“Keep awake,” Jesus urges.

            Really? Our doctors lecture us, in this overworked and under-rested culture, that what we need is more sleep, not less. For so many of us, our penchant for working overtime, then dashing home and playing well into the night, has battered and dented our circadian rhythms beyond recognition.

            Yet, Jesus is speaking to a people who know how to work just as hard as we, but whose labors are strictly limited by the sun’s rising and setting. (Can’t work much overtime by the light of an oil lamp, no matter how hard you try.)

            In the pervasive darkness of that pre-electric age, somebody’s got to keep an eye peeled for things that go bump in the night.

The Day of the Lord

            Jesus’ directive comes in the form of a mini-parable. He’s just finished warning his followers about the Day of the Lord soon to come. The temple will be destroyed, faithful people will be dragged before kangaroo courts, brothers will betray brothers and parents their children, sun and moon will be darkened. The very stars will detach themselves from the firmament and plummet to earth, and the Son of Man will come on the clouds of heaven to rule in great power and glory. (Okay, it doesn’t match our scientific conception of the universe, but this is poetry.)

            It’s heady stuff. Day of the Lord predict

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