Recall your feelings when you’re approved, applauded and thanked after a big job or an extraordinary work that you offered for free; recall also your feelings when you feel you’re about to leave your duty for someone else and that you find important to do one another thing as a remembrance or some kind of memory of you.

 

What we feel mostly depends on what service means for you in your culture and in your religious understanding. What is extremely common in many cultures is that nobody wants to be servant except there is another choice in life to survive. It has to do with an idea of possession. If you are rich, you have many wealth and power to have more things. Servant is one of things that you can owe or posses. The slavery rose in our history because of this common idea we shared, even in Jesus time as He showed us this parable.

 

Slave used to belong to his master. Whatever his master is, either very kind or very generous, he remained his belonging. In today’s gospel, it seems that Jesus wanted to describe what really defines discipleship. He started with what was common. Servant might get his master supper laid, make him self tidy and wait on him while he eats and drinks.  Being disciple means being servant alike; doing all your master wants you to do without wishing any kind of mercy or gratification (Lk 17:7-10). Moreover, the master must not or is not obliged to thank you for your service because you’re there thanks to his mercy. Finally what defines us as Jesus’ disciple is “being servant” who teaches us to serve and after disappear from the scene. It is really difficult as it demands us neither to be marked nor to be applauded. It asks you a deep faith as Abraham, when he went up on the mountain to sacrifice Isaac. At the moment when he would like to pierce his son, God stopped him and showed two another lambs near right him to sacrifice. God provides and at the very beginning of our existence He serves us by giving us his life and his love. Being Jesus disciple is being servant. It is a call and after all it is a choice. In this way we can understand what the book of Wisdom says:”God has put the wise men to the test and proved them worthy to be with him. He has tested them like gold in a furnace and accepted them as a holocaust”. (Wisdom 2:23-3:9)-tardelly,s.x.