The Serving Master: The Parable of the Watching Servants (12 of 26)

The parable is usually filed under readiness, and the readiness is in it.

What gets passed over is what the master does when he arrives, which is so far outside expectation that Luke flags it with a formula he rarely uses.

What Are the Servants Doing?

Waiting, dressed for work, with the lamps still burning.

Jesus tells them to have their garments tied up and their lamps lit, like men waiting for their master to come home from a wedding banquet, so that when he knocks they can open immediately.

The tied garment is practical. Long robes are gathered and belted for movement, which means these servants are not asleep in their quarters but ready to act at any moment. The lit lamp means oil has been consumed all night with nothing to show for it.

They are not producing anything. They are simply available, through hours when nothing is happening and nobody is watching.

What Are They Commended For?

Being faithful rather than being productive, and Bailey draws the distinction sharply.

Nothing in the parable measures output. No accounts are settled, no returns are assessed, and there is no comparison between one servant and another. The blessing falls on those the master finds awake.

Which makes this parable an instructive companion to the talents, where the assessment is entirely about what was done with what was given. Set the two together and the New Testament is holding faithfulness and fruitfulness side by side without collapsing either into the other.

Bailey’s phrase for it is that servanthood here is about being more than doing.

What Does the Master Do When He Arrives?

He changes clothes, seats them at the table, and serves them.

Read that again, because the roles have not merely softened, they have inverted. A master returning at midnight from a wedding does not wait on the staff who stayed up. He is served, and then he goes to bed.

This master dresses himself for service, has them recline, which is the posture of a guest at a banquet rather than a servant at attention, and comes and serves them.

Luke introduces it with truly I say to you, which Bailey notes is rare in this Gospel. The formula is a flag. Something is coming that the hearer will struggle to accept.

Why Does That Matter Theologically?

Because of what it says about the master rather than about the servants.

Bailey reads several things converging here. Leadership exercised through self-emptying service. A master who does not send food across from his own quarters for the staff but comes himself and serves them portions from the wedding feast he has just attended.

That last detail is the incarnational note. Provision is not dispatched. It is brought in person.

And the whole scene is a costly demonstration of unexpected love, offered to people who could not have required it and did nothing to earn it beyond staying awake. Bailey’s observation is that after something like that they can never be the same.

There is a further reversal underneath. The slave system in that world is being used and simultaneously subverted, because a master who behaves this way has redefined what the relationship is. Bailey’s word for what the servants become is guests.

Are the Servants Blessed Because They Served?

No, and Bailey’s reading here is worth holding.

The blessing is not earned by the waiting. The faithful servant is already a blessed presence in that household, and what the master’s arrival does is confirm and reward a state that already existed.

That order matters. Serving does not create the standing. The standing produces the serving, and the master’s astonishing response acknowledges it.

What Is the Parable of the Watching Servants About?

The return, and also the ordinary night.

The setting is the second coming and the parable is straightforwardly about being ready for it. But Cyril of Alexandria, in the fifth century, read it more immediately, saying we must be daily prepared for our departure and watch for the master’s signal.

Both are in it. Christ comes at the end, and he comes to each person at the end of their own life, and the posture the parable asks for is identical either way.

Lamps lit through a night when nothing is happening. That is most of what watching consists of.

Part of a series working through the parables. See also the parable of the talents, which measures a different thing entirely.

Footnotes2

1. Setting this parable beside the talents is the most useful thing a reader can do with it. One commends servants who produced a return and condemns one who did not. The other commends servants who produced nothing and were simply awake. Neither cancels the other, and a theology built on only one of them will be lopsided in a predictable direction.
2. The detail that the master serves them portions from the wedding banquet he has just attended is easy to miss. He does not have food prepared for them. He brings them what he was given, which makes the servants participants in the celebration rather than recipients of leftovers.

Sources

Kenneth E. Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels (IVP Academic, 2008), chapter 29. Supports the distinction between being and doing, the rarity of the truly-I-say-to-you formula in Luke, the reading of the master's service as incarnational and atoning, the subversion of the slave relationship, and the point that the servants are already blessed rather than made so by serving.

Cyril of Alexandria, fifth century, quoted in Bailey. Supports the reading of the parable as applying to each person's death as well as to the parousia.

The biblical texts cited: Luke 12:35-38.

Where the sourcing stops: the reading of the master's service as an atonement image is Bailey's interpretation rather than something the parable states, and it is offered here as his reading.