Be dressed for service and keep your lamps burning. Then you will be like servants waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet, so that when he comes and knocks, they can open the door for him at once. Blessed are those servants whom the master finds on watch when he returns. Truly I tell you, he will dress himself to serve and will have them recline at the table, and he himself will come and wait on them. Even if he comes in the second or third watch of the night and finds them alert, those servants will be blessed. But understand this: If the homeowner had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into. You also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour you do not expect.” “Lord,” said Peter, “are You addressing this parable to us, or to everyone else as well?” And the Lord answered, “Who then is the faithful and wise manager, whom the master puts in charge of his servants to give them their portion at the proper time? Blessed is that servant whose master finds him doing so when he returns. Truly I tell you, he will put him in charge of all his possessions. But suppose that servant says in his heart, ‘My master will be a long time in coming,’ and he begins to beat the menservants and maidservants, and to eat and drink and get drunk. The master of that servant will come on a day he does not expect and at an hour he does not anticipate. Then he will cut him to pieces and assign him a place with the unbelievers.
Alas for the day! For the Day of the LORD is near, and it will come as destruction from the Almighty.
Walk the Square · a single-voice walk of this pair around the Clowney square13:35
Significance
Jesus commands watchfulness for the returning master: "Be dressed for service and keep your lamps burning" (Luke 12:35), for "the Son of Man will come at an hour you do not expect" (12:40), and the unready servant is cut to pieces and assigned "a place with the unbelievers" (12:46). Amos 5:18 stands behind the warning as the Old Testament's great reversal of false confidence: "Woe to you who long for the Day of the LORD! ... It will be darkness and not light." Amos rebukes those who presumed the Day would vindicate them when in fact it would judge them; Jesus presses the same point onto His own hearers — the Master's coming is longed-for blessing to the watchful and sudden ruin to the presumptuous. The connection is a longitudinal development of the Day-of-the-LORD motif, carried forward redemptive-historically to the parousia of the Son of Man. The gospel turn is one Amos could not foresee: the returning Master "will dress himself to serve and will have them recline at the table, and he himself will come and wait on them" (12:37) — so the Day that is darkness for the presumptuous is, for those found watching, the arrival of a Lord who serves them. Readiness is therefore not anxious dread but glad longing for the face of the One who comes.
Found via
Beale & Carson (eds.), Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament (2007)
