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Morning Meditation for Eastertide
May 19, 2025
Dunstan of Canterbury
Reading: Matthew 24:42-45
Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.
Meditation by Jeremy O’Neill
The bluegrass band Nickel Creek has a song called “21st of May” which was written while the band was driving across rural America and came across a sign forecasting that the apocalypse would come on May 21st. The sign encouraged people to repent and turn unto the Lord in preparation for the coming Final Judgment. The song plays at the arbitrary nature of such a date (it is this Wednesday – you still have time to prepare) but makes an interesting point about any doomsday prediction. In Matthew’s Gospel we are told to keep awake for we do not know when Jesus will come again in glory, and we ought to be ready.
While there is no way to be truly “ready” for such an event, nor is there an easy way to judge our preparedness to enter into a more complete life in Christ, I do think there is some merit to the urgency conveyed in this passage and in the sign on the side of the road. Being a Christian is something we love to procrastinate. We know how important it is to care for the stranger, love our neighbors, seek justice for the oppressed, and worship God and give thanks, but we always figure that we will have time to do that another day. Work, school, being “productive”- these are all more pressing for us.
This anxious message may actually be a call to slow down. “Keep awake” does not necessarily mean drink more caffeine and make sure everything is in order. Keeping awake means being present to where God is in our lives, and getting ready to welcome Christ into our hearts anew. God works in mysterious ways, and indeed God works through us in mysterious ways.
You will notice that our Sunday lectionary has drawn extensively from the Book of Revelation in the past few weeks. I don’t know if a dramatic apocalyptic judgment like the one forecast in Revelation will happen, or if it has already happened to some people. What I do know is that God loves to surprise us. My prayer for this season is that we may be ready to be surprised by God, for when we are open to being surprised we are also open to how God works through others and even how God works in us.
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