Where God’s love and a parent’s care meet

A Reflection for Tuesday of the Twenty-ninth Week in Ordinary Time

Find today’s readings here.

During my pre-teen summers, my sister and I were allowed to stay home alone during the day while my mother went to work. But she always left us with a to-do list for company. The days were not supposed to be listless; by the time our mom got home in the evening after a long day at the office, we were supposed to have made progress on our summer reading assignments, cleaned our rooms or ran errands.

It won’t surprise you to hear that we usually put these tasks off. Instead, we baked cakes, had dance parties and watched episode after episode of “How I Met Your Mother.” After all, what else are summer days with your sister for?

I can still viscerally remember the feeling of seeing our mom’s car out the front window just before it pulled into the driveway—and the ensuing mad dash to clean up our mess, grab those summer reading books from the bottom of a pile and try to look like we were hard at work by the time we heard her key in the door. But after a day of blissful procrastination, there was only so much we could do to convince our mom that we had actually been whittling away at her carefully curated list.

While the summer days of random at-home adventures with my sister are precious memories, eventually we learned that time would always catch up to us, that those books would have to be read and those rooms would have to be cleaned some day, and most of all that our mom was working really hard and wanted the best for us. 

Using parental language to understand God is common, though we’re more often talking about God as father than as mother. But when I read Jesus’ instructions to his disciples in today’s Gospel from Luke, the way he tells them to be ready like vigilant servants waiting for their master to come home, I thought about how un-ready and un-vigilant I was for my mom’s return home on those summer days. Jesus tells the disciples something amazing: that if they are ready at the door when the master knocks, the master will subvert the roles. He will instead take care of them and wait on them as they, the servants, take seats at his table.

While I’m glad to say our parent-child relationship did not resemble a master-servant dynamic, I also recognize that my mom, who was in charge and had asked something of her children, enacted this Gospel kind of subversion with us. Despite our lack of readiness (not just on one but on many summer days in a row), she still spent her non-working hours caring for and prioritizing us, making sure we were fed and comfortable and happy at home. 

A parent’s care is much like God’s care. As children, of God and of our earthly parents, the lesson Jesus gives in today’s Gospel is one we have to learn, and perhaps we do so with a bit of stumbling (or baking or binge-watching) mixed in. It’s a transformation of heart, one that recognizes that great and giving love—and finally matures enough to show it in return.

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