When visiting someone’s home, we are often invited in, offered a place to sit, a refreshment, and when the purpose of the visit is complete, we are thanked and escorted to the door. There is something wonderfully different in being welcomed into someone’s home; truly welcomed. The kind of welcome where someone says, “Make yourself at home.” A place where you know everyone’s “usual seats” and you might even be comfortable totally slouching in your place.
In a way, that is St. Paul’s message to the gentiles in today’s first reading. He reminds them that there was a time when they were outsiders. They were not part of the family of the covenant, not “at home” in the household of God. But then Christ came. And through his death and resurrection, Christ broke down the walls that had separated people from one another and brought them together into one family. “So then you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the holy ones and members of the household of God.”
Perhaps we take for granted Paul’s message, especially we cradle Catholics. We’ve always been “fellow citizens.” We regularly attend Mass in the “house of God,” our local parish church. So we might not consider that we don’t simply attend God’s house. We belong to God’s household.
A visitor might be welcomed for an afternoon. A member of the household belongs there even when things are messy, life is difficult, and even when everyone isn’t getting along. That’s what Christ has made possible. But today’s Gospel tells us something even more remarkable about the household to which we belong.
The gospel story seems unremarkable: servants waiting for their master to return from a wedding celebration. Everything is ready for his arrival so that when he knocks, they can immediately open the door. Nothing surprising or out of place there. I mean, afterall, that’s their job. But this is no ordinary household.
When the master arrives and finds his servants ready, what does he do? “Amen, I say to you, he will gird himself, have them recline at table, and proceed to wait on them.” The master becomes the servant, invites them to sit, whereupon he serves them. Clearly, that’s not how households ordinarily worked in Jesus’ day – which is precisely the point: God’s household is unlike any other household.
We belong to a household where the Master doesn’t simply demand service. He gives himself in service. Think of the scene at the Last Supper when At the Last Supper, he kneels before his disciples and washes their feet. The question He asks of them then still echoes for us today: “Do you know what I have done for you? (John 13:7) It is a question we should remember and attempt to answer each and every day.
It is a question that should echo in our being as we come forward to receive the Eucharist, because we come as members of God’s household. We bring our prayers, our gratitude, our worries, our struggles, and our desire to serve God faithfully. We arrive at the Lord’s table, and the Master serves us his servants. He gives us his own Body and Blood. The One we have come to worship becomes the One who feeds us.
Usually we hear Jesus’ command to be vigilant, to keep our lamps burning, and be at the ready for our master’s return as a warning: don’t be unprepared. But today we are called to hear the words with an additional nuance. We are not waiting for a stranger.
We are waiting for the One who has already welcomed us into his household, already given his life for us. The one who already knows us, loves us and welcomes us to his table. This changes the character of our waiting. We don’t keep our lamps burning simply because we’re afraid of being caught unprepared. We keep them burning because we are waiting for the One we love.
And while we wait, we live as members of his household, to welcome others as Christ has welcomed us. To serve as we have been served and to overcome the divisions that keep us from being one household.
In a way, I think today’s homily should come with a “spoiler alert.” So often we are encouraged and admonished to “prepare a place for Jesus”, “be ready to serve Him when he comes,” and spend our lives preparing to welcome Christ.
Spoiler alert: when He comes, we will discover that Christ has been preparing to welcome us.
Image credit: created using Dalle-3 based on the text of this post’s use of Jesus washing the disciple’s feet. Downloaded 10-19-2026
