shot might be our last. If,” he says, “I’d had any inkling of Scott’s mortality, I would have sought out and entered as many conversations as could be squeezed into the remaining time.”
He concludes, “I had the natural sense that time was on our side, limitless tomorrows when we would actually do these things. I expected to see him again and never once thought otherwise.” But, as he learned, time was not on his side. With that hard-earned knowledge, he resolved to change the way he lived, the way he loved, the way he watched, choosing now to live each day as a gift and as a grace.
Four weeks ahead of us, another season of Advent beginning for us, it is a time of waiting, a time of watching, and–most importantly–it is a time of working. The Master has left us to care for his house and for his grounds, and that care requires work on our parts. If we fail to do the work assigned to us, the signs will be clear to the Master–a world with divisions and without unity, a world with indifference and without involvement, a world with intolerance and without humanity. Needless to say, there is much work still undone, and we do not know how much time we have to do it.
Among the Orthodox Jews, even to this day, there are some rabbis who go to sleep every single night with their satchels packed, waiting for the Messiah to arrive. In this way, they want to be ready. The Rabbi of Galilee seems to be telling us much the same in the story he tells us today. We must be ready for the Master at a moment’s notice.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 