The Master Who Serves
Incarnation, Vigilance, and the Kingdom Hidden in the Ordinary
Below is a reflection on the Gospel reading for Sunday, August 10th, in the Roman Catholic tradition: Luke 12:32–48
“Do not be afraid any longer, little flock, for your Father is pleased to give you the Kingdom. Sell your belongings and give alms. Provide money bags for yourselves that do not wear out, an inexhaustible treasure in heaven that no thief can reach nor moth destroy. For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be.” —Jesus Christ.
The words open with an astonishing tenderness: “Do not be afraid any longer, little flock, for your Father is pleased to give you the Kingdom.” Not to rent it to you, nor to withhold it until you have proven yourself worthy, but to give it. The Kingdom is not the wage of your labor, nor the prize at the end of your moral endurance. It is gift—pure and unearned—and this, precisely, is why it terrifies. For gift unmasks. It requires you to live not as one who has yet to secure, but as one who already possesses, and whose life must now become an epiphany of that possession.
Far from mere sentimental comfort, these words are an ontological announcement. In the Incarnation, the Father has already given the Kingdom, not as a promissory note for the devoutly patient, but as a present reality woven into the fabric of the world. Fear is a symptom of living as though that gift is deferred. The Christ does not speak here as a distant herald of an absent realm. He speaks as its living embodiment, the Kingdom enfleshed, standing before them in dusty sandals.
Christ does not tell his disciples to seek the Kingdom in this passage. He tells them to live as if it were already given. That is the scandal and the invitation. You do not wait for the Master as for an absent figure whose feet has yet to cross the threshold. You wait as one in whose house the Master already stands, unseen, setting the table from within the silence.
It is in this light that His strange counsel “Sell your belongings and give alms” makes theological sense. Detachment here is not the stripping down of life for its own sake, nor an ascetic audition for future reward. It is the removal of whatever occludes the eye from recognizing the Kingdom already offered. Almsgiving is not merely charity, it is an act of alignment with the divine economy, a participation in the generosity by which God gives Himself without remainder.
And then, as if to confound worldly hierarchies, He offers an image so subversive it threatens to undo the very scaffolding of ancient honor codes: the master returns and girds himself to wait upon his servants. Christ is not simply urging readiness for a future visitation, but revealing the very character of the Kingdom as mutual self-giving. The eschaton is not an enthronement of the powerful but a reversal in which the Master kneels, serving His servants at table.
In this moment, Incarnation and Parousia meet: the One who comes is the One who has already come, the Servant-King whose reign is defined not by possession but by self-emptying love. The vigilance He demands is the vigilance to recognize Him in this posture, because without such recognition, His arrival will be mistaken for absence.
Gird your loins and light your lamps. In the ancient world, this was the stance of one about to move: belt tightened, cloak hitched up, lamp raised against the darkness. In an incarnational reading, the “lamp” is not simply a symbol of moral alertness, it is the lamp of perception. To be ready for the Master’s return is to have the inner eyes lit, able to see God in the mundane.
In the mystic tradition, especially in the Carmelite way, vigilance is not constant scanning for divine interruption, it is the cultivated capacity to notice that every moment is the “hour you do not expect.” The unguarded soul is not caught off guard because the clock ran out, but because it mistook the ordinary for the unholy and failed to recognize the knocking at the door of the commonplace.
Peter’s question “Is this parable for us or for everyone?” is the perennial temptation to divide the world into initiates and outsiders. Jesus’ answer undermines the distinction by pointing to responsibility, not privilege. Stewardship in the Kingdom is not about occupying the right place in the right hierarchy, it is about fidelity to the character of the King.
Those entrusted with much are not given more power but more opportunity to mirror the Master’s self-giving. The judgment here is not arbitrary sentencing but the natural consequence of what one has become: to live inattentively to the Master’s will is to be found living outside the truth when the truth appears.
In the end, this passage is less about the fear of missing a scheduled arrival and more about the tragic ease with which we live in the Kingdom without knowing it. Incarnation means the treasure has already been placed in our hands, the Master has already sat at our table, the knock at the door has already sounded in the voice of the beggar, the co-worker, the child. The lamps must stay lit not because the night is long, but because the Lord we wait for often arrives disguised as the very moment we are tempted to overlook.
“…to notice that every moment is the “hour you do not expect.” How, dear Steve, do we cultivate this? “Be still…”. in body and mind and soul is difficult to do. To expect God to come to us - when He is already here! How many moments we stay aloof in a state of SELF, missing all the times of our/His visitation. I read your beautiful essays and wonder quietly and out loud at your holy mind, uour sacramental graces turned into thoughts, inspirations, and then written in words for your adoring readers to relish and learn from. I, for one, feel my own lack of holy reasoning, so I appreciate every new post by you to enlighten my sleepiness in the deepest longings of the heart. Thank you for sharing your love, your Love.